Hello there! Christopher here again. It’s time for an update on the game design since my last post. For this post I want to go over the design progress for the second level called “Wood Area” and also some late added assets for the first level I wrote about last time.

Regarding the “level part” in our project; a week ago we didn’t have much of..well, anything. No environment to try out character movement, for example. Now we have our first two levels pretty much finished. Emanuel, who has been working with the Park, always finds something more that could be added to complete the setting of a real park. So I have assisted him in doing some 3D-models while also working on my level. And I am just the same when it comes to being happy with the result. I always find something that can be improved, when I should just let the end result be what it is and spend the little time left on other things. So to make a short story shorter, I have spent too much time on being unhappy with 3D-models that was “good enough” from the beginning. I should have focused a little bit more on making the terrain for our second level look low poly. The “Wood Area” right now, has the assets it needs, but I would like to have the terrain not looking so “real” compared to the rest of the assets. Anyway, I’m almost happy with the result. I could get away with just adding some textures that have fewer colors, maybe. The level is also supposed to play out in night-time. With low light intensity, the ground textures really don’t bother me, at all. Here are som pics.

For some time I wanted to start learning Substance Painter. It’s a software many artists use for painting on objects. Basically, you can import a model from maya, with or without UV-map(without means you have to trust Substance Painter to do it automatically, which it handles pretty well).
So I used Substance Painter for the tower. Very simple stuff. Just gave the tower a material with low tiling. Then I painted the green color using a mask, with a particle brush, making out the green vines.

As told in my last post, I had to decide whether to use Unity’s terrain tools or not. I tried, and the images above shows the result. I feel like there’s too few heights in this terrain to add a script making the terrain low poly. I’ll at least try different textures first.

Most of my new models are shown in the pictures. There’s the tower, some stones, some trees…The house and the grass I stole from Unity’s asset store. I decided they fit pretty well. I have yet to ask my fellow co-developers. Almost forgot the two models we’ve added to the park area; a street light and a newspaper box.

The newspaper texture look a bit too real, but from the angle we’ll use in-game, it is not gonna be a problem. The glass part of the street light has a weird angle making it look like it’s not attached to the rest of the model. Easy fix.

Still lots to do. The woods need to have prints in the grass. In the game story, Luna has made a trail with her snake body for the player to follow. We need a bridge crossing the river, low poly waves…but these are Christmas times. I’m going home to the family and will start working again Monday. Update coming soon!