Container city project

Hello! This week has been pretty stressful and yesterday's presentation didn't go as well as I expected. We pitched our project to the critical studies team and they struggled to see what we were trying to produce.

Our level it's still pretty rough and the fact that some of our ideas needed polishing made our project confusing.

We wanted to blend the modern day era with the tribal one by mixing objects that the native people living in our island might have found inside the ship. This seemed to confuse every single teacher and the CS team was no exception.

I feel we should just stick to tribal theme and use the containers as infrastructure but it's a group project after all...

This is the structure of our level. The idea is that the player would start at the lower room and make his/her way up to the surface.

The first room is the dungeon, dark and hostile. As the player progresses, light will start to peek into the cave through the ceiling until the player reaches the end. There are are 4 rooms plus the Altar room, therefore we decided to do one room each and work on the altar together.

I chose to concept the guard chamber and after a few attempts I had the look for the room. As we were concepting, Callum and Johannes spent some time figuring out particle effects and interactions in unreal.

 We keep track of our work in this excel document via Google drive. We also have a Facebook group were we post our progress and give each other feedback.

My work this week has been to create assets:

I made two sets of stairs for our level mixing primitive stone stairs with boxes from the containers to make that link between the natives and the ship wreckage. They were all separate objects put together and unwrapping took me a lot of hours to finish but I am happy it's done.

Our level has got a lot of sand, specially on the lower levels, with that in mind I did a sand floor in Zbrush for the dungeon area which I think I have to tweak because it's too thick.

I have also been doing some organic bits like tree roots and vines that will creep through the ceiling. And today I modelled and unrwapped the assets on the guard's room. I was true to my concept apart from one or two things that I added as I went along.

And this was our level just before yesterday's presentation. The main worry the teachers had, is that we made it very organic and the point of using containers was to map out the structure of our levels very quickly so we would spend most of our time creating the assets inside the containers.

I feel confident we can make a really good level as long as everyone works hard and we get things done moderately quickly.

So far I have been getting along quite well with my group mates, the down side is that we don't communicate as much I'd like to and it's hard to make decisions together. Sometimes I have to repeat my point a few times for them to get it.  They are very nice to work with though, which makes me less stressed about this whole project.

See you soon!


Carla.