Moving on from last week I had to make more refinements to the level to make it even smaller and easier to manage for the team. The problem we have is that the level was simply too large for us to guarantee that everything from gameplay to art direction was completely polished which we needed for a vertical slice. Some cuts have been made, but everything should be stronger as a result.
Here's some pictures of our current progress:
The progress on the actual level has meant I could publish a small video showing the characters in context, so here is a small snippet of the characters in action interacting with some new collectible pickups I made:
From this basic blockout the focus can then be on creating a visual benchmark to show what we want the game to look like, then putting together the art and design later on. Once the blockout is complete the focus will be shifted to art direction and then continuing to refine bugs with the gameplay as we go on, our time is limited so we don't have time to dilly dally!
The problem with the project is that it will be marked by the course by it's artistic qualities because we are on a game art course, even though the gameplay is important we have to make sure that we put a lot more time into the visuals than anything else. That's why we need to hurry to shift over to the artistic side of things.