They are also quite large and I don’t worry about lining things up perfectly. I even used a little light bleed from some gaps to further add to the overall maps of softer light feel. This was not going to be one of those very dark and hard to move around from sight. I’ve had a number of those and I wanted a bit of a lighter feel.
There are several side areas and even little rooms. These rooms were not as big as they have been in some of my other maps. I wanted, for the most part, to keep things small, compact, but interesting at times.
With this being the 12th map there is a good chance many will just skip right over this. In other maps, if you tried to jump onto rocks to get into blocked off areas you could not. Even if a player found a way to “glitch” past them you would just hit an actual wall in most cases or fall off the map to certain death.
This time around I might at a later point in time come in and add something special or different to the little room behind these rocks. I won’t spoil anything further than that. I personally really love hidden walls, rooms, and areas.
While many areas like this one have not been completed yet since they require some scripting for interacting with objects in most cases. I’m usually rather careful to take screenshots before or take them in a way to exclude showing certain things. Only time will tell a later date if I’m able to pull off a lot of little things I have planned when I go back around to my other maps. A couple of things I’ll share the rest will be up to the player to discover if there is anything else to be found.
You run through your map so many times testing it. Taking a look at things, moving stuff, and trying out this or that to see how it fits. Since I know I was going be doing a lot of that anyways I simply build it into my workflow. This includes a very key thing of not always running though in the same direction. It’s funny the things you miss if you never run the other way or take a 360-degree look around. Some games come to mind where you could tell those who created them did not view things from all sides but I shall not name any—for now.
A lot of the things you do to create a map in a game become quite reparative after a while. I have placed who knows how many thousands of individual torches at this point as the main sources of lighting. This map itself was no expectation with 202 of them placed.
I also messed around with density numbers of the mushrooms spawning in. I did not want too many of these things scattered all over in places I selected. Thankfully things like these don’t require too much manual placement so I could just wave the foliage brush in areas I want them and boom 567 mushrooms added to the map. They cause very little perforce drops and help fill out the map not looking to void.
After filling out quite a lot of basic details and creating some layers of objects. It was time to go into some of the larger areas of the map and add in several objects. I’ll admit most times it’s just whatever random thought that popped into my mind when looking at a room is what I place in it. This one, in particular, I was expecting to have some lighting issues with it being too dark so those pillars placed were perfect for adding torches. Who is to say it’s an unfinished gravesite or a fence of some kind? I’m not going spoil that.
This time around I did not use any Exponential Height Fog. This was due in part that I had a lot of narrow areas that were easy to light. I also did not delete the maps sky sphere or skylight. So any lighting that can get through the meshes from light bleed just lightens up the areas. That does mean I’d have to put more effort into a spot if I wanted it dark to combat that.
Sometimes I just love going through an area and taking a look at it from being unlit, lit as a developer, and finally how the player will see it. You see quite a dramatic change.
While it feels like I have so many more maps to make since I have plans on doing 25 of them to start with. I have a couple more left until I start working on some other things for a while. I don’t want to burn out to much on focusing on just one element. I also want to start adding in loot tables, items, and creatures to fight. I’ll be working on after I have the first 15 maps completed up to the point a certain point like The Passage is.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Unreal Engine 4.