TowerJam 002 Designing the tower and surrounding world
2016-01-18
I started by designing the world around the tower because in my head I wanted the start of the game to involve the player approaching the tower in a fashion that shows how vast the tower is. To do this I have the player start a few kilometers away from the tower with the tower in view.
The world design involves the player starting in a small mountain peak town with the tower in a distant view. This is used as a beacon much like the north star to guide the player. The world will be designed to also guide the player and blocking geometry will be used where appropriate.
Here are the first two sketches I made to get a rough outline of the world :
Quick design of the tower splitting it up into its major sections.
Topdown view of the world (tower is in the center top)
Side view approaching tower :
After drawing this I began blocking out the world in the Unreal editor to quickly establish the scale and world size. Important to get that right as early as possible to reduce the pain of fixing scale issues later. As I worked onthe layout the world design began to change relative to my sketches. There’s many reasons this happens. One of the main reasons is that once I have something in 3D I can frame the world using the game camera in different ways and see issues I couldn’t see when only desgining on paper.
I will most likely go back and redraw the world overhead view again to reflect the new world. At that point I wouldn’t be surprised if the design changes again when I got back to taking a big picture view of the level. This kind of iterative and destructive design I find immensely helpful early in the project. This is the point where throwing out things that don’t work is the cheapest to correct so it’s important to make as many mistakes as possible.
Here is an in-editor screenshot of the world at the point this blog was written.
Finally I think many blog posts for this game jam will have a cliche shot of the player standing with the tower in the background
Tags:
unreal4
tower jam
TowerJam 001 The beginning
2016-01-16
As I mentioned in the http://levelism.com/2016-time-to-wake-up/ I’ve been itching to do some kind of personal game development lately but have not had the time as work, life and every other excuse has been taking up a lot of my time. I’m trying to find time to focus on personal projects because I could spend my whole life telling myself I don’t have the time to focus on my own work.
With that in mind I went tohttp://www.indiegamejams.com/ to see what the current jams were and I saw a jam called “Tower Jam” which caught my attention. I have a deep affection for games that focus on a intricate unfolding environment. Often referred to as metroidvanias. I thought the tower jam might be a chance to do so.
My scope is ridiculous for the time I have but I’m going to try anyways. I’m essentially planning to make a game that’s a love letter to these environment focused games. I’ve been doing a second run in the PS4 version of Dark Souls 2 recently so I’m sure some of that will bleed into my design.
I will be using the Unreal 4 engine as I’ve been toying with it for the past year and have been VERY impressed with it. I think it’s probably one of the cleanest, best designed engines I’ve ever used. I figure even if I fail to produce for the tower jam I’ll at least have the benefit of having more time with the Unreal engine.
I’ll post whenever I have something to show. It will be pretty off the cuff and unrefined because I want to spend most of my time working on the game rather than blogging. I’m actually only writing this post because I’m waiting for unreal to update and I’ve already read the necessary docs I need to get started.
Here’s a screenshot of the default unreal character standing in front of a block tower without much implemented
Tags:
unreal4
tower jam
Screenshot from my current Unreal 4 project
2015-10-17
This is a screenshot from my current project with the unreal engine. This isn’t exactly intentional but I do like it and might try to find a way to keep it
Tags:
unreal4