Maintenance Room Layout

Paper Layouts

I did 4 iterations, the first being a maze with 3 interactable objects in it that will lead to the main valve. The second is a simple platformer set in a flooded room of electrified water. The third is pressing buttons in a certain order which can be figured out by following the tangle of wires to signs that tell the player which button to press first. The final iteration was the player must press 5 buttons in a certain way to turn 5 steam-releasing pipes off to reach the main valve, but each button turns on/off certain pipes.

Digitized Layout

These are the iterations that I’ve gone through for my section of the level. My group was planning what the idea of the game was gonna be, and we came up with a space, puzzle escape type of game. After figuring out the rooms we would need, it ended up with me doing the maintenance section of the whole level, which will lead to a main valve that will turn off the steam blocking the entrance to the loading bay of the level.

As I was iterating, I had trouble figuring out different puzzles that I could do for my different layouts, since the game is meant to have puzzle elements. I instantly came up with my first iteration since there’s a natural puzzle element to mazes, however with my second iteration there weren't any puzzle elements, it was just a platformer. After that, I realized that I needed to really focus on maintaining the puzzle theme of the game, and came up with the last two iterations which, although the interaction of buttons was the same, it was presented differently.

We ended up going with my first iteration, which is a maze of pipes that contains the main valve. However, the main valve is blocked by 3 other steaming pipes, so the player must navigate the maze to find and interact with the corresponding sub-valves to turn off the 3 pipes so the player can reach the and turn off the main valve. The layout only has the sub-valves acting as the interaction elements, there aren’t any obstacles other than the 3 sub-pipes that the player should watch out for, but we could add pipes which the player must duck under, and there can be certain elements such as signs or pipes to act as landmarks so players aren’t mindlessly lost in the maze.

As I was working on the whitebox, it was obviously known that the digitized layout maze had very uneven spaces and non-straight lines, so I loosely followed the maze wall layout and made sure that the spaces between were even and relatively consistent throughout the whole maze.

Whitebox

I started using just a regular 3D cube primitive, shaping, duplicating, and laying them out to loosely match the maze layout. However, one of my teammates introduced us to Probuilder, which was a package that acted in a similar way to Maya, so one could create a 3D model in Unity. Having already done my layout without it, we agreed that it would be best if we all used Probuilder for consistency when we combined our layouts, so I redid it.