Programmer To Level Designer
- frozenwispstudios
- Oct 24, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 26, 2019
Why even bother making your game look pretty? Because a white blocks dont cut it.
Paper To Digital
Foundations need to be laid out. A world without a foundation is not a world at all but an asteroid flying aimlessly. In this scene I have create a set piece in this case a dead titan with a river bed filled with flowers and plants and bamboo. The core of the rive lay out is complete and as well as a flat green plane to state how big of any area I am looking to build.
Inner Environment
Building the view/playable/interactable area. The Inner Environment is the next step to build this world and start to bring it to life. With the foundation is complete next up is detail adding trees, bushes, rocks, waterfall and all the extras to make the look and play great. step by step adding small things to fill the core inner environment this is still not the time to add props only environment pieces.
Outer Environment
This component of an Outer Environment is hard to really show of in this scene its more so for when you are in game. Making sure the illusion of a faraway land exists but isn’t fully render is key to immersion in this small piece of the world you have built for the player. In this case lots of rocks to cover the empty void and having snow mountains scaled up in the distance. This hides the emptiest of a level while also making it so it feels like there is more out there then there really is.
Effects
In order to bring the world to life you will need to utilize some of games greatest powers of beauty. Post processing, particles, shaders and lighting. With these combine your world building skills will flourish. Starting with Post Processing this can provide a lot of different things that bring the world to life weather that be bloom, Anti-aliasing, colour grading and a lot more. Next is particles a small sprinkle here and there just for environmental flare can make the world spark with life in the case of this gif you see purple leaves and fireflies. shaders create a well of life with the waterfall and water its self. Lighting is never to be under estimated with the only real lighting in this night time scene being the trees a regret that I would like to change.
Summary
Build a foundation on paper know what you want to build before you build it spending hours placing thing experimenting is costly when it comes to your time. Then take that paper and build the basics in your game engine have a centre piece/set piece as the build around/ the object you intend to build around in this case a titan. After that clean it up build around it create an environment and begin to test it with the player or on the players view this way you can patch holes or things you don’t want the player to see. The world now looks great but looking away from it into the void needs to be changed make sure you use scale to fix this and scale up rocks or hills. this way when you look off into the outer world your player feels like there is more out there then what there really is. now for polish with effects in all my screen shots i had post processing on mean things like bloom, Anti-aliasing already made the scene/mood from the beginning. However other things like particles and lighting come last particles do so much to the environment and are my personal favourite but be careful sometimes less is more. Lighting is something you can spend hours on, and I always do this last when the level is complete. All in all, layer your work and try to move to the next layer only when you are truly happy with your current one.
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