Adventure 2

This project was my first opportunity at Full Sail to design my own mechanics to help design the kind of level I wanted to design, in my Level Design II class. At the time of designing, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye had just come out and I was inspired to create something similar to the light mechanics in that game. I created a quick flashlight and got to work figuring out how to detect that light on the light receivers. At the time, I had very little experience designing mechanics, so my solution was to add a handful of cube collisions in front of the player in a vaguely cone shape and have the receivers detect if they're overlapping a cube collider and if the player's flashlight is on. this had the issue of being very direction non-specific, allowing you to activate light receivers even through walls and if you can't see them, but since this was a level design class, I deemed it good enough and moved on. If I were to redesign this today with what I know now, I probably would have used a fairly wide Sphere Trace that was only active when the flashlight was, so I could precisely modify the length of activation as well as dealing with being able to activate receivers you can't see.

To assist in the design of the level, I created a handful of objects that could be activated by a receiver, such as doors and moving platforms. The very first door leading into the level acts as both a tutorial and a valve for the level, making sure no player can get past it without fist understanding how the light mechanic works, and then ensuring you cannot backtrack once you've entered the level proper. From this point, I designed my level in a sort of hub-and-spoke style, with 2 paths off to either side that can be completed in any order, one side more focused on the climbing mechanic built into this project, and the other being more focused on moving platforms that move when activated by a light receiver.

After finishing both sides of the level, the player could interact with 2 podiums to open up the final trial, which incorporated both the climbing mechanic and the moving platforms into one challenge. Once reaching the top of the level, the player would collect the key to open the last door and leave the level. In retrospect, I regret making the level as incredibly dark as I did. I made it so dark to give off a moody tone and make the flashlight more useful, but in practice it just makes the level hard to navigate if you don't know where you're going. Additionally I believe the level looked somewhat brighter in the editor than it did in the build, probably due to me not building the lighting very frequently while building the level.