So final year begins and im not going to hide that im scared as hell! summer was a fun filled experience being back in my time warp town of which the people get older but don't move on much. Moving away from the drama and drabness ill start with my work over summer.
Over summer with the long hours of work trying to earn back some of my student overdraft I managed to draft up a sketch of a level design and build the geometry in unreal tournament 3 editor. this was based off a similar drawing but was revised to a design i thought would better work to help the movement about the map. as the only map really i have made was more of a way to show off my skill set in using the tool set I wanted to make a playable level this time. Here was the sketch of the revised level from top view.
The original design was based on a one floor approach where moving from room to room in a lateral sense was how you orientated the level. I felt that could be a bit restricting on the design over all so I devised this rough multilevel to encourage a high level of movement and ultimately more intense game play. This however was a very rough sketch, and as all rough sketches they always change in the process in the attempt to make it a more successful test project.
the images below show the build process of the level and the relevant changes in top, side, front and perspective views.
As you can see from the pictures of the top view they no longer really look like the original design. As i was following some of my ideas from the original idea I saw ways to utilize the space to give a freer flow of movement to the player. I started to apply materials and textures to the walls before static meshes but it came to the time of going back to uni so everything holted to pack move an settle in in my new fantastic flat! (good student digs are always a must)
First lecture in and a new project is set and with a four week turn around to boot. Time to start the ball rolling to how I will be in the rest of this year head down engrossed in work. as much as student can be I suppose =)
Our brief is to tackle the issue of/or informing about piracy, such as digital piracy in what every way we want. A pretty open project as we could choose to go pro or against piracy. Leaving this decision to students to make that kind of decision may have been a mean one as in little more than 6 months we will be looking for jobs it may be frowned upon if we decided to back piracy.....
So naturally my thought process was to incorporate being a digital pirate into a game (lets see how that works out for me =S).
I have never really had to think about a set story line into my games before as I have never really considered the idea of being a games story boarder and most of my experience was in the death match multiplayer area of games. There are probably too many multi player map designers coming out into industry so i thought i would try and push the boundairys a bit and design a objective style map where a player works towards a finish point getting collectables enabling the finish point after a certain number are collected.
Considering my brief I was working to in all of this, keeping in context its piracy nature, I went about setting some kind of storyline to work to before I went about the whole design. I am still amazed even to this day the learning potential of games as a whole. I find in enthralling that a child of 5 to 7 can have such a intricate knowledge base through playing games learning things that maybe a child that didn't play games would not. Most computer game playing children have a extensive knowledge of weapons in first person shooters that are real life weapons today, they also know about ancient civilizations that they explore that they may not learn about until older or studying history of cultures. Just through the interaction of the game they can learn so much about any era of subject matter the game is based on.
Taking things a bit more out of concept, Disney films old and new play on moral teaching to enhance their storyline, such as love and hate and good overcoming evil. Even though the child isn't actually engaging with the film for the moral understanding, me as a kid never watched it for the morals but more the interesting characters an animation, but the engagement causes a subconscious knowledge of right and wrong or what ever the films message was about.
In a similar way to the learning process of computer games and moral understanding in the subconscious I thought that I would put the player in the persona of the pirate trying to steal a piece of software, but through out game play informing players of consequence of what their damage their actions of stealing are causing through sound lighting and visuals.
I had a idea of a story building movie setting the scene of a money starved culture where stealing in any sense was become more prevalent. police were now becoming less powerful as they are now stretched capacity. corporations realising the instability's start moving underground to protect themselves and their products. piracy for many is a very tempting outcome of the modern society, making lifestyle cheaper and rich with accessibility, but not without great risk. The player is a pirate that has come to a far out and hidden facility so steal software for money, but finds that the consequences of his actions causes more instability to society causing corporations to go into liquidation, causing humanity to go into regression. Ultimately the player would move towards becoming a saviour by taking back from pirates what they stole and returning the vital developments back to the corperations to atone for his sins.
Being realistic a game of that much intensity isn't what i could do start to finish in 4 weeks so i wanted to do like the prologue where the pirate steals the software sucsessfully whilst playing through the level I was to design and sends the world into chaos, as this holds the most weighting morally of the game.
few now that the explanation of my thought process is over now to some of the designs. =D
this is a top down view of my original design of the map lay out
From looking at these I realised that convensional shaped craft in the future would probably not exist as planes may then be vertical take off and have some sort of anti gravity function (being all sci fi like =D) i thought this would aid my design of my airport as this would be based in a mountain. On snowy peaked mountains there is obviously little ground to build run ways so a vertical take off hanger would fit quite nicely into my design aspects.
I started to draw out ideas from my head to get some initial ideas down. and what I came up with after a while of drawing was this...
After I finished doing this design I knew this was perfect for what I wanted to achive from this airport. the curves were organic in their look and looked similar to avalanche precautions they put over the top of roads to stop them being cut off and blocked if a avalanche occurs.
. I realised this wasn't the sort of ergonomic design in which we were getting taught how to build our characters after the first few weeks of tutorial, rig them with bones, but then again I've never taken the easy way with any of my projects so far.
