[ Color Match Tile ] - My color match tile I created for my mechanic was inspired by Q*bert. It took me just a workday to get it to work the way I wanted it to. I wanted this tile to originate as a neutral color and then once stepped on by the player, it would change to its activated color first, which in this case is blue. Once stepped on again the tile deactivates, turning it red. I got everything to work properly on my first go around.

[ The Visuals ] - I was super proud of the visuals I had put in the project by the end of the month. I wasn’t really focused on visuals throughout the entirety of this project until the last week. I wanted to make it look a little better and I really like the way everything came out. It originated as a regular skybox with a blue sky and some clouds and I changed it to a purple-ish color with dark purple clouds. I also added fog volumes around the edge of the map to hide the sky below the map. My favorite part out of everything however was the rain vfx I created using the Niagara System within Unreal.

[ Importing Royalty Free Music ] - At the end of the time allotted for the project, I didn’t like the fact that the only sound I heard was when I interacted with one of the 2 mechanics available. So I went browsing on Google to try and find some good sounding free music. I had no idea what I wanted the track to sound like but within 30 minutes I had found the perfect one to loop. I really like how easy it was to get into Unreal as well. I definitely thought it was going to be tougher than a drag and drop into my content browser.

[ Creating Rain Vfx ] - This right here is definitely one of my favorite things I have in this project. With the way I had the visuals, I felt as though it would be aesthetically pleasing to add visible rain to the level. Going into this, I had no idea what I was doing. I had never worked in the Niagara System before, but after watching countless tutorials trying to find a way where the Niagara System was explained in a way I could understand, I finally figured it out. I really like the way this came out as well and I was glad I had time to get it done and working.

[ Formatting the Map ] - When I had completed the first sprint, I really didn’t like the way the map was formatted. I wanted all 3 of the levels to revolve around the active mechanic(s) in each of the levels. I did a ton of experimenting with different layouts to find what I wanted. This actually took me an entire workday because I did not like any of the layouts I was coming up with. I found the one I wanted and it actually worked really well for each level and ended up tying in with the mechanics as well.

[ Pressure Plate Door Animation ] - I originally wanted to have the pressure plate doors play a little animation whenever they were activated, just to make everything look nicer, however I struggled a ton with getting it to work using a simple timeline. However, I could never get the timeline to work properly regardless of how many different ways I tried to do it. I also tried googling to see if I could find anything but everything I could find didn’t really help me. I ended up settling for showing/hiding visibility and enabling/disabling collision depending on if the pressure plate had been activated and that ended up working fine.

[ Original Map Layout ] - When time was up at the end of the first week for the sprint I was proud of the mechanic but I really did not like the level design. I thought it was too easy to navigate and it just looked really ugly. However, I couldn’t find a design I really liked no matter how many different combinations I tried. I ended up finding a good one but accidentally moved one of the tiles and it broke the whole tile system so I had to regenerate my map. I did end up making a layout I was proud of which is in the final version.

[ Adding Sfx for the Pressure Plate Door ] - I wanted cool sfx to play with the pressure plate door opening from the timeline I mentioned earlier but I just couldn’t find a sound effect I really liked after looking for a few hours. I ended up giving up on looking for one. However, I did settle for sfx when activating and deactivating the pressure plates. I think the pressure plate sound is good but I really wish I was able to figure out the door sfx.

[ “The Sound Trial” ] - I was trying to find sfx for virtually every action the player could take and the interaction with the environment around the player. I spent hours on multiple different websites trying to find sfx I thought were suitable for the project. I could definitely say I wasted a lot of time looking for sfx when I could’ve prioritized making my mechanics even better than they were. I learned that sfx are definitely a last touch kind of thing for small projects like this.