Week 15: Welcome to 2015!

Catching-Up

First of all I'd like to start by wishing everyone a happy new year at this point. Hope you all made it well into 2015 and are looking forward to another exciting 12 months. The Christmas holidays (which covered week 12,13 and 14) are over and we are back at work with a new project: Container City!

Group Work

Just like our first real project (The Film Room Project), our new project is a group project; and just like with our first group project we were first assigned to find ourselves within groups of 4. Not again... Why can't they just assign us groups?! Guess I'll just have to keep hoping. Luckily this time I quickly got a group together and I am quite happy with my group members as well. Enough of the whole group talk, let's get into more details on the project itself!

Drafting Floor Plans

The Container City Project is an environment project in which we design and create a playable level, which is made out of containers. Whether indoors or outdoors is completely up to us and we have been granted a lot of freedom. When we first sat together as a group we weren't quite sure how to approach this project so we started off by brainstorming a couple of interesting elements that we wanted our level to have. Since the brief stated that we had to have at least 1 interactive element in our level, we quickly came up with the idea of having the player taking an elevator to finish the level. However, the elevator was to be out of power and thus the player would first need to turn on a generator, which would be found inside a locked room. To open said room the player would need a key, which it would get by climbing through a slightly hidden vent into another locked room.

We then drafted a quick floor plan and decided that we should all do a couple of floor plans each. So I sat down and created 3 floor plans myself. I was careful to stick to the original container dimensions so that my floor plans would all be up to scale:

Plan 1

Plan 2

Plan 3

After each of us had created their floor plans we sat together and chose 1 floor plan from each person that we then had to create a basic block out of in 3D. To do this I sat down and created a set of building blocks which used the shipping container measurements that we had been provided with. When we then sat down to review those block outs, I had an idea of merging 2 of my other team members block outs together, with which the rest of my group agreed with:

Final Floor Plan

Having finished the floor plans I then took up the role of creating the final floor plan as a basic block out in 3D, which was easy since I used my team members' block outs as a base to work from.

Themes?

We then had one major problem left and that was deciding on a theme for our level. No playable level is appealing if it's made out of bland blocks, so we decided to brainstorm some ideas. We decided early on that our level was going to be underground, so we thought of possible things you could have underground. Like prisons, vaults, temples, etc. We then assigned a couple of those themes each between us and created moodboards. I had been assigned with "Prison" and "Laboratory" and soon went to research some pictures for my moodboards.

Laboratory Moodboard

Prison Moodboard

We then fed back on each others' moodboards and soon decided to make our theme an "excavation site based inside a temple that was discovered in a series of crystal caves."

Concepting!

The next step was to start coming up with some concepts. To do this we decided to use screenshots from our block out and sketch/photobash over them. We quickly discovered a problem however: How were we going to stick to our theme, but at the same time make the whole level out of containers?

So this is the stage we are currently stuck at and we are having another talk with the tutors tomorrow to see how we can resolve/work around this issue. I will update this blog next week and hopefully be able to show off some concepts so stay tuned~