Museum

In the Museum level Molly and I made, there's a small hub and spoke design.  The player starts in the hub and must explore the east-west spokes in so that they can unlock the last spoke.  In the each of the east-west spokes, there's a key that moves stairs in the dome room when collected, allowing the player to get to the end.  In order to get to the first key, players have to jump across a gallery area bounded by crates to get to another room. There, they are blocked in by crates on wheels, which they do not yet have the ability to push.  So they have no option but to climb the tower of crates where they can find a glove that gives them the power to push crates.  The  they can push the crates to get the first key and then return to the hub.  Once at the hub they can push some crates to get the second spoke and make their way to the second room by pushing more crates.  In order to get the second key, they have to push a box into a certain position in order to over come a wall of crates.  Once they have the second key, the player can go back to the hub, climb up the dome, and enter the ending area.  

For me, the process began with playing through Molly's gray box and thinking about what models we would need and how we could rearrange the layout a bit.  Something that was helpful to me in thinking about the layout was how we could separate spaces using some of the ideas from ch 5 of Form, Space, and Order.  We added more orthogonal planes using either explicit walls or using glass to help separate sections out.  I made the crates, floor, walls, and display cases in Maya.  I actually enjoyed modeling that stuff a lot more than I had enjoyed modeling before.  After playtesting, we realized that we needed a better sense of direction and a better sense of cause and effect.  For the direction, we added more vertical areas, so the player can climb up and see areas that they might want to go to and that we've lit specially.  For the cause and effect we tried our best to put the first key more in front of the door it effects and moved the glove into an area that you can't get out of without pushing a box.