Level Design Blog

 Blog 7: 10/23-10/29 This week, I continued work on our latest RPP project. The game takes place in a suburban house, which a lizard has to run around while solving puzzles. Once we had settled on the narrative and the locations of each cutscene, which would tell the lizard's story in between puzzles, I spent time planning out the route the lizard would take and the locations of each puzzle. Once I had created a rough outline of the house in Modeling Mode, I exported all of the walls from Unreal as an FBX and opened them in Maya. I created a cleaner model of the walls in Maya and brought them back into Unreal before beginning to populate the house. Part of the story of our level involves a cat knocking over a variety of objects in the house after accidentally removing the lizard's tail. I started by adding upright furniture in each room, and then I went through and began adding knocked-over furniture and a variety of clutter. Once the house was mostly populated, I started worki...

 Blog 6: 10/16-10/22 This week, I completed my real-world blockout and then began work on my level design document for the FPS level. I thought that my real-world blockout turned out well, but I might have been too ambitious with my project. I wanted to block out the Leu Botanical Gardens, because I think the grounds are very pretty, but working on a somewhat-open outdoor level was very challenging. I spent more time than I maybe should have on modeling the main house, and I think the grounds around it suffered as a result. I did enjoy working with Houdini's built-in tree modeler to create trees for the grounds, though, and building simple assets in Maya and the Unreal modeling toolkit was very good practice. If I were to redo this project, I would probably move the entire project to model the interior of the house, instead of the exterior. Starting work on my FPS level design document was somewhat of a challenge, because I have never enjoyed FPS games very much and don't have ...