Spelunking

Hey guys!

            Today I’m going to tell you about the process of creating the cave area found on the farm map. The cave area located at the south end of the farm is an area game design created to give the player more area to explore before leaving the farm. Inside the cave, there is a variety of monsters as well as an item when the player reaches the end of the cave.

An overview of the caves will show that they’re actually four caves connected together like organs in the body. The cave has two possible paths that the player can take to get to the item at the end, but I wanted to make sure that each of the caves was unique. One thing I didn’t want to do when making the caves was just make a curved back wall and call it a day. I chose to stagger the back walls in order to show different depths. This way I also would be able to make each cave interior different. Inside of each cave, I also wanted to make sure that I made unique stalagmites for each of the caves. Along with making unique stalagmites I also make sure to create unique rocks inside of the caves that follow our oblique angle.

As a result of our oblique angle, I did not make ceilings for the inside of the caves. I chose to keep them open like our building interiors because the addition of a ceiling would ruin our oblique angle. One issue of not putting a ceiling on our caves was I was not able to hang stalactites from the ceiling. Having stalactites hanging low from the ceiling would give the levels more of a cave feel, but I found a solution to my problem. On the back walls, I was able to draw in stalactites to make the level feel more like a cave. Unfortunately, the player isn’t bumping into them like I originally wanted, but they do enhance the cave experience.

Overall, I feel like the caves came out very well. The use of staggered back walls and slightly different color tones gives the caves a good sense of depth. The stalagmites and rocks inside of the caves also create another challenge, because the player has to dodge those obstacles as they fight the enemies that are located inside of the cave.

-DevinD1198-