Matthew: Initial Whitebox

After our first week of preliminary whitebox work, some actionable improvements on it are:

• To make the level less of a linear walk. As it turns out, my mind still thinks very much in 2D, so I conceived most of the level in terms of left-to-right progression. This works great for a 2D game, but players generally expect more freedom in a zoomed out third person 3D platformer. To fix this, tons of people suggested branching paths or optional collectables, but even something simple like rotating the barn 90 degrees to add some bends to the path or positioning key moments in the opening area in a non-linear fashion would enhance the experience.
• Many of the jumps as they exist right now are fairly awkward for the movement controller. This is primarily because we had to lay down a whitebox before finishing the movement code. We will need to tweak the spacing of the platforms to allow for more natural flow of gameplay.
• The whitebox needs to actually be completed. Right now we have a very loose skeleton but we need to add various spots of concrete level progression: the holes in the roof of the barn, boundaries that prevent you from sequence breaking, an ending area, etc.
• We will need to add camera controls in order to allow the player to properly view the level. With the way our level currently looks, there is no camera angle that will give a desireable view of the level in all parts of it, so we plan on adding a system where the player can freely control the angle of the camera.