Designing Forest

Forest initially began as a 2D horror game where you would play as a small child exploring a forest while avoiding enemies by hiding in smaller areas only a child could fit in such as small tunnels and through tight squeezes between trees. Eventually, the game went through small changes at first and then I completely overhauled it to be a bright, 3D first-person exploration game set in a forest where the player is collecting memory fragments with key mechanics built around exploration such as crouching and climbing. I built the entire forest area using an asset pack I found on the unity store called the environmental asset pack by Joshua Pearson with sounds coming from Nature Essentials by Nox sounds. The player is controlled through an asset pack called the super character controller that has built-in 1^st person and 3^rd person movement pre-sets, which cut down a lot of my workload. This meant I was able to focus on building and designing the level which changed a few times as I learned more about level design.

The idea of the game is that you are playing as a man who is remembering his time as a child playing in the forest and exploring. I was trying to emulate that feeling of being a child and exploring a new area that you have never been to before. This is the reason I chose to make the game played from a 1^st person perspective, to make the player feel small. To achieve this, I scaled up all the assets so that they look massive from the 1^st person perspective. I added the benches to highlight how small you are by adding “normal”, human-sized objects to the world. There are 11 collectables in the level, 7 are in the “crawling section” and end in a small, secluded area, where a text pop-up will tell the player where to go next. 3 collectables are found at the top of trees that need to be climbed to reach them. This is done by attaching a script to the 3 climbable trees that uses a trigger area the player moves up and down in. I added the trigger area above benches so the player will know what part of the tree is climbable. When you press space in front of a bench, the character controller will de-activate and a simple up and down movement controller will allow the payer to move up and down until the exit the trigger area and then the super character controller will take over again as normal. There are 5 invisible trigger areas that act as tutorials of the controls or guide the player to where they need to go next. They eventually guide the player to the final area in the opposite corner from where you spawn when the game starts. In the final area is the last collectable and a bench that when the player gets near will end the game.