Now that we’ve recovered from PAX we wanted to go in depth into our development process, what we’ve been up to, and what’s coming up from Faffinabout, the From Light team.

First, let’s go into our development process.
We start by talking about what we want the location for a level to be, for the first level we want it to be the same place as the demo: a grand canyon-esque space port with a visitor’s center. In the demo all these sections are quite small and the canton is more like a busted bridge. We really wanted to expand on these on the first level so that was our setting.

Once we decide on what the place is supposed to be, we setup a meeting where we outline what the structure of the level should look like. Here’s what we came up with in those meetings for our red level:

These were a bit messy and hard to understand almost immediately after the meeting, so we cleaned them up a bit to have a stronger layout on which to base ourselves off of. Here’s what that looks like:

Once that’s done we go in the level and graybox it out. Here’s what it looks like for red level, you should be able to see the resemblance:

After that we begin doing some ground texturing and early population. Here the level starts to look like a place, although it needs continuous work and tweaking to make it feel like a place. Here’s how that looks like:

Then as we continue populating we begin getting into specific rooms and what we want them to be, tweaking them. For example here’s what we did for a movie theater

and a diner

As we continue going slowly, but surely the world comes alive. And we end with something like this:

Keep in mind, this is not yet completely done, but it is getting close. It’s where we’re at now. We’ll be sure to post a picture of it when we’re done with it :)

Aside from this, we’ve been working on our Faffinabout website! We wanted to get it up and running by our talk at PAX, but ran into trouble with our webhost. We’re told it’ll get resolved sometime this week, we’ll make sure to post once it’s up so you can check it out. It’s looking awesome! Here’s a screenshot of the homepage so you guys can take a look:

Is there a particular part of our development process that you would like us to focus on? Something you’d like to know how we do? Let us know!