Week 13, Meeting 1:
Date: 04/05/2010
Time: 12:00pm until 12:30pm
Staff present: Claire Brierley
Location: C2 – 04a
This week's meeting with Claire had the team talking about Milestone II and our meeting plans for the upcoming weeks. We also discussed summer work and the verbal report at the end of May.
Here is a template for creating the documentation, for individual parts of the artefact creation.
This will be useful when it comes to later iterations of the build. Plus, if our build ever breaks on us, it will be possible to know which iteration we need to go to, in order to fix it.
Also, if you don't have any specific tasks for the build, you can always be designing gameplay elements and features. Once there's some documentation up, it will be very easy to design things around what's already there.
You can find the template here.
GoldenEye: Source's remake of the Control level, Janus' secret Cuban base..For a quick environment study I cast my memory back to the halcyon days of 1997, and the FPS phenomenon that was GoldenEye (and its namesake film), and decided to produce a quick overview of what we can learn from the two and how we can apply it to our forthcoming level design. Bond villains are the world's greatest super-villains, and their underground bases are a hallmark of the role. I'm sure there are other examples within the series, but here is the first..
"Possibly the best example of a villainous control room is that found in GoldenEye. Situated in Cuba and below a satellite dish (which is itself hidden under a lake), the Janus syndicate’s hidden base blends earth walls and polished, futuristic technology excellently. This is the kind of style we should be aiming to ape as it gives our level a sense of super-villainy, which will make the experience more fun. Having previously been made and remade in videogame form, GoldenEye is an excellent example for considering the addition of gameplay elements, and as one of the most famous FPSes in history, there’s no more deserving candidate of study."
As I meant to when writing the Source Analysis of The Silent Language, here is the accompanying breakdown of how the distances between characters are percieved, and how we can implement this into our test. I've also included a comparitive scale in Hammer units to help with both analysis and design. To download the document, click here.