Wednesday 27 April 2011

Task 11: Elements of game design, part four: environment

As you can tell from the title this week’s blog task is to talk about the environments in games. To start getting a working environment you need an idea now this idea needs to be well thought out and the best ideas are based on real life. You will need good visual reference i.e. photographs or videos and good sketches so you can visualize the overall level normally you would draw a lot of different designs from all angles.
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You would then draw a floor plan for each level on the map depending if you game has multiple levels. Floor plans can help you decide where players will go through the level or how the map will be played. The floor plans can then be taken into engine and a white box can be created, this white box will allow you to scale and build your level in 3d so you can run around the map so you can see if it works. A white box should be a very simple overall design so you can iron out any problems that may occur when you play the map.
After this you should add terrain and a sky if your map is open and also add basic lighting so you can see the overall atmosphere of the map. The next step is to create basic textures and apply them to your white box so it gets rid of the flag texture, so it is then easier to take away parts of the map that will be static meshes. Adding objects is next and will always want to start working from big to small and you want don’t want to focus on a small part of the map the whole map needs love. You would then go into the texturing phases and then finally you would tweak the lights and start making them a bit more complex.
I’m saving my money for a game called brink it looks to be a really good game and his heavily stylised it is getting compared to team fortress 2. I believe as long as you don’t go wild on stylisation, you keep everything consistent and always reference things from real life the player should not loose belief in the game world. Brinks environments are really well made and look amazing they have got the atmosphere just right and looks just like their early concept art. An area called container city looks just like the slums in Brazil and India lots of corrugated metal all rusted and decaying there are areas with neon signs quite like blade runner but the lights could have been influenced from other cities i.e. Japan. Brink has a key feature in its game called the smart system "Smart Movement Across Random Terrain" this allows players to run, jump and strafe across the environment to get a better view point on other players and the maps. This means all the environment has specific collision boxes and each object has been placed in the environment with thought and precision.

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