Level Art - Final Thoughts

Working on the art implementation has certainly been a learning process. I had never really done worldbuilding with and asset pack quite to this scale before so there were some things I wasn't able to plan for. For example, never having worked with tiles before getting the roads just right proved to be an arduous and time consuming task. I feel as though there has to be a better implementation method than what I did which was individually placing tiles and making sure they snapped properly to each other. I would actually be curious to know if it would have been easier to build the floors out first as opposed to the buildings to see if that unrestricted/unconfined workflow would have been easier. I say this because I had to pick and choose where I wanted the roads with minimal pre-considerations of the existing buildings (mostly I just placed roads where the building space allowed). 

I also learned more about shadows and the different settings that affect them. Ultimately, I needed to adjust our normal shadow bias because some light was just passing through our assets for most of the developmental process. I also learned about being able to change the shadow distance, which in reality makes sense, however I had just never known the option existed in the first place. With the school conclusion portion of this project, I will definitely be going back to past projects and fixing the shadows now that I have a better understanding of the available manipulation options. 

Overall this was a very enjoyable process. It was relaxing to place the assets and create a story through the physical look and feel of the level. What I enjoyed the most was creating the fair/park area because that was a completely organic idea that none of us had in our original whiteboxes but it ended up giving so much life to the world. My least favorite part was certainly the road implementation. Because I had to work around the buildings some of the floor scaling was off resulting in the creation of parking lots and a few minor scale discrepancies throughout the level.  Something I would like to see added to the Level Art portion of this game given more time would probably be more wildlife and particle effects included. It would be nice if you could see different birds flying around or see leaf particles flying across your screen!

It has been a pleasure learning and building for !Bird.