Week 15, Year 2 A new year and a new project

So I had a very nice Christmas break. I got my first real job working as a salad chief in a harvester. It was funny but killed my legs and back but I’m very happy to be back now and I’m already looking forward to the next project, the “Container City Project” and I’m looking forward to it because we have to do level design, which is something I have been looking forward to doing.

So this is another group project what I’m happy with because we only have 4 weeks to do this and I feel like when working in a group, the end result comes out a lot better what makes everyone happy. So the first thing we had to think of is if we were going to do a SI-FI level or a dystopian level. As a group we all felt like doing a dystopian level more than a SI-FI level just because we fell like we can get more creative with it. After that we came up with a plan on how the level would play out and what the player had to do because the level need to have some iterative parts.

Once we knew what need to be in the level, we all make 3 floor plans each from a top down view and from there we showed them to each other and then pick the best 1 out of the 3 so there were 4, one for each person and then that person would whitebox of the level in 3DS max. This part went really well because one of my team members had set up a 3DS max file that made it really easy to block out the floor plan. So he sent it to all of us so we could do it all the same way.

Once that was done we had to think about a theme. We already knew we were going to have a dystopian theme but we wanted to add more to it, so we all came up with different themes that could fit in and made a mindmap out of it from there we pick out the once we like best and gave 2 ideas to one person each this way we would come up with 8 different themes.

I had pick mines and caves because I think that they could work well, seeing how we going to have most of the level underground and think there would be good ways to add the containers in there as well and the caves could help with the mines idea as well there would need to be tunnels and broken rocks. We all decide to make one moodboard each for are themes but when I was making the moodboard for the caves I came across something that was really amazing.

In Mexico there are some caves there with crystals in them but not your normal crystals once bigger than humans and this is not some small little cave it’s very big. If you want to find out more I have left a link that you can follow to find out more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Crystals

So looking at these crystal caves just gave me some great ideas with what we could do because we want it so that the power is off and all you have is a flash light but looking at this crystals gave me the idea that maybe the crystals could be glowing and this could be a good way to show the player were to go.

So once all the moodboards were done we all meet up and talk about what we like with each idea. We really like the temple theme. So I started to concept some ideas by photo bash images together.

I’m really happy about this project and can’t wait to get more into it. I think my group have some really good ideas and can’t wait to see with what we come up with.