Finalization

Between presenting at Level Up, finishing all of my other final projects, and moving, I don't believe it would be a stretch to say this week was very busy.

Spaceship Interior:

I was able to complete the interior of the spaceship, despite having very little time to make it work. I focused on keeping the design as simple as possible, as the core functionality required was to simply act as a hallway between the fourth battery and the belly of the ship. Additionally, as there was so little time, I created two assets with moderate levels of complexity in order to be able to view them from many different angles without it getting too tiring: a chair and a table. Finally, I added small features such as wooden rubble, a dancing stage, and lighting features that followed the contour of the ship. I would definitely like to create a full interior for the spaceship in my free time without the constraints of having to work it into the design so late into production for level design purposes.

Forcefield and Mountains:

In addition to the spaceship, I created a forcefield around the temple, with a slightly perceptible hole in the location that the ship would have broken through.

This was in hopes to create better context for the world around Theseus while at the same time setting boundaries so that the player would understand that they could not simply wander the map. It actually seemed to work far better than expected as well, because players said that they wanted to go out of the map far less than during previous playthroughs.

Additionally, due to the fact that the forcefield is a physical object and was broken, it allowed for me to open up other areas of the map to look outside by having pieces of it crash through the temple.

I also added mountains to the background, again to give context. Just like the rocks scattered outside the map though, the mountains are simply scaled up crystals in order to save on time and computational power, even minutely.

Bug Lights:

Early on in development, my team and I had figured that there would be specific points in the temple that would be very dark and we would need some sort of light to illuminate it. As we wanted to show that this was an alien species and not humans, I wanted to come up with a more elegant solution than traditional torches. Therefore, I had come up with an idea that the alien species could lather a spherical tablet with a substance that emitted a pheromone which would attract bugs to it. Those bugs would act similar to fireflies, creating a lit effect around it.

Despite the fact that most of the map is open to the outside world, there were multiple areas where they would not have been until the ship had crashed. Therefore, I was quickly able to add these items which did not impact gameplay in the least, but gave more context to the world.

Etc.

Beyond what I mentioned above, everything else was squashing bugs. Lots and lots of squashed little bugs.

Presenting at Level Up Toronto 2019:

Honestly, Level Up was a blast. We got a lot of very positive feedback, especially in regards to the art, and while there were suggestions that people made that would definitely be added (such as switching the colors of the crystals so that the one in the tower would stand out better), it was overall a success. I very much enjoyed getting the opportunity to showcase all the work we have done this year, seeing people play it in its intended setting.

Moving Forward:

Despite the fact that Etherian Sol is completed, I would absolutely love to develop the style even further on my free time. I am very interested in what I could do with it, and will write an article on the process of creating this new style in the coming months.

Finally:

Here's some final shots to send Etherian Sol off. It was a fantastic experience to create a game such as this with all of the challenges it possessed.