Associate Level Capstone

Halfway through the program at Full Sail students are given the chance to take a pre-made controller setup and a basic game idea and make their own level. This project is then paired up with more students to create a cohesive whole. This project takes place over three months. The first month is setup and teaching the basic needs of the controller, as well as designing the map for the level. The second month involves getting the level blocked out and functional with scripting and animation. The third and final month has the level integrated into three to four other similar levels. Mechanics and designs are shared between the levels to create a unified design that still fits within the framework given by the design team for the project.

My project was ambitious, I wanted to create a rotatable series of mirrors that could interlink to complete a puzzle. Using light beams to show the path of light through the level to unlock the relic at the end of the level. The planning portion of the project was fairly interesting. It was a skill I had not particularly stretched to that point. After receiving feedback from the teacher and my peers, I made several iterations in a weekly basis. The map grew and changed as the month went on, trying to find practical methods for creating the various ideas I wanted to do. 

These changes made me rethink how certain things would work within the level. Having to deal with my limited understanding of C# at the time, I needed to use line renderers and animation to cover a lot of the things that I could not do at the time in script. In particular, the idea of using Vector math to target and dictate the length of the light "beams" wasn't something I understood firmly at this point. Thankfully now I do, because it would have a design like this much easier in the future.

The third month was the first major project I had the opportunity to lead on campus. With a team of five, we brought our levels together, learning how to properly manage scene loading, resource management, resource profiling, and occlusion to keep our game running smoothly with the tools we had access to. As well, we had to make the levels thematic to the master game design document, as well as our own visions. To this effect, we made changes, such as the winter theme that suited several of our team's levels. As well, we found through the month that certain members of the team could handle certain tasks easier, so team management was something I really had to work through. This helped greatly in later projects, but it took a while to learn. In particular, the need to enforce a uniform design took time, as well as the file organization that makes a unified design work well. These are things that took precious time in a very limited project window. However, at the end of the day, we had a very solid project for the skills and tools we had available to us.