Lost Echo’s Preview 50 – Designing the Experiment Room

Sorry for the lack of updates over the past 3 months. I’ve been in the process of moving and had to take my workspace apart. Picking things back up with the game, and this month I started working on the Experiment Room. I need a way to easily test and debug game states. I have been manually setting flags in the code to test things then starting and stopping the game, but that really does take a bit of time, so I decided to work towards finishing up the experiment room so that it can double as a debug room.

Blocking out and Designing components

I started by blocking out the design for both internal and external components. Then refined the design, and added in the aspects for the recording device, lights, and side compartments. I added in Animations for the Cassette Wheels, which is a simple armature for the wheels to spin, and a UV trick along the film’s model the move, then synced up the two animation in game to make it look like one seamless motion between the two objects.

I then added in two switches for the Recording Device. One turns on the wheel, the other has no function yet.

New Lighting

I also made two new lights for this room. Originally when I was thinking of this room in my mind, there would be ambient light given off by status lights from the machine, but I felt like it was too dark in engine, so I put in two lights behind the player. I was going to reuse the maintenance lights I’ve used a couple of times, but I felt like they took up too much space and covered the doors. So I just made two new ones, that could be more flush against the wall.

Designing the internal door ways

The internal doors for the experiment room are animated, but I haven’t included any interaction for them yet. They’ll be controlled in other ways to prevent the player from entering the inner compartment.

That’s all for this week, if you can see the current preview in the YouTube short below.