Level Design Blog

Blog 20: 4/1-4/8 This week, I finished the mock design test. As I was working through it, I found that I had a lot of uncertainties about the process; although it made working on the assignment more difficult, it was probably very good experience for future job applications. The biggest hurdle for me during this project was using Autodesk Maya, which may be my new least favorite program. The program kept crashing for seemingly no reason as I was modeling the scene, which became increasingly more common as the level became more complex. I tried to mitigate some of the issues by staying on the FIEA VPN, saving frequently, and merging meshes and deleting history as I worked, but even with that there were probably dozens of Maya crashes, and once where my entire laptop bluescreened. Most likely, it's an issue with my specific machine, and not with Maya as a whole, but it made the whole process much more tedious either way. The other challenge I faced with Maya was that I had only ever ...

Blog 19: 3/25-4/1 This week, I began working on the mock design test for Uncharted 4. Since the test specified that the level should take place in a set of ruins, and I studied abroad in Sicily during undergrad and spent a lot of time around the ruins there, I decided to model the landscape in the style of Sicilian ruins.  I started by collecting references both from the photos I took while I was studying abroad and from the internet. I decided to model the ruins in my level after a combination of some of the larger ruins I saw while I was traveling, combined with the landscape of Sicily.     I also researched Uncharted's co-op mode quite a bit, since I was much more familiar with the single player version of the game. I was particularly inspired by this level in the co-op mode, which was a similar style to the ruins I was hoping to create. Once I had a general idea of the level I wanted to create, I drafted a rough map. I was planning to do a larger section of city rui...