It was pointed out to me earlier today that I haven't updated my blog in quite some time. I think my updated website makes up for it. I threw in all the bells and whistles, and since I'm still a novice I can only assume I threw in a few handfuls of bugs as well!
I sat down and drew up a few concepts for possible future buildings for use in-game. They are pretty basic, but they depict a couple versions of a similar setup: two separate buildings that are connected by an elevated walkway.
The first picture shows a smaller building with an inset room for player spawning, etc., as well as stairs leading up to an elevated walkway. This is a more basic setup and it's nothing too crazy.
The second is my favorite of the two. It's a similar idea, two medium-sized cylindrical buildings that are connected via two passageways. The first is the blue passageway that runs underground. The green walkway is on the higher level, and it runs parallel to the first passage. Since there is a gap between the two passages, that means that players can run between them on the ground level. I like this layout personally since it allows for so many varied ways for teams to attack each other, and it's a bit more visually interesting.
It's good to be able to post some work again. I've had quite a bit of work these past few months and it breaks my heart to say that there's really nothing that I'm allowed to talk about, leaving just a few trickles of things that I do on the side for me to post on. That's enough of that, though, I'm taking the time to educate myself with new techniques on a new engine. These screens are from a scene I whipped up using the Unreal Development Kit. I'm learning development of it as a bit of a side experiment right now but I must say I'm loving every bit of it so far.
I'm working with a team of artists right now to generate content for the maps I'll be working on. The people on our team our very skilled artists and I've found that my own skills are, well, lacking! I'm trying to create a setting with a bit of an industrial feel, albeit whatever industry would look like four hundred years from now. With that I've come up with a few drawings I wanted to share for fun.
I think that it's extremely important for anyone interested in level design to try their hand at working on art in some form. When you think of it, level design really is nothing more than applied art; it's a way to guide the player through a visually interesting gameplay experience. Likewise, I think every game artist should give design a shot, to get a strong feel for how their assets will work in a more practical setting. It's this cross discipline training that I think helps to bring a team together, especially if everyone feels like their partners are taking the extra step to better understand their work.
I'm posting a few of my sketches for fun, and to let people who don't know what goes into making game see what some of the more crucial initial steps look like. Enjoy!
My last seven months or so have been spent developing content for Orion, an ambitious total conversion for HL2's Orange Box Engine. The mod itself is a fast-paced multiplayer game set on the fictional world of Orion, which is a fertile world that is reminiscent of an infant-earth. The multiple maps in the soon-to-be-released 1.2 patch will feature a number of locations across the planet; all of them a scene of the great conflict between the humans looking to Orion as a chance to escape their used-up, wasted planet earth, and the alien Altair who are similarly trying to escape a ruined home world.
The map I spent my time working on is called Catchment, and it takes place inside a water purification plant for one of the larger colonies on Orion. The Altair know that if they can disrupt or destroy this facility, they can effectively make refugees of dozens of thousands of humans and offset the human military's strategy in a major way.
The team spawns and flags are located at 3 and 9 o clock, and 12 and 6 o clock respectively. Each team has two routes out of their spawn: one main exit and one shortcut to their own flag which can be shut down via a clever keypad hack. Each flag room is accessible through two side entrances, or a shorter entrance that is only available to the assault class. A few pipes are placed higher up to let the assault class get a height advantage. There are choke points for support class defenders and more defensible positions for snipers to do their thing.
I hope you guys like it!
For fun I thought I'd try my hand at the Unreal Development Kit, a FAR, far superior editor to the Source SDK (sorry Valve, but it's true). The UDK comes loaded with a few textures and static meshes (models essentially) and a light version of Unreal Tournament 3 to test your creations with.
This was just a couple of days of effort last week and I have to say that I was blown away by what the editor was capable of doing:
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