Playflow and Electricity!

I thought i would write up in a bit more detail how i think the playflow should go, you guys can think about it too and we can have a bigger talk about it on Monday.

The player enters the main common room. There is the electric grid above them, and a dividing possibly electric grid in front of them. The middle are is like a cage that contains 'roller coaster tracks' a cool idea thought up by Sophia and Tom. Through the grid, but inaccessible is something weird/scary/shocking. The player thanks the heavens that they are protected or do not have to pass this thing, which we will have to discuss. Potentially a crashed roller coaster full of corpses or the like.

The player is forced through the room. Green areas representing lockdowns, as this would be a high security facility. They cannot just leave the building.

The only route forward is to double back, but go past the 'shocking thing' that they had been so thankful to avoid earlier. Forcing them into a situation they do not want to be in.

The electric grid above will also create a sense of containment making the large room really enclosed and limiting.

At this point in production, I don't want to be over ambitious. So when the player reaches the other side, they only have access to the staircase that leads to the above walkway. If we later wish to include the funky hallways we can make them the only route to the first floor instead. This is dependent on us sticking to schedule.

So the player heads upstairs and across the walkway. Discovering more weird things about the building with signs such as 'do not feed the inmates' and 'gift shop this way'. I think the lift should be accessible at this point. We want to play on the idea of forcing the player into bad situations, so something undesirable will also be in the lift, but they have no other choice.

This can either lead upwards, or down to the ground floor again, past the lockdown and out of the building. I think we should concentrate on the one area first though, before we think to far ahead.

All we need to think about to start is the main ground floor, and the first floor walkways, potentially a stairwell and a lift area too. This shouldn't be too hard to block out and get to work on. Hopefully we can get these areas completed on schedule! :D
What do you all think of this playflow? there are holes we will have to fill, but i think this layout could make the opening field of vision, and thoughts of the player very exciting. Tell me if theres anything you don't like or things you think we should add too!

Also, today I've been researching shaders a bit more and have started to develop a flickering/moving electricity shader for the grid.

Its not finished yet (not everything is linked up in this image to make it easier to take a screeny) I'm still working on getting the flickering right. Once i get it finished tomorrow I'll apply to a grid mesh i made today and try and make a vid for you to check out before we meet on Monday. I thought it might be cool if other stuff was 'live' because it had somehow linked with the grid, that way we could use the shader on more stuff, maybe even a puddle of some sort???

I also thought that there must be some kind of instability with the power for the grid to be sparking so much. So there is some kind of control area where the different circuits can be shut off. Hence why its dark in the lower areas and lighter the further up you go. We need some dynamic lighting coming through the grid casting shadows on the floor below.

I didn't get everything I wanted to get done today! but I'm not doing to bad I think, since I only started using unreal three days ago! I'm gonna get some sleep nows, I should try and post on my own blog at some point, I'm neglecting it :p