Venture into the stormy highlands

On this stormy night, you find shelter, but at what cost? Your time to see my portfolio piece and admire the stormy nature of my project, yay!! In this project, I made a simple and short level design project of the player navigating through a tiny forest on a stormy night who will then find a mysterious cabin to stay in. This project was designed not to be the next game on the market, but to flex my level design skills with particles, and for the first time to use Tree Creator and wind zone to create trees and wind respectfully. The assets (including the fps controller and one of the trees) are mostly borrowed from the Unity asset store, except for the trees I created (which will be shown one by one later in the video).

WHAT I LEARNED: · How effectively I can use the Tree Creator to create main roots, growth, leaf frequency and growth, textures, branches, LOD, how effective are they in the wind, size (including leaves), and crankiness of branches of trees · About how to use the wind zone for the first time and how effective and complex it is to use to enable to blow the trees around like the real-life wind. · How I can make small particles float around until they reset their starting position to play the particle again. · How I can shape particles. E.g. the dust flying around and the rain particles falling respectfully. · Rotating around skyboxes to fit in with the scenes better. · Using code to make a randomized range with an enumerator to flick the lightning (directional light) between 15- 20 seconds. · How effective using flare lights can be used to get players' attention from a distance,

WHAT I IMPROVED: · I improved on mixing different terrain textures with each other to make it seamless and blended together as possible. · I managed to control how high and low the terrain is to distinguish which are hills/mountains and walkable areas. · Getting a better hang with the lighting and post-fx respectfully. · Snapping modular pieces such as planks and steel roofs to corners of the little house to reduce z-fighting visuals.

WHAT I COULD HAVE DONE BETTER?: · For rain particles, I could have added a splash particle when the rainwater collides with the terrain to make it more realistic and alive instead of it going through the ground. · Not all the trees look exactly what I call “natural” trees, some looked a bit randomized with branches and a little bit blobby, so I will need to practice with the Tree Creator in the future to get better realistic trees. · I would need to be careful how many leaves and branches are attached to the trees, otherwise, it will increase the polycount in the scene and crash the game. · I only used a minimum of post fx this time because I thought without the player having a flashlight or lamp posts around, the player would struggle to find their way around if the post fx is too dark. So next time I should have a flashlight or lamp posts for the player to navigate around and use more post fx to enable me to use more of my creative freedom of it.

OVERALL: Not only was this something a little different and a good exercise to improve my level design skills including sculpting the terrain and creating particles, but to try out new things like using the tree creator to create trees and using the wind zone to control how much wind to blow trees. Next time I may need to practice on the terrain editor and tree creator more to create more unique trees and terrain or just simply create trees and land from modular sets instead all respectfully, but that would depend on the next game I will be making. Overall- good exercise to expand my level design toolbelt.

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