Tuesday 25 February 2014

Modular buildings part 2 + Attack of the sickness bug.

Last week was hectic for both of us –Luc fell ill at the start of the week and I fell ill at the end of it. We both got hit hard with our colds so the week wasn't as productive as we hoped, plus for one full day we had to type up an article about our Pudding Lane/Off The Map project. So apologies for the late blog update. Luckily we planned for a buffer week at the end of this project so if anything like this did happened it wouldn't affect the quality of our work overall.

The work we did do last week was carrying on from the week before, which were the modular pieces so we could start producing all the buildings. Luckily we got everything done to a standard where we can start putting together the buildings. Some pieces aren't fully textured yet or need further tweaking but it’s enough for us to get a good idea of how the buildings are going to look.

One big decision we made last week was to scrap the idea of doing building interiors, which we were schedule to do last week. We really liked the interior idea and wanted to have it in, but after talking we felt only a week to make several interiors for different buildings wouldn't be enough time to get it up to the standard we wanted. As the idea for the interiors would to pretty much have all the furnishings and objects you would have in a house but all cramped in a little space, we felt it was too much to do in a week and we didn't want to eat into another week which was dedicated to something else and we didn't want to attempt it half arse – go hard or go home basically.  Another reason for dropping it was because after a few weeks working with the buildings and textures we felt we needed another week to really get it up to the standard we wanted, as the building exteriors are a key part of our level.

So far with got some basic buildings built, with some placeholder geometry and textures to represent larger structures. We've done this so we can get a better idea of how different buildings are working with each other and how well the level plays now. Whereas if we just put our final buildings in straight away without testing, we would probably find a lot of the buildings don’t work well. Wasting time for us. After we are happy with these place holder buildings we will then start to replace them with the final buildings with in the coming weeks.

One of the basic high end shacks

Some place holder buildings in the courtyard

This week we hope to start producing the road and monorail system, along with making a start to the terrain.
Should have more to show next time as we have both recovered

Tuesday 11 February 2014

Modular Buildings

This week our focus has mainly been on getting the modular sections of the buildings done, which includes metal panelling and trim for the high end buildings, and doors, windows and other fixtures for the shacks.

Dans modular panels

Dans early modular panels
Lucs corrugated metal
Lucs shack modular items

Some of the placeholder bashkits have been put into engine to get a better feel for how things will look. Upon initially importing however, we noticed the buildings were way too small. We were working to a 1x1 meter scale for the modular sections, but have since changed that to 1.25x1.25 to make sure everything is the correct height.


We've also started thinking more about key shots within the level and how we're going to control what the player sees with some concepts drawn up from the whitebox. This is a really key aspect, especially since our scope is quite large, we need to give the illusion of scale but do it in a very controlled way, to make sure we don't get too ambitious with playable areas. Hopefully in the next week we'll delve further into this before we start building the modular assets up in engine.

Lucs concept
This week and next, on the side, we need to start thinking about dynamic elements such as the holographic projections and cameras in the level and how the player interacts with them, we'll be doing tests in engine soon.