Working on this game was a great learning experience and a lot of fun. I enjoyed that this project gave me an opportunity to use both my technical skills and my level design skills and to push myself in both of these skill sets. Creating the effect smoothly was a great technical challenge. Creating levels that exist in two different dimensions and the planning of these levels was also a great challenge.

    Creating the universe/dimension hopping effect was a fun exercise and had its difficulties in creating a seamless transition while also allowing the player to really feel as if they are looking through a window into another space. While most games that have this space transition usually do so by flashing the players screen fully black or white for a second to mask the transition, I embraced allowing players to see it in its entirety. I think some things I would probably change if I were to do this again would be to give these portals a bit of depth/thickness instead of being paper thin.

    The first iteration of the portals was perfectly circular and lacked the distortion effect on the edge and instead just faded. This portal also moved with the player's camera. This made the effect more akin to a flashlight and didn't give off the correct feeling for players. Deciding to make it stationary really helped sell the fact that it was more of a rip or tear between the two worlds. While this did slightly diminish the players ability to view their entire surroundings from a single portal summon, it was overall more beneficial for the feeling.

    Unlike other games that use a similar world swapping effect such as Titanfall 2, or Dishonored 2, which use it as time travel, I wanted my two worlds to have more than just doorways or killzones being different. I decided to change elements within the level playspace per world. This created the challenge of how to prevent players from portaling into other objects that didn't exist where they were standing in their current one. I ended up creating a system that would check the other world for collision before allowing the player to teleport, thus preventing them from teleporting into these objects.
 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     Creating the puzzle traversal space was an interesting challenge. I had to create a completely traversable path, but split it between two worlds and still somehow be able to lead the player to their destination, even if they couldn't see it. I did this with lighting and helped cue the player early on by creating little rift effects to help signal the players to open their rifts at that location to survey the area so they could see the path in the other dimension. I later removed these cues after holding the players hand long enough to let them go off on their own. Editing these spaces was a huge pain because if I moved something in one world, it wouldn't necessarily move it's paired counterpart in the other world in the editor. If I were to do this again I would certainly start by creating a tool or tools to simplify the level creation and allow for easier iteration.

     There were some things that I really wanted to add to this game that I didn't have the time for or didn't have the skills to do, and not the time to acquire them. I'd really love to add combat to this game and start using these portals for combat, sneak attacks, and even things like combat puzzles such as sending a rocket that's been fired at you through the portal to destroy a wall in the other world. I'd love to get voice acting into this game so I wouldn't have to deliver the storytelling through text that players generally want to skip through. I'd also like to add another form of traversal, like ledge clinging, ladders, or something similar.

    I really enjoyed the concept of this game and may even revisit it at sometime with all the new skills I have learned and recreate the game with better techniques and expand on its ideas.