During the making of the artifact I made quite poor choices. I spent way to much time working on the walls. They were remade once so that it could be used more efficiently. What I did wrong there was that I made the walls far to high poly count. Which made me dislike them quite a lot when I was finished. There was also holes here and there and I had to make a few non modular pieces at specific areas. I welded the holes together instead of fixing the original pieces and placing them out again. This is really a waste of time and slowed down the entire process and I did it about 3 times. It happened again with the second set of modular pieces and I discovered these errors when I was finished putting out the wall pieces. I also did it with a second set of pieces that are placed at the bottom of the wall connecting it to the floor.
Why I didn't do it in a better way was because I didn't do a very good job at planning out the entire process before I started working on it. I did have my general theme of being underground and in some sort of sewer system. Nothing else was really planned for this and that is really bad. It's a bad habit that I have which makes me go forward without planning it out before had, mostly happens when there is a lot of things that have to be done at the same time.
For me I prefer just having one thing to deal with at a time. So most of the times when under pressure planning doesn't happen because I think of it as a waste of time when it really saves a lot of time since I wouldn't have to redo things over and over. There were some pieces that had some problems that they didn't quite fit it so that I had to make some special pieces for this that made it fit in when meeting other pieces. These pieces weren't used in the final product, this was because I didn't have enough time to make to make enough props so I had to change the size of the level and make it smaller in an attempt to make better use of the props. So after finally finishing the walls I started working on the shader for the wall which uses a bump offset to make a flat surface push inwards and create depth. It doesn't work very well on sharp corners or inner corners. Which is why my level doesn't have any sharp inner corners or outer corners.
Which looks kinda good, I also used it on the floor and the ceiling. There are some errors that occurs when you're far way it creates white lines around the areas that are being pushed down, It happens if the scenes is to bright and lowering the scene brightness fixes this error to some degree. For this shader to work you need to have the normal map compression set to TC_default instead of TC_normalmap, I have no clue why but it does, you will also have to enable SRGB for this to work properly and when this is enabled you can't flip the green channel of the normal map it causes some serious errors. So if you need to flip the normal map you would have to do that manually by opening the image in a editing program.
So If I had 2-3 more day I could have made a few more props to populate the level with. Though better planning could have saved me 7 days or more. So the greater lesson to learn form this is that its very important to plan things and for me its something I have to become better at doing in stressed situations.
Here are the props I made today:
Screenshots from the final level, running from the exe.
