Jordon's Post #7

At this stage in the project we are focusing on completing our assets so that we may bring them into the engine. We are going at a nice steady pace and I think we should be able to begin asset importing and placement next week.
Our goals have changed in that we are now trying to make sure our level is fun and layed out properly by the end of this week. This is so that we can begin to bring in all of our assets which will be the meat of our level.We may even conduct a few extracurricular playtests to get it right.
Some major problems came up this week that needed to be handled right away. First off, Chris' build of the level looked great at first, but when we went into the engine there we a lot of errors. The convex shapes that he put in just screwed everything up. We handled this problem by having both Chris and I try our hand at rebuilding the level. We both came in on Thursday with good builds, but we decided to stick with mine because I added the walkway challenge, jumping challenge, teleporter placeholders, and underground spring.
For the most part people liked the concept of our level as well as the teleporters, walkway, and pitfall challenge. What failed were the patchwork lighting job, the placeholder textures, and MY GOD the jumping challenge. Funny thing, I just remembered why not many shooters have jumping challenges. THEY SUCK!!! They are a total pain to make and plan out for the designer as well as a pain for the player to navigate. I will be getting rid of ours ASAP or making it way shorter using ladders or a mover.
All of Our problems had to do with the game engine so I worked hours on end on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to fix them. Unreal is a great program, but she is a delicate flower that will crumble before your eyes at the first sign of a PNG or a convex shape.
Our project is going great at this point despite the challenges we faced this week. Our first build is done and now all we need to to this week is refine it. Once that is out of the way we can bring in all of our assets and make our level a thing of beauty. The people in our group who made mistakes (including myself) have owned up to them and we have moved on. I am on edge this week because we will all need to be passing the level around to add assets. I hope nothing goes wrong.