This is the final post!
As you can see we have made a huge leap towards finalizing the level. Yet the smallest change makes the biggest difference; The lighting. We went for a sunrise scene to still showcase the lights in the level.
We also gave the level a more dusty feel and that it is almost dissappeared into the sand.
To make the size of the city feel a bit bigger I made some simple building that are shown in the distance.
Now that the level is finally complete it was very important to let people run through it to see if my goal succeeded. And it did! To a certain extend ofcourse. They got the parts i implemented with the posters and the train. And from the environment itself they could tell it was old and not from our world. Ofcourse most of it was still a bit on the surface and they could not get on the exact story that I wrote.
I could see this as a negative but I will also take it as a positive because they are thinking in the direction as it was intended but still have plenty of space to put their own imagination into play. And I think for an FPS map where there is usually too much action to really grasp what is going on in terms of storytelling.
So what do I think of the project in the end?
There are a lot of things that I can take to my next project in terms of story. I intend to continue on that path.
One thing I will definitely do different next time is the project size. In the end this project was not really a one man job. I wish I had more time to put more story in but building the level itself alone was proven to be quite the challenge. I'm also not completely happy with everything and if I had more time I would definitely improve on it. Maybe something for the future. So it is very important to keep an healthy balance between what you want to achieve and what you can achieve. But by pushing my limits I now know my limits and this is going to be very important in my next project.
This was also my first time in the High Render Pipeline of unity. I did have some struggles with this as we were still working in a older version due to the Unity sample project. So I had not a lot of options in terms of VFX. Maybe that was a good thing as well as I can get lost in those things. But overall I am happy that I now have a basic understanding of it and in the next project I will try to work in the newest version of Unity to learn more about the HDRP.
Thanks to this blog I have taken a better look on how other types of games handle story telling and that each game does it in a different way. In the end its key to make your creation interesting to explore in the first time. That way people will look for a story soon enough.
Anyways I hope this blog was helpful for you and I hope your projects will turn out even better thanks to the blog! Do not hesitate to contact me to throw some ideas back and forth or for questions!