RPP 4 Level Design

 

I've been working on a beach island for my next RPP game. The story follows a marine biology student who visits a coastal lighthouse to complete their senior project and collect marine life samples. The lighthouse keeper is missing when they arrive, and there are documents detailing dangerous oceanic monsters as well as a harpoon gun. The player takes up the gun to defeat the monsters in the keeper's absence. 

This level is meant to portray a brief narrative. It's short, and loops onto itself. 


Using the landscape tool is always fun, though my least favorite part is setting up a terrain material, especially making it NOT tile painfully. Yikes!



This level is going to need a TON of decorations to make it feel livable. I'm hoping to find most of those in an asset pack. 

An oddly common challenge in adventure games of all kinds is making caves. Landscape editors all unanimously use heightmaps to shape out landscapes, which inherently can't make anything with a roof. This is a problem in every engine, and all the solutions are usually pretty hacky. Using some sort of a static mesh is one of way to do it. That's what I did, and honestly, it's pretty lame. Gonna need those props I mentioned in the above paragraph to make it look less like a god damn sphere I extruded via normals. The texturing sucks too. Ouch! 

Overall though I'm not too unhappy with the look. The water does a lot of the heavy lifting, and I need to figure out lighting for real, but it could be worse! Ali's lighthouse proxy looks awesome too, as a silhouette. 






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