Blog week four: The battleground
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Hello and welcome! So, the beta deadline for our space shooter game is just a few days away. The team is scrambling to get everything into the game. We have been a bit too ambitious and overestimated our abilites quite severely. We realized there was absolutely no way we would get everything done in time. As a result, the last few weeks has consisted of cutting things from the game. This includes enemies, levels and several planned engine features ( parallax scrolling, dynamic lighting and probably some more things I can’t remember at the moment). So this week I have been working on a very simple level design together with Simon on our team. Instead of a large, multi pathed level with a boss at the end as was originally planned, we needed to simplify a lot. We decided to make an arena type level, with enemies coming in waves instead of the player coming across them as they make their way through the remains of Stockholm. Sergels torg was featured in the original concept document as the setting for the final battle against a super mutant, so this is the location we chose. For simplicity’s sake (and to quickly get a level in game), we decided to only include Sergels torg itself, with both staircases and the ramp blocked off. We also wanted to include some objects to give some clues as to what has happened up until now. This is the basic design completed, on paper:  Going digitalWorking with this drawing and some reference pictures easily found by googling, I started blocking out the main elements in Photoshop. I tried to work on all the parts simultaneously, so that the level of detail would be roughly equal throughout the process. This way, whenever the parts had to be sent to the programmers, they were of equal quality.  At this point the level is made up of six parts:
For the final version of the game, as much as possible of the graphics will be tiled to reduce the workload of the computer. The next step was to flesh out the environment somewhat. I used a one point perspective to add a little depth. I did not actually use a vanishing point so it is not very correct. It still works though, because the player can only see a small portion of the level at any given moment.  Next, I added objects such as concrete blocks, two crashed cars and some military tents to help set the scene, and to block off the playable area.  From this point on it was pretty much just polish and detail work. Some more objects were needed though, to make the setting a bit more interesting. I made some metal crates and bodybags. I also finished up the tents. Textures and dirt were added to the big areas to the top, left and right. The floor tiles were darkened slightly to fit with the rest of the graphics. I will add some dirt to the bottom area as well.  All in all, this took around ten hours of work, and with ten more it will look pretty good! DifficultiesDoing a mockup of this size is not easy. At 11200 pixels wide and 7800 pixels high it takes quite a while to load (700mb!), and it tends to slow Photoshop down quite a bit. This particular level is pretty small though, and to be able to see it all at once is helpful. I will cut the large pieces into much smaller tiles eventually and that might help photoshop perform better. I will point out that we have not been able to playtest any level designs, so the layout of tents, crates and barriers may change for the final version to make for better gameplay. Thanks for stopping by. Over and out!  |