Postmortem

I learned a lot about Unreal's Landscapes and the workflow for them from this project. Heightmaps are something I should probably focus on getting a better grasp on in the future. What I created was alright for a first serious attempt, but will likely require me to also learn to better use my image editing softer as well. Getting an effective slope from blurring grayscale layers was an early issue that I ran into, and ultimately just used UE4's sculpting tools to handle it.

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Lighting seems to be a recurring issue for me as well. Both interior and exterior, though interior is more troublesome. I kept having issues where objects would take light from a source that was beyond another hard surface, they wouldn't take light at all, or different planes on a single mesh behaved drastically different even when only illuminated by a single light source. I see a project based entirely around learning to light things in my future.

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The main puzzle to get into the structure could use some work. There are clues for the player to find the answer, and it may be enough that people can get through it with enough time. I feel like I could have given the player a better idea of how to tackle it, but was struggling to come up with an idea that would both fit into the scope of the project as well as refrain from giving any text instructions. I would have fleshed out all of the puzzles more if I felt like I could spend more time on this project, but I didn't want to get stuck into a loop of constantly tweaking things. I wanted to have a product and share it in a reasonable amount of time. The 6-7 weeks I spent on it already feel like it was too long and that I should have been able to get it to where it currently is within a month.