Week 4 – Layouts and Story

This week, we laid out a plan for quarters and setup a scrum board accordingly. Given our goals from last week, we spent most of our time this week producing low-poly assets for the environments. The main factor in deciding which assets to produce was asking how necessary it is to convey the story to potential playtesters next week.

This allowed us to design, preview, and iterate environment layouts both in Oculus and CAVE in pretty quick succession this week. Ironically, this also helped us realize that many parts of our story still have holes, which is currently preventing us from making some more specific decisions regarding the guest experience.

Static Art Assets

While we work on ironing out story details, we’ve made good progress on the assets that we have decided to move forward, keeping in mind that the myth itself is static so there are some elements which will not be changed regardless of the story nuances.

wood texture for the guest’s boat
lapis lazuli texture for the jewelry of the gods
sandstone texture for statues and obelisks

 

rough sculpture of Anubis in ZBrush

Environmental Assets 

Working on the layouts of the world have revealed changes which we need to consider, and the resolution of many of these changes will be dependent on locking down the presentation of the story.

updated Land of Night experience design
updated Judgement Chamber level design
Discussing the textures in the Judgement Chamber

Story

We are running into a question of how we want to present the traditional myth, going back and forth between two particular ones.  There are many questions still to be answered with both approaches, so we are planning on filling those out and collecting opinions from our peers over the course of the next week.

This playtesting is to be done in conjunction with playtesting the timing through the rough environment layouts.

Music

We also began working with Yutian Zheng to create music and SFX for this piece. As we iron out the story and the specific events that will go into the guest experience, we will be working with her to create sounds and music that suit the intentions and emotions of this piece.

See you next week!