Dark Souls III Level - Finishing Touches

My whole level has gone through multiple detail passes, and nearly the whole level is functional. All that is left to do is script the different endings to my level, add some negative space to the inner city to improve gameplay, decorate outside the play space, add more colors to the Hollow Village, and record and implement my NPC voice lines.

This stretch of work has been extremely rewarding for me as everything is really starting to come together. That being said, what I have left will still take a lot of time. I also have to create my updated map, create my level webpage, and if I have time, create a page for my souls-like gameplay pack that I scripted.

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Everent - Continued Blockout and worked on Sky Boxes

I've started to blockout more of Aeribus, a level for my capstone game Everent. I've developed the first sub-island of the level significantly more. I created multiple factories and added a way for the player to destroy the spire in the level. I've also started creating the second sub-island for this level as well, although I don't have gameplay laid out for it yet. 

A major hurdle during this blockout has been balancing the logic of the level and the gameplay of the level, as these two things almost counteract each other. So far I have focused more on logicality, but in the future I'm going to focus more on gameplay, as that is my lead recommends.

Additionally, I am responsible for the sky boxes of two of the three levels for Everent, those being Aeribus and Ventis. The asset pack I used to create the skies was very new to me, so I spent a lot of time just learning how it works. There were actually many points where I thought customizing a certain aspect of it wasn't possible with this pack until I spent more time with it and realized that I could. Working through this has made me much more comfortable working with unfamiliar asset packs as I am now more familiar with modifying them. Overall, the rest of my capstone team and I are extremely happy with how they came out, and I had a lot of fun learning how to overcome this challenge.

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Ventis Images: 

 

Dark Souls III Level - Started 2nd Pass

I have just started the 2nd pass of my Dark Souls III level. This entails giving the blockout much more detail. I'm about half way done with the first half of the hollow village. So far, I have a made a few modular shacks that I've been placing in and around the critical path. I'm extremely happy with how it's turning out, as I thought making it look as good as it does would be significantly harder. I also replaced a cylinder that was used a statue placeholder with a character model.

An issue I am having though is that placing these shacks to look good is actually extremely time consuming, I've spent many many hours on it already, and I still have a lot to do, although I'm very confident I can get it done within the next week. 

My next steps are finishing the hollow village second pass by replacing the placeholder cubes with their appropriate meshes. After that, I'm going to do the same with the inner-city section of Londor. Those buildings will have gothic-style architecture. After that, I'm going to spend a lot of time scripting and blocking out the side-quest in my level. Once all of that is done, I'm going to really start the gameplay iteration process.

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Everent - Aeribus Early Blockout

I just started the blockout for the 2nd level in my capstone game, Everent. This level is called Aeribus, and it is the 2nd island of Stratos, which is a civilization consisting of three floating islands. Aeribus consists of four fractured sub-islands, and it is the manufacturing center of Stratos. The manufacturing district of Aeribus is located where the four fractured islands are closest, and the rest of each island is filled with high-density residential housing. Another notable aspect of this island is that rails are everywhere. Rails let the player rail grind to quickly navigate the area. In my blockout, these are represented by white pipes.

The residential areas of Aeribus are inspired by Birmingham, England and 1920s New York City apartments. While the factories in the blockout right now are just placeholders, the final factories will be inspired by the Battersea Power Station in England.

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