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Rooftop Run

olirant
Oct 15, 2015
3 min read

It's the second week of my New York rooftop project. I think it's going pretty well, but there's still a lot to do, of course. At the end of the first week I was suggested to look into turning my singular rooftop into a series of multiple. After all this project is meant to be about designing a level for a Third-Person shooter game, and what I had before was less of a level and more of a tiny arena.

On Monday I had absolutely no idea what I would do. These realistic projects are hard for me, as you really have to research and think about what you create. When looking into real museums, as I still want to run with the idea of a museum heist, I saw some really interesting shapes and with some help managed to get a simple idea.

One of the things I like most about this idea is how you can see the museum glowing from the start of the level. I like to think about these projects like real game levels, and being able to see the museum's lights from afar gives it this allure, and gives the player a reason to go there.

Right now all of the buildings are very rough shapes. This is how I prefer to work, making very simple assets at first and then rebuilding them later on in the project if I have time. This way I dont get caught out by having an unfinished asset at the end of the project which ruins everything.

This week has also been a week where the Game Art Gods have frowned on me, and a lot of the technical side of things have just completely failed for me.

This sunroof was the centerpeice of my idea for this project, so of coruse it had to be the most difficult thing. Due to multiple different issues, most of which honestly my fault, I had to spend at least a day on this one asset.

It reached the point where I just had to shelf it and come back to it later, which did actually work and now the sunroof asset works as I intended it. Texturing and unwrapping the thing was most difficult. It's still not strictly finished, I would really love to have the glass of the asset actually look realistic when the project is fully finished but that seems to be a more difficult task than I thought.

I've also had several smaller issues, which always seem to occur, like these assets exploding out of nowhere.

So now my project is in a good place, I think. I've been constructing a lot of smaller assets to populate the environment and make it feel slightly more real. I've even been starting to build a cityscape around the level using some emmisive lighting. I'm slightly worried about how real all of this will look, but honestly I just have to try my best and see what works.

So moving into the next week I still have a lot to do. I want to finish another group of assets, and that will almost completely fill my teture budget. After that I will be spending some tme populating the level properly. Then making the lighting look better than it does now. I like the fog effect I've used but the rest of the lighting needs work, to make an interesting but believable night time scene. But despite the work I have to do, I think I'm in a good place over all. I'm honestly excited to finish this project and move onto the more stylised projects though in all honesty.