Ship Layout

[mdgunn]

As I'd mentioned elsewhere I have problems with the single room cryo map not saving if I try to work on it now so I had always thought at some point I'd probably split things out into separate rooms and now seems to be that time.   I've put together a ship schematic of sorts to help me figure out a logical structure and where the rooms we think we would need in the story would be compared to others, many of which we may not build. 

On the left in the image below :-

• Red outline rooms are ones that are probably required and most of which were present in the single main cryo and associated existing rooms in different sections. 
• Orange rooms are rooms that I think might naturally be built next to make the ship feel more alive and if there were more quests to do.  I probably will not build out the orange rooms at this stage. Instead focussing on getting what we had in place in place again in new rooms.
• Grey rooms are rooms that fill out other functions of the ship that probably can be avoided but might have also been interesting places to go.
• The purple rooms relate to the engines (covering 2 decks). I don't see we necessarily need to go in there and I haven't entirely figured them out but the engines can make the ship levitate (floating island) but also produce seismic shocks that can pretty much turn ground to be fluid like for the purposes of burying the ship where it would later construct an underground factory(or mine) as it has done in part at the start of the story.

As usual, there may be errors.  this is a WIP.

[mdgunn]

I'm behind where I want to be at this stage but still mostly pleased that I've been making gradual steady progress.  It's been hard to find the time the last couple of weeks and there is a LOT to do to take things from 2 or 3 rooms up to 9.  Sometimes it feels that LW is fine for small simple levels and OK if you have all your assets sorted in advance but when you want to build a complex level up from scratch it can be quite a challenge and time is spent managing this challenge rather than moving forward as fast as you'd hope. 

There is a video of where things are at though some things may be confusing as to which room is what (maybe?). In my mind some things are still a little fluid as I try to put things together on the map and in my head. A few things have morphed a bit as I try to imagine how to manage the initial story should be realised in the actual game.  Now I am thinking that the cube is taken inside from the crane through a sort of mine conveyor tube thing (the red tube) into somewhere that might laser samples rather than a human medical quarantine (though it would potentially serve this role too - though it does not currently look like this in current layout).  I am thinking the cube has initially attacked the ship by injecting some virus in a port (largely in secret and unknown) and it disables the other pods and downgrades AI. It is not known to be an attack by the now downgraded (dumb) AI or by the waking hero (though we probably are shown it doing this - usure if it is best we know or not - maybe not - for later suprise - but then player is maybe never told this clearly enough not to be confusing - can't trust reading of text log - some people just don't read them).  They think the cube may be a beacon of sorts sent to revive the ship to complete a new mission so the AI and hero think they should bring it inside to open it up and find out what is going on.  The cube is picked up by the crane (simple script) and transported to the mining laser/quarantine area for investigation.  This quarantine room then becomes a simple puzzle room where the cube will open up and attack the unarmed player and they must do a 2 or 3 stage activation of the laser (e.g. turn laser on, boost laser with reserve power, point laser at special point in centre of room with the right timing to destroy the drone. Drone explodes into bits and player gets weapon bit in their hand (unless we want to drop this bit - it was done to minimise weapon modelling etc.)  There may be other effects (e.g. tiny micro-robots invade ship).  

Not having the cube attack the ship outside was also a way to avoid the potentially strange scenario where player wakes up and is straight away cast into super urgent situation but they must first do more carefully paced slower sections in sleep and VR.   This seemed to introduce a gameplay conflict that I couldn't satifactorily resolve...at least in my head.

Here is where the layout of the ship is at.  There are many unfinished bits which will be clear but hopefully it can be seen that it quite a bit of  work has been required to get it this far.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[aiaf]

Really good progress.Lots of work.

 

Im close to finish with level01a and i will try to help here.