Level Design Blog 3

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 second round of testing the timing of each player within the level.

Creating the house section of our level was especially challenging for me, since it required the most texturing and mesh creation. Since several of the wall meshes didn't work properly with the materials I created, I will have to bring them back into Maya to fix their UVs.

Outside of working on our group project, I didn't have much time to work on level design work this week. However, I began planning for a personal project I am hoping to start in more detail in the next few weeks.

I am a big fan of the band Queen, so I was very excited when I found out they had released a video game in the '90s. The game, Queen: the eYe, is a very strange and fairly difficult sci-fi game. It blends fighting mechanics with puzzle-solving, and it was allegedly the first game ever to use full facial motion capture.

I thought it would be a lot of fun to try to create my own version of one of the levels of Queen: the eYe as a way to ease into more complicated level design projects. I own the official art book for the game, which contains a lot of the original sketches and ideas for the game, some of which didn't make it into the final product due to both time and technical constraints. This week, I read a good portion of the book and watched several video essays on the game, including an interview with one of the original developers, and I took notes on some of the core components of the level I wanted to recreate. In future weeks, I plan to try whiteboxing the level as it is in the original game, and then to work through it and see what I would want to change if I were creating the level myself.

Images of the original level, gathered from the art book:

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