This previous week, I finalized a lot of the level design updates that I had. These were the same ones I had worked on previously but needed to be redone as my Github was not updated to the correct version, because of this I was missing some prefabs that caused some issues involving having to replace all the walls, scaling down the initial levels, etc.

While this was definitely a setback, being forced to scale down the levels from their initial sprite meshes actually allowed me to create more interesting room designs! I had to play around a lot with wall sizes in order to make certain rooms fit into their scaled version. This caused me to place things in ways they would fit in the room sizes properly and as I built I was looking at the designs from afar and felt "This could totally work for another room idea." and would copy and paste what I had into a separate room to work on after finishing the initial room concept. While I was worried about having walls of different scales. Nate, the narrative lead, brought up an excellent point, where The Abyss is extremely strange in terms of lore, and that things SHOULDN'T look right to the players. He reassured me that perhaps the differing wall thicknesses could act as that strange feeling players get when they travel from room to room. 

I think it was really interesting how the ideas came together and allowed us to come up with a lot more room layouts to generate in the randomized level generator. We have a few more concepts that we'll be working on in the coming weeks before our final release but for now, I'll be focusing my time on other departments such as UI and Narrative as I help implement dialogue via Yarnspinner.

In other news, I also updated the background of the Whispering Abyss page(Shown in the image above) using some of Erin's art assets along with an abstract background I made. I randomly got a jolt of energy to do this while listening to an audiobook of "Moby Dick" for another class and quickly made something before our showcase to students last week. I had experience doing stuff like this as I had more recently updated my own homepage on itch.io and it was also similar to the process I took when updating my portfolio website. It's definitely a work in progress, but for now, I think it's a good start compared to the normal itch.io background that's extremely empty and barren!