Little City Mega Update: Part 3, Greybox

This is the third of a three-part update. Also check out Parts 1 and 2

Map greyboxing is mostly finished! Items finished include:

• Traversal from beginning to end, including some tuning to prevent fall damage along the critical path (the player could possibly escape the police bots with 1 health point and there are no healing items.)
• Basic stand-in meshes and BSP (such as cars and rubble), with blocking volumes for gating. All meshes were created with in-editor 3D tools, but future meshes will be imported as .ase or .fbx files.
• All basic scripting and triggers are in, such as police bots and animated doors.

Greyboxing proved its worth enormously, as level layout took only a few hours. Some major issues were quickly exposed, and easily fixed since the barebones assets present were easily re-arranged. Some notable fixes:

• Overall map size was way too small: speedrunning took about 90 seconds. It only took a few minutes to increase the map size by 50% which I think will help play length without creating boredom.
• The dimensions laid out in the 2D map didn’t translate well to the skyrails in the 3D level, which were easily adjusted in both mediums.
• Greyboxing turned up a spot where the player could easily misinterpret environmental cues and miss the police IFF, which is crucial to success. This was also easily fixed with little work lost and a huge amount of potential player frustration prevented.

Here’s the video of progress so far:



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