Construction of the final scene

The construction of the final scene started with the final terrain. This included the rocks and the floor. From here, it was about populating it with props and gameplay elements. Some elements I received with the terrain, such as the placement of the climb blocks. But I had to go around and put a climbing collider on them, and the same with the grapple climb blocks. I received the foliage and the barriers in one prefab which was easy enough to put into place. Most of the other prefabs were of signular items for me to place around such as the ruins and other props. A majority of the gameplay elements were received in one prefab. This one was definitely the most time consuming to sort out...

For starters, for some reason, the prefab didnt come over in place, so this meant having to realign it by eye. Every puzzle had to be realigned in some way. Amongst this, I had to set up all the grapple pull points for each object (pullable planks, blocks etc) so they would work with my grapple system.

Another problem was most of the animations for the pull actions (platorms moving, falling etc) came across messed up due to the positioning problem, so I ended up re doing all of them aswel. They slowly decrease in quality as your progress through the level! TIME IS A BITCH

The other other problem was the lightmapping. I wanted to use Unitys realtime global illumination system to generate the indirect light etc. This still involves baking light maps. To clarify there, it still requires the baking of light maps, just fancy real time light maps. It literally took 2 weeks to finally get a build of the light maps. It turns out the size of the terrain floor were simply too big for the system to handle. Once I removed them from the baking, it finally worked... Still took around 7 hours tho!

After the lightmaps finish baking, you can then place light probes. These light up non static object with all the nice and fancy bounce light etc. This is how you get global illumination on dynamic objects. They themselves require baking (really fast) and also require light maps (real time or static) to be baked to work properly.

I only managed to place this many of them. Would have been cool to do the whole level, but maybe another time now.

The last annoying issue I can remember was that screen spaced ambient occlusion crashes my version of Unity 5

 It really,

Really did

The last few days consisted of me being back and forth between whatever task springed to mind. Tweaking this collider, tweaking that one. Redoing this because something went wrong somewhere somehow.

Im so tired right now I havent slept in like 40 hours. So heres some screenshots and words so I can hopefully sleep knowing that I maybe covered everything I've done

Input manager, think i already did this one, nice and helpful tho. The only problem is it doesnt serialize properly with prefabs but its easily overcomeable by clicking the update prefab button. Thats meant to sound confusing

 Lighting. Lightmaps. Baked GI is off as you can see. Realtime is ON. Auto is turned off to stop any potential of unity being like "hey im going to fuck you up and delete your shit". I want my lightmaps, and i want them on

 Mecanim. Lines arrows states names blending, all of the parameters orange red green. Tripple arrows, more blending, blending blends with blending

 Blend tress, the ultimate blending experience, blend everything together in one magnificent blending orgy. Parameters. Parameters control the blending. Code the parameters in the scripts to control ALL OF THE BLENDING

 Occlusion culling. Very good. Very helpful. Dont touch any settings, press bake and you're fine. Saves loads of draw calls etc. That was sarcasm, I should have probably played around with the settings. But hey, it saved a lot of draw calls and a lot of FPS at the end of the day

Camera smoothing, I added camera smoothing aswel as transitions and occlusion checking to make sure the camera doesnt clip throught objects

I coded a random lightning script. With sound. Headbanging. Combine the two together. Then I could listen to metal and stand somewhere cool.

I really thought the lamposts were fine. They were untextured and the base was red (as a materal test). But I was aiming for the contrast between the ancient ruins and the modernism. The giant ice cream I get, I really do, but its just too good on another level to not include. It has googly eyes that actually google. But the lamposts when textured and with some other modern urban objects, I think would look pretty cool. Conveys the sense of time and space being torn apart and deep shit like that and armilary spheres etc

So tired

Need to export this thing now as a PDF :(