this post covers the middle section of my development on the escape room, this section of the development process was arguably the most difficult as it saw me making all of the design decisions that carry over into the final stages of development, this was the stage of development in which I was populating the environment this meant that as soon as I populated the rooms with assets it made the overall design and layout of the level final, during this stage I made sure all designs were final and transitioned into the late stages of development. this is why this is the most important stage for me personally.
to start with we changed the lighting and the atmosphere of the environment making it darker in the interior spaces, this enhanced the thematic elements as this is a horror game it was important to establish the thematic elements so people understand the genre, in regards to the layout of the level and the detail, I made significant progress in these areas in this stage, I grey boxed all of the rooms and adjusted them to make sure that was 100% happy with them before moving on. Here I added the lighting in the hallways, at first I lit the entire level and then I went back and made it work thematically by removing and dimming some of the lights by hand to create an atmosphere that I felt was perfect for the style that we were going for.
I created signage to help guide the player to the rooms dotted around the level, this is useful as the player will have to do things in a certain order and this is one of the easiest ways of finding the rooms other than wandering around. all of the rooms here are their own individual graphics that I made using photoshop, each of the point to the direction of the room that is labeled. this is placed at the bottom of the first corridor that you see when you exit the first room, it is also enshrouded in darkness, this is specifically designed so that the player is drawn directly here after they have left the starting room, this is key as they need to immediately know where this is for them to be able to find their way to the rooms.
the cafeteria is the first room the player will go to in the game, this is why it was the first room I decided to turn my attention towards when I begun the process of populating the rooms, for this room I created a few new assets, these were the bins and the wall details, I made these in 3Ds max like my other assets, I the created the textures for them in photoshop. I also had other assets made by other members of the group to use, these were the stools, I used the modelling tool to make the tables. some of the assets I already had at hand and I simply reused then such as the computers and the lights. I decided to come back later to add more to the room as I felt it was still lacking in some areas, I decided this because by doing other rooms I thought I would be changing some things slightly in the stylistic department in future rooms so I thought stopping and coming back to finish it later was a good idea.
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