How do you have the best level design and game environment art year?
I used to set vague goals, work on a couple of projects per year that I didn't finish; I didn't work on level design and game environment art consistently and deliberately enough to make a difference. I didn't set projects that supported my level design goals, I never created working lists, I worked on multiple projects at a time, I didn't plan out my work, I took too many days off and did not push myself.
Because of that I was stuck at the same skill level for a long time. Actually, I thought I was getting worse.
In this blog post I will share what has been working for me and what I would recommend you do to get better at level design and game environment art.
I sat down to write a fairly short article, but in the end I could not stop adding more information. The following article ended up being 3,000+ words. So grab your favorite drink and lets dive in on how you can have the best level design and game environment year!
How to plan your game environments and level designs?
In the last article we talked about why I failed for years in level design and game environments. I focused on one part of the process. The planning stage.
In this tutorial we will cover planning workflow. Where do you start? What do you do?
Looking back over last decade it is easy for me to see what I did wrong and what I could have done better in learning level design and game environments. It is easy for me to say what I could have avoided and where I should have focused my time on.
The mistakes and failures I went through were extremely valuable, even though during such moments it seemed I wasn't going to pull through. In the end, most if not all experiences were extremely valuable and I wouldn't give them up.
But, I do wish someone could have told me a few things to make level design and game environment art creation a simpler process to go through. Certain principles to keep in mind and goals to aim for. So I didn't have to re-invent the wheel. It would have helped me to avoid my first few years starting a project after project and never finishing a single one.
We continue with CryEngine 3 SDK tutorials. If you are just starting to learn and use CryEngine 3 SDK, start here.
When blocking in terrain you will often find yourself wanting to re-arrange and move certain sections of terrain to another location without having to modify it from scratch. There is a useful function called Move Area tool that allows you to do just that.
In this tutorial we cover how to move sections of your terrain to another location.
When I started working with CryEngine it was difficult to gauge scale and proportions of the world. CryEngine can build large landscapes, you have to be able to judge world scale and how far terrain and objects are from each other. Here are 6 ways to keep your maps in CryEngine 3 SDK to proper scale and proportions.
In this tutorial we cover how to keep your world to scale.
10 Year Old Brother Game Environment Challenge is over. The challenge was started by WoLD member Robert aka BasketQase. I want to thank Robert for coming up with the idea and 1111mediaworks.com for t-shirts to top 3 entries.
This challenge was fun to watch. It was interesting to see how story defined the perception of the environment and the variety of environments created from the same theme. In the end we had seven final entries and 3 top winners as chosen by Rob's brother and his friends.
Below are top 3 entries with kid's reactions and the rest of the final work submitted.
Thank you to everyone who participated and hope to see you in the next challenge.
We continue with CryEngine 3 SDK tutorials. If you are just starting to learn and use CryEngine 3 SDK, start here.
In this tutorial we cover how to navigate around CryEngine, interface functions to get started and viewport configurations. After this tutorial you'll be ready to start creating your first map. Which what we will do in the next tutorial.
In this series of tutorials we begin to cover CryEngine 3 SDK. If you wanted to learn CryEngine 3 SDK, this is the time to do it.
We will cover everything you need to know to get started with CryEngine 3 SDK so you can begin creating beautiful, realistic environments with one of the industries top game engines.
Lets begin.
In this first tutorial we cover how to download, install and launch CryEngine 3 SDK.
Topics covered:
Download
Install
Launching the editor and the game
Changing the game screen resolution
Loading the example map, forest.cry in game and in the level editor
