Double Cross, modelling and level design - balancing the 2

After the presentation last week (that I think went quite well!) it's back into production. Over the next few weeks I feel we need to really focus on a couple of things.

#1 - Getting a working prototype out the door.
This is so, so important and thus far we haven't managed to do it. I wouldn't say it's any of our fault that this has happened. But we have such a nice mechanic and at the moment we don't have the technical abilities to pull it off. In short we need someone familiar with programming and is possible scripting for UDK. Now we have two options, hunt for someone who can do this or one of us learn to do it ourselves, possibly sacrificing other areas of the project. So I'm stumped. We have a meeting tomorrow so hopefully we can discuss a solution then.

#2 - Having a defined art style in engine.
By this I mean something within UDK that shows how are game is going to look. At everything apart from the actual static meshes is out of the box UDK (textures, skybox etc.) and it's painfully obvious that UDK is the engine behind the game, not good.



Here's a shot of what I've been modelling. Although it's not great because it doesn't show all the work I've done pulling models apart and making them re-usable... meh. The problem I'm having at the moment is balancing level design and asset creation. Trying to build the level without getting bogged down in details is hard. Of course I want the level to look nice but a lot of these assets need love to bring them up to a better standard. But at the same time I need to focus on the level over all and work on elements of the environment that are important to game play. Basically what I wanted to say is balancing these two is tricky. And I feel at the moment, especially taking into consideration the 2nd point I made earlier, focussing on the features important to game play within the level should probably take priority. As much as I enjoy modelling weird little bits and pieces....

And my website is down :(
Yesterday I posted my double cross dev diary & post mortem on Polycount which must have been read a few times because it killed my bandwidth. Which is a bit of a good/bad situation. I'm happy my site is getting traffic, but now it's dead! Also had some nice feedback from the people over at polycount!

anyway if you want to read the dev diary & post mortem here is a link to it on media fire: http://www.mediafire.com/?5fdfdbzsf69jhjo

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