Greyboxing

This week my task was to rebuild the current "mood" graybox in the game so that it was more functional for player testing and ready to have art assets placed into it. The reason we needed to replace the current Greybox in favour of a new one was because the current one made traversal difficult for players due to the uneven surfaces and random placement of geometry. To properly playtest the level design we need a level that can be played smoothly.

ProBuilder

To actually recreate a simplified version of the original Greybox I decided it would be beneficial to use ProBuilder to build the level within Unity. ProBuilder is essentially BSP that allows the user to freely construct geometry within Unity instead of having to use a modelling package such as Maya to create a level blockout. The advantage of using ProBuilder is that it has built in UV mapping tools that allow for the addition of textures. This means that when dressing the level we can use parts of the Graybox in the final iteration of the game as they can be textured within the engine.

Level Design Modifications

In addition to remodelling the geometry of the level to be more in line with a good user testing experience, some areas of the map were changed so that they allowed more flow for player movement. It should also be noted that the yellow objects in the screenshot are actually jump pads, which were present in a very early iteration of Deus Vault but were removed in later builds. I thought bringing them back was a good idea as even though players have quite pronounced jumping abilities the addition of jump pads in areas that are difficult to reach by jumping can speed up the general gameplay.

Texture Experimentation

A key aspect of the final iteration of Deus Vault is going to be PBR textures on all of the objects within the scene and are going to make of break how the game looks. I thought it best to do some experiments now to decide on the best way to tackle texturing everything. I started out doing some simple objects like the walls pictured below, as they have a very basic UV unwrap. I feel they turned out quite nicely and im convinced that using smaller sections like these walls to dress some of the level is a good idea as using one texture for multiple objects cuts down on the draw calls within unity, especially if we decide to use 4K textures.

Texturing smaller objects seemed to work quite well, as they maintained their texture fidelity and detail and had no visible stretching. This wasn't the case for some of the larger objects that I tried however. Since some of the other objects are not as easy to unwrap as these wall sections it was harder to get the textures to look correct on them.

The solution I have decided on is to use a combination of custom assets and tiling textures mapped to some of the ProBuilder objects in Unity. This works to both cut down on draw calls and prevent texture distortion. The drawback of this method is that some of the areas that use tiling textures may look somewhat repetitive. This is where clever environment design is going to come into play. By using a combination of custom detail assets to cover seams and repetitive areas and another Unity Plugin called Polybrush, we should be able to make these areas look like they are unique.

Personal Reflection

I underwent a lot of iteration and experimentation this week while trying to decide on the best way to address a few of the environment art concerns we were having, and finally believe I've settled on a good solution. In addition the new Greybox is much easier to playtest as many of the areas are more open and much smoother. I'm ready to begin the final stretch and put in all the art assets for Deus Vault.

List of completed tasks for this week:

• Rebuilt geometry and refined the flow of the existing Greybox
• Settled on solution for environment textures

-Tom Forwood