University final year project Level - crit needed.

Greetings.

Right, first thing I would do from looking at those first few pictures is change that floor texture. Stat. It just doesn't work.

The first picture is black for me, cannot see a thing. Brighten it up some.

And the long hallways are just flat and lifeless, could use some kind of detail, anything.

Hey.

The textures on the roof look like they are scaled down too low make them bigger. Also a lot of the props look very random or don't fit. My advice from personal experience would be to rip most of them out and start again. Take each area and build some really interesting things for the player to focus on and detail the area around them from that. Put props together to make bigger objects that are more detailed. Look at pro levels and that the number one rule for Unreal. A lot of the BSP looks way out of scale too like walls being too high for the width.

Good Luck!

If you are going for suspense then you don't want the player to be able to see everything. That doesn't mean you have to make everything dark as in your first screenshot, rather get some contrast in the lighting. Get some structures in there that obstruct the players view slightly. Even just something basic like a few pillars here and there will help immensely if you want the player questioning what is lurking in the room with them. Large open environments like you have work best when they are contrasted with the type I just described. When the player enters one of these large open well lit rooms they should pause because they are so used to thinking something is lurking around that any apparently safe area looks like a trap.

Some little things that will help, visually anyway

If your goal is fear, lighting is your number one tool for that, take this standard corridor ...

[Blocked Image: http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/116/thirdhallwaylights02.jpg]

1. Continueous lighting all the way down a corridor completely breaks the suspense, no suprises and I can see everything, works much better if you can use darkness to your advantage. Light a few areas of the corridor but leave some parts almost pitch black, keeps you guessing! Light sources from outside of the corridor work very well too. Contrast is key here, dark levels are _very_ tough ... overbright the important areas to make sure even with a dark screen/brightness setup the level will be bright enough where it matters!!!

2. Open up some areas outside the corridor and have flashing lights/sounds fom behind them

3. Most of your lights should be disabled, keep them there for art reasons but have them turned off. The one you do have on should serve as a kind of checkpoint where you aim towards. Also use some colors not just white, red and yellow and orange are good colors to use if fear is your objective. If you want to be clever you can try reversing this an use happy colors (green, blue) to prove a sense of calm before the storm. Thats more for single player scripting.

4. Keep the exit illuminated what ever you do

5. Use flashing/moving lights carefully, a good tip if you want flashing lights is to always have a constant fixed light and the flash adding a little movement, flashing light by itself is usually too strong.

6. Play with shadows if you can, place light sources where you get the most interesting (or scary) shadows possible, although this is very dependant on technology.

Further to what the other guys have said, what strikes me about this is that there's not really a sense of place. There doesn't seem to be any coherency or purpose to the placement of things in there that suggests what the area is or what any of the props in the room are doing. It all looks a bit too random at the moment. If you're aiming to scare to people then you need to keep them immersed and an environment that's too obviously artificial and obvious isn't going to help you. If you build something convincing that feels like a real place then building the scares in will come a lot easier.

Other people have mentioned the textures - you've got a couple of issues here.

Some of them aren't tiling too well, they have obvious artefacts when they are tiled.

Inconsistency of scale between textures

Alignment issues up the wazoo (the huge-o grate in the floor is a good example of this)

Excessive normalling; whereby it looks like you've auto generated the normal for the sake of having it and some areas of the texture have way more depth than they should. The floor texture for instance.

I can't find it right now, but back in the HL1 days there was a fairly nifty article by (I think) valve that covered creating a texture set and gave some decent advice on what elements you wanted to include and how to make it work together. Things have changed somewhat since then, but it's still worth a read if you can track it down.

A few images about what scary lighting looks like to go with what 2dChris said about the lighting. Really bright areas around the stuff you want the player looking at, dark shadow in any areas you want them to ignore (and possibly throw out a few noises from to go for the scare). A good trick to see if you made your lit areas bright enough is to either turn the brightness and contrast of your monitor way down, or jack up the mid-range under the world properties->post processing up to 1.5ish. If the areas with lights still look like they're lit up, then your lights are probably bright enough.

http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/artic ... 0_640w.jpg

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/ima ... 1_640w.jpg

http://www.definitivejux.net/files/u3/bioshock_06.jpg

http://vgfive.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/bioshock1.jpg

http://savepoints.files.wordpress.com/2 ... ay0012.jpg

http://2.gvt0.com/vi/E2fPFb6P8oY/0.jpg

http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/9021 ... ay0ht9.jpg

Man that Big daddy being green (usually means safe) really fecks with your perception! With the orange environment lighting :] Never noticed it before but it's very well thought out. Opposites attract!

careful with the lighting on the game following this link, its so good it's NSFW!

sex

http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/2857307/ ... 3?h=edb668

Quote from manhuntworld

Another things guys, if you notice on my first picture, the door is completely black and is not recieving any light. its an interpolating actor because im using matinee to animate it opening, i've made dynamic lights in the room, made sure it accepts dynamic lights but yet it stays completely unlit. any ideas to why this is?? cheers.

You don't want to make the lights dynamic. That's way too expensive in UE3. All you need to do is enable "lighting environment" on your mover/interp actor and it will light up just fine.

Overall the lighting is still too uniform. You want more shadows and more contrasting light colors. Here's a quick crappy example I did in Gimp. It's a little overemphasized to illustrate what people are talking about.

First thing was lowering the global brightness to get some good dark areas. The lamps look like they should be casting blue light, so you can see the two variations shown and how much they should light up the area right around them (really bright around the lights, really dark elsewhere). Looks like you have a window of some type on the right, which is a great spot to use some nice contrasting orange light cast through the grating as illustrated. The idea is to light up the areas you want the player to look, while leaving the other areas shrouded in shadow. I'm sure some of the more graphically inclined here could paint a better picture with some photochoppery, but hopefully this gives you the idea.

[Blocked Image: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4783596/Manhuntsworld/Manhuntsworld1.jpg]

Your environment needs some serious lighting contrast.

I think the biggest issue I see is the boxyness: it looks like you started with some basic rectangular rooms, then just retextured the surfaces and put props on top. Modify the BSP structure more, put in some angles, stagger the room height, etc.

The details don't feel integrated. Don't just put pipes and vents everywhere -- where do those pipes and vents go? What purpose do these rooms serve?

Quote from Campaignjunkie

The details don't feel integrated. Don't just put pipes and vents everywhere -- where do those pipes and vents go? What purpose do these rooms serve?

this very much. allow me to expand on this by saying that you need there to be some sort of ambient narrative; i.e., events that transpired before the player got there. the overall atmosphere will benefit greatly from this, and it will make the player uneasy. typically something that will make something scary is when there are missing parts of a narrative scattered around. for instance, you can have leads in your level that battle has been going on, with blood splatter everywhere; but missing bodies and sound effects that suggest a presence in the nearby rooms. the suspense will always be in the ambience in a scary level; and this goes whether you choose for it to have a climax for it or not.

also the level is so dark that i can barely make it out on one of my monitors.