The zone is set up in a way the player starts on one side of the city. They will have to cross a bridge over the great divide into the caves. Once they are done clearing that out they will have to cross over a secondary bridge back into the city. Where all the way in the back is the zone exit.
The Great Divide itself has a few different meanings and ways it became about. You do have this massive void in the middle that has been overrunning by flowing lava. You also have the culture and racial divide between the two different factions.
With how massive this zone ended up being and it’s quite an adventure to walk around it to the tune of 20 or so minutes. I thought I would try taking screenshots from an above view at an angle as I progressed through creating it.
I’ll admit showing this viewpoint shows things in an uglier but true fashion of creating a zone. There is always a reason why game developers rarely want the player to piece the bubble they have created around them to see. It is interesting even to me how it pulls together, in the end, to give the player amazing views while they are exploring around a zone.
After that, I imported into the zone some of the more common meshes that I would be making the bulk of the zone out of. I wanted to make sure I had some idea on the scale and the best way is just spawning in as the character to get the point of view the player will have.
This will serve as my general building area for everything else I have planned for it. While it did end up being a little bigger than I should have allowed. I did want some distance and depth for the player when they are exploring the area.
On the right side, it was time to build a general outline of the area I was going to use. With this being a cave system I knew I was not going to fill in every area of it. There comes a point where concerns about this zone taking far too long for the player to finish come in play.
I also wanted both sides to be around similar lengths visually. The cave side I did make on purpose a tad longer just to give it a little offset. With the player heading over on the second bridge I wanted there to be some cave wall on the one side visible as they make their way back into the city.
You will notice I’m going back and forth to some degree between the two different sides. I’m somewhat building this zone in stages. It also keeps some of the more repetitive tasks on either side from getting overly boring as I’m switching things up every few hours. This also helps keep me motivated to work on this for long sessions at a time.
I did some starting work building up the entices into the different areas so I could better work out the paths that would be leading to them. I also built up the sides with some rock meshes to fill in the divide itself.
I also wanted the right side near the first bridge to have a second level overlook seeing across everything. I felt now was a good time as any to get that roughed in. I raised some of the dirt on the right side and put in a dirt ramp for the player to walk up as well. Once I get more layers built up I’ll further define it later in the build.
There is also going to be quite the debris field of walls in all different stages of decay filling in the wider areas between different areas I create for the player to explore. This was quite a dense and large city after all where smaller homes did not survive the passage of time and only left behind a stone wall or two.
I also did not want the player just running over to the zone exit. If I would have placed the zone exit on the right side they would not have much of a desire to check out the remaining city. Unless, they are farming.
You can also see I built out another foundation of an area for the player to go into and explore. These are just the remains of large buildings with many of them having an outdoor area to go through as well.
I also took this screenshot spawned in as the player getting a partial view of the unfinished city. Outside of the two openings for the bridges, this is the only viewpoint the inhabited in the caves have of the city. I come back later to further build-out.
I was at least expecting not all of the space to get used up. Much later on I do go back and clean up anything that the player walking around seeing. This also leaves me some areas to work with if I ever want to come back in later and add something a little extra special for the player to discover. Not that I’m necessarily saying this zone will have hidden areas for the player to discover.
I took the time to add in some light importance volumes before adding in the ceiling as it is just easier to do in that way. This tells Unreal Engine where to focus effort when it comes to building out the light later on. There are some dead areas and voids where I do not need a lot of quality when it comes to the lighting.
You might have also noticed I snuck in adding lava to the great divide in the middle. Along with a lot of other details. I have been wanting to lava feature in one of my zones for a while now. The downside is the massive preference in frame rate hit. I still need to do some research and further optimization later when I come back around and do a pass of that for many of my zones.
I’m hoping I don’t have to take the lava out. It’s not perfect and I have a feeling I’ll be redoing some work on it in the future. It also sadly create some lighting issues due to some of its settings that I need to resolve. Things the future me needs to worry about. For now, I have lava in this zone!
With how large this zone is I did increase the static lighting levels which decrease the quality by changing how it measures the length of light. It took almost two hours for lighting to build and I’m glad I made the change so it was not five hours or longer. Final lighting for this zone is going to take quite a fair amount of time and perhaps days.
I do expect the lighting to even out a bit better once I come back around for a lighting production level build. That will also include lowering the static light level and some balancing being done with post-processing volumes. That however I expect it to take days and not something you do until you are done changing anything that would require lighting to be rebuilt.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Unreal Engine 4.
Game roadmap.
