In the production of white-box environment, I had to deal with a few things. At the beginning I made a list of the items that are necessary for successful completion of quests for each room, as well as the items that are necessary for successful storytelling (the environment level design is related with it too) and basic items that characterize each location. I also set the characters for each location and divided everything to be interactive or non-interactive and objects to be pickable or unpickable. This is a very basic list of models that white-box prototype must have and which I implemented to individual scenes.

Another thing was the proper settings of interactive objects and characters to the scene. These important elements should not be placed at the very edge of the screen / scene because players can get frustrated while looking for them. And what is worse, in some screen resolutions they might not be visible at all!

A link to an interesting article dealing with similar issues by Junxue Li: Design HOPA & Adventure game scenes: mind the screen ratio

All the possible exits of locations should be also taken into account, it must be obvious where the player can go and where not. A passage to the next location (an invisible dividing line which switches the camera to another scene after being exceeded by the player) also cannot be at the very edge of the screen / scene for the reasons described above.

The more I am being engaged in the environment design now, the more things I discover to be solved, things that could in a poorly design mess all the gaming experience.

Jakub