Environment

In sprint 1 Laura made a map for our game, where she mainly focussed on the visual aspect of the map design. That looked visually pleasing on paper, however we got the feedback that we hadn't thought about it from a game design perspective. So I sat down with Laura and we discussed what our different perspectives were, and how we could combine them to get the best result. I think that the end result was nice. Here's a link to Laura her perspective on this.

The end result of our environment map.

The way we made this map was by discussing what we both found important, and I tried to translate Laura's vision as much into a "game layout" as possible. For me it is very important that the hub area is easily navigatable and that the players can easily see where the next experiences are and which ones they've already done. And for Laura it is very important that users take their time to observe the environment and that the room is very abstract and that there was an "outside" element to it. At first the idea was to have a big outside area surrounding the hub, but I thought that would be a waste of Laura's time, because that would require a lot of time to model while there was no particular reason to go there. So we decided to incorporate that outside area inside of the hub.

To summarise the layout:

We have 3 rooms, each containing a separate experience linked to a theme. The first theme is Audio Visualization and the second theme is Multiple Body Embodiment. We want to have an entrance hallway and an exit hallway for each experience. However the exit hallway will not be accessible from the hub side.

Each entrance hallway should have thematics that link to the particular theme of the room. So for example the audio visualization hallway would have an element that reacts to the audio of the players.

Each exit hallway would get a visual indication linked to that room that they've completed the room once it's cleared.

All the entrance hallways lead up to a room where the players get to inhabit their bodies.

The hallways have openings/are partially transparent. This leads to the players seeing the outside environment in between the rooms and the hub. The hub area also has several windows from which you can see the outside environment.

Here are some sketches that we made while designing the environment: