I'd like to recommend this article on how Flight of the Amazon Queen was made, it details some simple but not so obvious tricks:
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JohnPassfield/20150601/244740/Making_of_Flight_of_the_Amazon_Queen__A_20th_Anniversary_Retrospective.php
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I feel like i should remake the map i made completely but with a radically different approach
here is a list of the (major) things that went wrong with the project (so far)
the maps are made with CSG-ing boxes together and later editing the geometry
but his has led to a lot of errors that often went unnoticed
these little gate models to hide the errors but it didn't work that well
you could destroy the cork from the shoreline easily so there had to be a a little house built around the thing
which then made it hard to find the cork and made this puzzle way more confusing than it should be
but during prototyping it was made to be allow more than hundreds
of these in different sizes
(the physics are simple though it's just a sphere masquerding as a cube)
so only mini Lara can fit through (the giant arrow sort of addressed this problem in the end)
With the deadline extended (and now being capable of using other orifices than my mouth to breath .. not counting my nose yet) i'm back in the habit:
rewrote how the light is calculated, previously it just picked up the light from the lightmap
but now it actually takes the lights position (up to 4 lights) into account for vertex lighting (previously it was a single fixed directional light only)
in the end it looks nice but the the difference is hardly noticeable
.. also smoke is now affected by light as well
I'm cutting down the game to a single map to have something to release
so now it's just introduction, single puzzle and ending .. not much of a game
It's at the stage where everything that can go wrong goes wrong ..
and it seems many things i worked on won't end up in the final version .. another victim of feature creep.. oh well
So I realised I need to make maps as well.. (darn this would have been funnier if i announced it on the last day.. oh well)
Anyway one thing i noticed is that often map design comes from neccessity
E.g. in this one I wanted a simple concept: you need to drain a pool to access a switch
And to drain the water you need to get rid of a plug by shooting at it
(but you cannot shoot or use switches underwater)
So to shoot underwater you need to turn into Steel Lara (when in doubt just st- borrow from Nintendo)
and just walk on the bottom of the pool shooting stuff
Now the problem is that in this form you can just walk over the switch and push it
And to solve that first the Steel powerup is time limited and there needs to be some extra wall added
so you can walk to the cork and blast it but you don't have enough time to reach the switch
Postponed my battle with the camera for now and decided to use the non-smooth one
after 'studying' some third person games it seems to be the most common one (and least frustrating)
Also added bullet shells (thing is you got infinite ammo .. so where are they coming from?)
Now to add something to shoot at..
I'm still at heavily on alpha stage with this (engine and character movement is done, there is saving and loading.. only things missing are the maps, textures and enemies .. only the things that would make it a game) and for now just collaged some screenshots together to give an idea on whats it all about