Progress

It's been just over a week since being given the group project and i think that on the whole it's going well. Thanks to some helpful advice i feel we are on track to getting this done hopefully on schedule. At the moment we have a complete white box of our level. Nothing too ambitious, just a modest portion of the queens building with a few extra breakaway walls and modifications to add interest. The white box plays well, even though it is just a base i enjoyed running around it.

Looking back at the previous years work we are undecided somewhat on the scale of the thing. Laura built a basic white box model off of the blueprints in 3ds max which i then used as reference to make the level in UDK and finishing off the level layout. However whilst we already scaled it up a bit to match the massive unreal characters we can't decide if the rooms are too small. I should mention that they are more or less the size they appear to be in the building itself. The question is, when creating a game level should strict real world room sizes be adhered to? We have considered upping the scale slightly so it doesn't seem so cramped but this can be done quite easily at any time so we'll see how it goes for now.

Personally i think that by having it to scale from the blueprints we wont be left with loads of unnecessary space without anything to fill it.

So far a good amount of the assets have been completed. There are tons to go yet, but for the first week we are off to a good start. We have tried to split the asset list in terms of smaller assets which might only take an hour to complete compared to larger assets such as the statue in the courtyard. We have also split up the work of creating the tileable textures between us. This is so that we can each focus on one and make it really good. I feel that if we get good tileable textures with convincing normal maps onto the BSP early on we wont feel as if we just need to cover up the horrible bland walls so much.

We had our first group meeting today in one of the syndicate rooms in the library which i felt was very useful. It was a good opportunity to make sure that we were all on the same page. As it happens i think all of our general visions for this level are relatively similar which has aided us in being able to just get on with making it.

Well that's all for now, hopefully by next week we might have some tiling textures on the white box and be starting to bring in the assets we are gradually accumulating.