Asset Creation (Continued)

My task on Deus Vault now is to continue creating and implementing the art assets that will make our game look and feel great to play, my favourite part of the game design pipeline! The first area that I moved onto after last week is the archways that connect the ruined Mill House to the the round tower on the outskirts of the map. I thoroughly enjoyed creating this area of the map as i essentially only had to make three new assets to build the entire area; The arcway, a pillar and trims. These objects were then duplicated to build what you see in the image below. This method of map creation is extremely efficient in a number of ways, firstly its less work for me (always good) and secondly its very optimized, as the GPU will only be making three draw calls as all the objects are using the same materials. The round tower on the end is actually using a tiling texture with the PBR blend shaders that I discussed earlier to make break up the tiling a little bit.

The second area I got stuck into was the main keep. Obviously much of the level is still very work in progress so it doesn't look all that pretty yet. I'm finding the main keep to actually be quite challenging. As I'm trying to optimize the game to the best of my abilities keeping keeping the material count low is essential. That means I can't create a unique texture for each piece of the castle, I have to utilise the tiling textures that I have. Breaking up the repetitive feel of the textures is going to be harder than some other areas of the map because the castle is so large. My plan is create lots of different trims and decorative assets that can be placed all over the castle therefore making it look less boring. All of that said, I used the same method of asset creation on the Aqueduct on the top of the keep to create what you see below, which i feel turned out quite well. Another point to note is the shattered bridge that joins the aqueduct area to the castle. This was a revision from the gameplay graybox after some testing. The entire team agreed that we much preferred forcing players to jump over a gap to the castle rather than simply walk, as we want them to use the mechanics that we've created.

The final areathat I began work on was the Town Square. I've been looking forward to this bit of the map as I get a lot of freedom to play with the architecture and shape the area according to my vision. As you can see archways are quite prevalent and are a common theme throughout the entire map. I decided create a few different variations of the arch trims that I have in order to spice things up. I've also started to incorporate whitewashed surfaces as many medieval buildings used this technique to beautify and/or seal interiors and exteriors. I've also started to really play with my materials applications in Blender so that my custom FBX models can use the same tiling textures as the rest of the level while maintaining their more complicated geometry. Although its hard to see I've actually added more ramps to the left most building so that players have an easier time moving around, this was because one of our team members implemented a slope helper script to the player prefab that allows it to move up inclines at the same speed of normal movement, making my job much easier!

Personal Reflection

I had a good week this week, making plenty of assets and refining my process for asset creation as I went. I'm really having fun with the flexibility the level allows me in its visual style. This is essentially the final push now, so completing as many assets as I can and getting them into the game is top priority.

List of completed tasks for this week:

• Created many more assets for the game
• Refining my process

-Tom Forwood