New blog editor here! My name is Christopher and I’m a game designer. In previous school projects I’ve worked with many aspects of game development. This includes scripting, programming, UI design, character design/animation and level design. For this project I will solely focus on level design as that is what I want to work with after my education is finished.

So what’s going on with the level design for this project? (Her name is Luna) Well, together with Emanuel, our lead designer, we have come some steps forward in the design development. We agreed on having the game-style in low poly. As you’ve probably read in the early posts, the world in “Her name is Luna” contains forest areas, parks and modern towns. Finding assets in Unity that coalesce in all our wanted environments will not work well. There are many low poly packages, but mixing packages together means having some assets more or less low poly than other assets. We want everything fused in one single style, who doesn’t? Now, our group consists of two programmers, two level designers and one character designer/VFX artist. I have had some experience with modeling in previous projects. It made sense me being the one creating 3d assets. Below are some pics of assets I have made for the park area (all modeled and textured in Maya).

All models basically have the same base topology. The axis of cylindrical assets have eight subdivisions. Spheres also have eight subdivisions for the axis and 6 subs for height. So the topology is uniform, the next step to making the assets fit is texturing. I’d love to have all assets textured in a “cartoonish” style. Unfortunately, time for this project is short so I won’t have too much Photoshop-time. Therefore I will keep the texturing simple. The models will have one to maybe three colors. Most of the colors comes from the materials inherited directly from the modeling software. In the next level, for example, there are ruins. These old structures will have their single materials textured with a few colors making up cracks in stones and moss.

The base of the first level is now finished. Emanuel, our designer in command, has made the overall layout and has yet to fix lighting etc. I’m currently working on level 2 that takes place in a forest environment. So far the area only have heights making the way where the player can/cannot go and a river. Compared to the park area which basically just a square area, the forest is much more asymmetrical. As the park is an introduction to the game where the player learns basic movement and mechanics, the players will feel that the forest allow for some exploration. The area, according to the backstory, has a little farm, old ruins, a river with a crossing bridge and not least different vegetation. This means models need to be created accordingly. When I have made those, I will fit them together with my terrain. I have some thoughts about getting the terrain fit the assets. I can form the terrain in the game engine and script it to be low poly after it is done. Or, I can make the terrain with a height-map in Maya or Houdini, triangulate the plane and make it look low poly there. It will be faster, but I’m not sure I will have the option to change the terrain in Unity, or even texture it. We’ll see..

Update coming soon!