Making a beautiful Apocalypse : Part 2 Rough Blockout

Hello everyone I'm back with Part two, of the blockout.(Part1:Planning) In my experience with this project this phase took many iterations of editing the environment and assets, continuously playing the level and streamlining your environment and how your player moves through it. The blockout post will have to be split into a few different  parts to make it less cluttered. As this is large and solo project, I decided to work on certain parts first for the sake of also growing my portfolio while I complete entire project.

Task list: 

1. Rough blockout of terrain and surrounding houses including points of interest.

2. Refining the interior blockout  with all the props needed to complete the inside. 

3. Making final props and texturing inside.

4. Exterior environment ,refining landscape ,outdoor plants ,rocks etc

You will see how things change, allot! which leads me to the first part of how I approached this.

Just  like property hunting in real life have a few conditions.

1. It has to  be in the Sonoran desert 

2. It needs an iconic Arizona landscape/Mountains

3. A river. 

Its hard to find exactly what you need, so I had to combine a few methods to get a basic landscape. 

• Try to setup a decent basic landscape and composition early on as it becomes much harder to change later. 

• I started off with a heightmap from real location. This tutorial from Ben Cloward was insanely helpful!! (side note. This guy has amazing Tutorials) Bens landscape tutorial 

• I Couldn't find the ideal location. In unreal I sculpted over the height map to add the features I needed. Using sculpting methods and stamps I created in Gaea and the new landscape tools, it started looking fake fast.

• To overcome my new man made flawed additions, I exported the landscape heightmap from unreal  to rework it in Gaea

• This terrain is not finished at this time, but I will show the progress for it up to this point as it will most likely be improved on later, when I focus on the exterior :) 

• I also loosely followed the landscape concept layout. Because sometimes the 2d concept doesn't translate so well into 3d or we just decide later something else feels, plays and looks better!

• Because of optimization reasons and lag, I'm working on  a slightly lower quality version of my landscape I made in Gaea, this will all be issues I address later when I'm focusing on exterior.

• If you are looking for more helpful info about level design check out Spaghetti Game

While blocking out I tried loads of different ways of placing walls. So here I am showing the original walls, as there is still something to learn from this! The way I placed them and the angle of the doors and openings. While they looked interesting, it proved to be very difficult to navigate with the character. As a side note while on the topic of doors. For games they are much wider and taller than in real life, this is so that the character can move through them easily. So depending on the game and the size of the playable character, it will affect the door and window sizes.

Stairs need to be consistent, to avoid creating difficulties for the character to move up or down. Like the picture  below points out it is important to  have enough space between stairs and wall to stop the camera from clipping through or just in general feeling too tight .

As mentioned in my first blog post, it is very important when creating an environment for games to have a good idea what type of game you are creating it for, how the game will be played and how the player will potentially behave in this environment. Spending time on planning those things when you don't have an entire Team  by your side will help you make decisions and find possible issues.

The placement of the above door is a good opportunity to showcase the flaw in placing the door like that... not only does the right side feel very off and visually not pleasing  but its also problematic for game play ,the player wont feel safe or  have place to hide behind...ok  if it is one player one can say  he will hide on the left side, but what if there is more than one player? What if the threat is from another angle? It was clear the door had to move :D

Another very important thing I learnt during this process is the importance of composition and using each opportunity I get to to show something. Windows, doors or places where you enter an area like the town entrance is a good opportunity to show the player something. Its like a frame of sorts, so make sure when the players runs to an open window to look outside, or the player steps out the front door that the composition outside is good and leads there eye to places where they can go explore.

I changed much of the layout and the rooms and made the space more fluid to move through! Making sure the character doesn't get stuck on anything causing them to get annoyed (I'm sorry Leo I know you got stuck allot)

The stairs below in the workshop have to be fixed... As you can see they are a good example of stairs not being consistent.

I think this is a good place to wrap it up for now. I want to thank you all for taking the time to read the post! As always I would love to hear any thoughts.. also if you have some kick ass tips please share!! It takes a village you know and this project is still young.