Creating prototypes without much size reference or direction is hard. We had started really strong on a saturday meeting to create each area and the interactions and puzzles we were going to include, but by the time we got to the coral reefs we were fading fast. The ideas are there, and the general shape are there, but I'm not going to put any more work into the greyboxes and instead use that time to start actually modeling the environments.
Lets start with the worst first: Coral reefs. Not really sure how to prototype one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, so I just used lots of rocks. You're gonna need some imagination for them.
I'm kind of picturing the drop off from finding nemo.
I didn't consider how we would have to block off the player or what we are going to do if the player falls/escapes and how we want to create the rest of the world around it. I kind of have the plans, but it's still rough.
Green Shallows:
Here's where the sense of scale (and sense of anything really. What a mess) get's kinda weird. I think that's just me and how I'm used to working in Maya, but it presents a challenge.
Purple Caves:
It's an enclosed journey through really dark caves that you need sonar and the otter to transverse. This is the only one that has both a beginning and an ending that will dump you back out into the hub world. We were thinking of having a final puzzle/interaction to create a bubble stream that would send the player back up into the hubworld because of how deep we want the caves to go. Good thing we are running into these things now, because I hadn't considered a lot of this.
Finally the dark caves, which is the most developed conceptually and map prototyping wise.
The player and otter will travel separately after the otter gets trapped in the beginning and they have to work together to get the otter through the three rooms and back through the astronaut. Don't ask me to explain how the puzzles work, I've got no clue.
Spaceman's side:
Otters side:
The main puzzle will then be a jumping puzzle/maze through a ship graveyard to collect a searchlight for the ship.
I hope you all like my grey, messy prototypes, good luck trying to gleam anything out of them!
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