I’ve been putting together a short game about exploring a house and collecting keys. I’ll have more to say about it later. For now, here are some screenshots.
Category Level Design
Textures and Lighting
Remember a few posts back when I showed two shelled layouts and said they would be best left at that stage? Well, right now I’m working on the textures and lighting for the DM map. (Thank / blame Jos.)
A little darker and it might feel like a Thief 3 level.
The palette I’m sticking with.
At least while I build these levels for UT3’s small community I have other projects in development too.
Reset
The Singularity reached something of a landmark this week. I’ve recorded myself as a placeholder for the narration, and I’ve addressed the issues discovered in the playtest. With that momentarily aside, I’ve been exploring other ideas.
Foremost among those ideas is Reset, which I began two days ago as an exploration in eastern european level design and atmosphere. The result so far is pictured above. It’s diverged from that inspiration, taking on the gameplay of system-exploration puzzles, but I think there’s still some similarity in the tone, particularly in motion.
All the remaining work is some audio, maybe more visuals (pillar trims?), a basic UI, and then packaging it. I’m hoping to finish—or at least reach content completion—in time to participate in 7dfps. That’s the plan, anyway.
Two Unreal Designs
A few days ago several design ideas came in close succession and I proceeded to draw them. Two of these are distinctly Unreal Tournament designs; there’s no other use I can imagine for them. I feel, however, I’ve stopped benefiting and learning from multiplayer design in Unreal. As much as I want to, designing more levels would be accepting stagnation. Even DM-Galsteen was pushing it.
All the same, there is benefit in practicing the transition from 2d sketches to 3d layouts. The first level, the capture the flag map pictured above, translated almost perfectly. The main difficulty was in the flag bases, which originally felt too exposed on top and too crowded below.
The second level, the death match map pictured above, encountered more difficulty. My first drawing was a one inch square, so I redrew the two wings on a larger scale without minding the middle space. While replicating it in engine, aligning the wings to create an interesting middle was the main obstacle, and my original sketch for the middle area was ignored.
I don’t know if I’ll finish either of these levels, but I guess they’re something for me to work on when I feel blocked in my other projects.
A New UT3 Level?
This morning I sketched a floorplan for a one-on-one unreal tournament level. One of my goals with the level is to make a visually interesting unlit level. With today’s results, I think it will be possible, but there’s quite a bit of detail work left to do.
UPDATE: I added lighting and released the level as DM-Galsteen. There are new screenshots of it on my portfolio.
Andrew Yoder 