DMUGA Week 15 - Back from Christmas break - now on the way to container city?!

Back from the Christmas break and we're straight into another group project: Container City. Over the holidays I did take some time to relax because you just have to - It's family time. I did however, put together one HUGE blog post giving you a breakdown on how my summer project went and what it entailed. Found here: Summer Project - Ancient Ruins

Anyway... getting back to Container City, we have to get into groups of 4 and design a part of a level using modular assets with interactive elements based from 1 of 2 themes: Sci-fi futuristic, or dystopian post-apocalyptic. Here's how the first week went!...

Our group consists of: Andy, Georgia, Luke and myself.
The very first thing we did was decide on which theme we wanted to go for. We didn't mind as we had ideas for both, but were inching more towards dystopian because it would give us a chance with the challenge of modelling and texture lots of assets which need to look less clean & perfect. It became apparent that you could combine the two and go for sci-fi grunge, but we were 90% sure on this one (I did create a sci-fi moodboard just in case however).

There were a couple of ideas being flown around for the setting, why is this here, and what would make sense it include, but a key comment in the briefing was to focus on a block-out and how to make the player route an interesting one before settling on the context too much. We put together some block-outs in 3DS Max first just to see what we liked from each other's routes and this is what we got:

... A big mess... But it got us thinking on what kinds of things we want to include to make the route fun for the player. Andy had some really cool sketches for his thoughts on the route and how we could vary the lighting conditions so that it is dramatic and interesting - A key part of the brief.

I put together a couple of moodboards just to get some ideas going on the types of things we need to include:

Tuesday was the day we began to look at the player's route in more detail and what we could do more specifically to enhance the route. The brief states that we need interactive elements, so we thought why not make the player have to go through a small challenge to get a key, then use it to open the main area (of which we didn't know what it was going to be). Here's what we were thinking:

Our initial idea revolved around something which we were yet sure of... the context. It involved climbing up a ladder (interactive element) from the sewers (dark place), into another dark area such as prison cells, and finding a key somewhere in an outside courtyard, going back into a gloomy tunnel with volumetric lighting, completing a very simple jumping puzzle, finding another key, and then that will unlock the big area.

As my description may suggest, this route was far too long in the period of time we have to make this. So, we cut some bits out:

Before I carry on, the life drawing session this week was really good as it got me back to drawing, but my outcomes weren't something I'm proud of:

It's not just a bad photo either

It may just be the first L.D back, but I know I can do better. I really wanted to go to the life drawing in the afternoon as well, but the container project had my full attention at this point and I didn't want to lose any time on it.

Moving on, we changed the player's starting point and had them finding a way to open the gate, and then sliding down a long container into the courtyard. We thought this would be a really cool thing to include to make it fun. However, the a 3D tutor advised that we'd probably have 1 person making the rocks at the start looking good for like 2 weeks so it wouldn't be that viable.
We kept it in for 1 day but then decided to take it out and think of something else to fill in the starting point. Nevertheless, here's the work I did on this route:

We were also advised to cut the level right down because it was still far too big, and this is what we ended up with:

Two big blocks standing up are watchtowers guarding the city against whatever it is they want to keep out... Zombies?

I thought it was ok having to change the route again as it made our lives so much easier for scale-wise, but I had a change of heart because I realised that now, the route could be completed by the player in about 20 seconds, and it didn't include anything that was really that interesting.

We tried to get it in balance on Wednesday/Thursday so that it wasn't too big and wasn't too small. This is the final layout that at the moment is roughly what we're going for:

Current layout

Current progress with actual assets

Misc Assets

We've spent the rest of our time this week getting a lot of the assets made because there is just so much we need to clutter the map with. It just worries me a little that we only get 10 1024x1024 texture sheets/40 5125x12, but we need to have many different texture sheets for each object to get the variation in there.

In addition, I got the ladder blueprint to work with my meshes in the game engine, so at least we know we can definitely have that in there now as an interactive element!