Level Design Blog

  Blog 5: 9/25 - 10/1 This week, I began working on a new RPP project. Our game is set in a small, old-fashioned house, using a top-down two-dimensional level. I started work on the level by blocking out each of the rooms we wanted to have in the house. I made several different variations of each room, since initially we planned to have the room layout shift over time, but ended up settling on a static layout, taking inspiration from the three rooms I liked best. After revising the initial layouts, I put together a full house map, tweaking a few pieces of the rooms to make them fit together better. The flow of the game involves running around the house completing tasks in preparation for a birthday party; once the basic blockout was complete, I created a diagram of each of the task locations and their order in relation to each other. I wanted to make sure that the player was able to spend a lot of time in each of the different rooms. Since part of the game involves noticing some of...

 Blog 4: 9/12-9/24 This week, I was very busy finishing our RPP project and working on my first game pitch. I spent a long time learning basic modeling to help with our RPP project, and I got some practice creating and texturing props for our level. The most difficult part was unwrapping the UVs, which I had some difficulty with but eventually figured out. The best prop I created for our level was this shovel. In the future, I would like to work more with modeling in Maya; I would like to be able to create my own simple props and objects, especially to use as modular assets in blockouts.  I also finished adding materials and props to our level and worked with Unity's landscape tools. It was interesting to see the differences between landscape modeling in Unity and Unreal; although I think I like Unreal's landscape mode more, I was able to create a landscape I was fairly happy with. I also worked on some basic level design for my game pitch. The game I wanted to create was very...

 Blog 3: 9/11 - 9/16 This week, I worked a lot on my RPP project. Getting used to designing in Unity and Maya was a big hurdle for me, especially as I worked on populating our level with the final meshes. In the past, I have done all of my level design work in Unreal, so getting used to the differences between Unreal and Unity was a challenge. I also began working with creating my own materials and meshes, which ended up being much harder than I expected, since I don't have much experience with UVs and ended up causing problems with several meshes because of it. However, populating the level went very well. I spent a long time creating prefabs in Unity out of existing meshes and prefabs created by our team's artist, which I then placed into the level itself.  Figuring out how to add a pond to the garden section was a lot of fun, and I thought it added a lot to the feel of the level. Once we have foliage and plant textures ready, I'll finish adding their meshes and begin a s...

  Blog 2: 9/3-9/10 This week, I started work in Unreal Engine on a second iteration of the cave-inspired level I worked on last week. I liked the concept of my previous level, with platforms a player could travel across and inset areas under the platforms, but I wanted to make it feel more like a cave and add more variety for the player.  At the end of the series of platforms, the player reaches a large pillar with a chamber in the back, hidden from view at the start of the series. I haven't finished blocking this level out yet, and as I work further on it I would like to focus further on the lighting, and possibly begin to replace some of the blocked-out areas with megascans. I also began work on designing a level for my second RPP group. Our game is an asymmetrical two-player game, where one player is growing plants in a garden and passing them through a window to the second player, who is inside a house brewing potions. The potions are then passed back through the window to...

Blog 1: 8/20 - 9/3 In class, I worked on completing the randomly-selected blockouts. I worked mostly with the included modeling mode tools, although I also spent some time trying out the BSP brushes on the cruise ship. Outside of class, I worked more with modeling mode and landscape mode and practiced lighting my scenes. One of the first blockouts I tried was of a playground. When I was a kid, my neighbors and sister and I would visit the playground near our house all the time, so after my mom told us it had been completely bulldozed a few days after the semester started, I decided to immortalize it in Unreal.  I used photos I had taken, along with Google Earth satellite images, to try to reconstruct the playground as a basic whitebox level: I found that I struggled with more complicated shapes like the slides, so I used placeholders like spiral staircases for them, and I skipped the railings around the playground entirely. Once I was done, I used Merge Actors to turn the playgroun...