Week 15: Level Design Project

Swiftly back to work now Christmas is done and it's from a dichotomous duo to a new team project. The Container City. This project is working with shipping containers to create a small, modular and playable level in UE4 featuring interactive elements, so doors, locks, pick ups ect. This would be in the style of our choice from either Sci-fi or Dystopia. As much as I love sci-fi I was in favor of dystopia from the word go, rust is a lot easier to make believable than hi-tech I find.

We kicked off the first day attempting some level planning and while we were advised to focus on a layout before thinking about content, without something as a focal point we weren't getting particularly far so we switched to moodboards to help with idea generation.

Of all our collective moodboards the images that caught our attention were greenhouses that had interesting, coloured lighting. This seemed a good starting point for creating some usual scenes and atmospheres and was a large factor in the final selection of our greenhouse level.




After settling on a more solid idea we started to once again arranging a layout for the level and the pathways for the player. Becky, from the ideas discussed threw together some simple plans for what we had in mind with a summary for the player's journey.

We delegated work mostly by rooms, breaking off to each tackle a certain room and tasks to begin with. For my part I choose a feature that I had wanted added when we were suggesting ideas with was a flooded lower levels. I thought some corridors that resembled a sort of maintenance area for the rest of the facility would be a nice contrast with mechanical components and man made lighting to the organic shapes and natural light of the greenhouse upstairs.

Since these maintenance tunnels would be fairly sparse and populated with mostly modular components I also took the job of modelling the panels for the shipping containers that would be used to construct the level itself.  

Straight off the bat I knew I wanted the shipping containers to be almost completely rusted, not only to give an aged feel of having been sat there a long time but also with all the plant life to have remained so healthy the metal would be more exposed than normal to lots of water. I also looked into designing how the containers would have been modified for the environment the level was, such as wooden panels bolted to the floors for offices or for the greenhouse a grated floor to drain away water that might accumulate in there as well as how plant life would effect and interact with the materials they were surrounded by. While I worked on creating these panel pieces Becky set to work on blocking out a white box in Unreal 4 was we could start working out lighting and placements. Following the brief timetable we set up my panels had to be completed by the second week to allow us to continue to work with the lighting in a much more final setting.

By the end of the week I'd been in engine also, starting to try out materials for creating water for the flooded levels and stepping up blueprints in testing files to get doors opening and lights turning on which are simple enough. What I really want to try and get running is a way to add footsteps that change depending on what type of surface the player is walking on. The documentation I've found for it doesn't seem that hard for a 3rd person game but the fact we're working in 1st is complicating things. Other than this I finished the panel modelling ready for next week and have moved onto modeling my share of the assets to populate the level with.