Finish line

We had all our assets ready and now it was just the matter of moving things around and making sure that everything works well together.

Our team was great and everyone worked well. It was nice experience for me and good preparation for next year. I am not sure if there was another team like our in fact. There were no conflicts between us at all and everyone worked to their best. I am not saying that our level is better then other's, but our team really was awesome.

It was easy to work with this team. Everyone's opinions has been taken into consideration and no one been left aside. Each of us was better at something, and we divided tasks taking that into consideration. But still with ability to choose. Every person in our team was at the right place and this is probably why we played so well. It would've been unfair to not to mention that Alex was a great leader. His organisational skills are just outstanding. Organisational part is extremely important in game development.

Overall we are happy how our level came out, it was a good experience.

Alpha

At our alpha we had almost all assets ready and with final textures. Apart from boss and few things, I was finishing the boss texture at that time and Sam was rigging it. Our terrain was the main issue, no matter what we tried it still looked crappy so we decided to redo it. We also decided to add more assets to fill the space.

As we still were not sure about the terrain we decided to make a full sculpt in Zbrush, not overly detailed but enough to use it as a base for low poly mesh to add variety in hight and flow. I've been assigned to make a sculpt.

Overall flow of the level stayed almost the same, however, I changed the size of boss area and the width of the river.

The left and the right side of the canyon are mirrored, but flipped on both axis to avoid repetition. On that scale, you can't really say.

The whole sculpt took me few days to finish, but we ended up using it not exactly the way we planned. 

In the end Alex just built planes roughly around it and we didn't bake any information from it. Instead we painted set of tiling textures for the planes and used them. It worked, resolution on the terrain got up dramatically and gave us better look.

Me and Alex painted the first diffuse map for a terrain plate and he carried on with others. 

I also painted the diffuse for boss area, it has different bottom bit, the top bit stayed the same.

Modelling and Texturing

From the very beginning we agreed to try to play on each others strong sides and see how it will come out.
That way we were able to speed up our workflow a bit. We worked as a team, supporting each other.

Some of the assets were built by one person, textured by other,rigged by third.

For example this bunker was modeled by Chris and Textured by me. We discussed what we want the bunker to look like and he built it that way. He also UVed it, but I decided to reUV it for more comfortable use, as it was such a simple asset. All this was some sort of test-drive for this workflow, and it worked. Sometimes when I model I get carried away and just never happy with the design, so end up changing it a lot of time and wasting time. But when someone else built it I don't think about it that way. I was able to just jump into texturing.

As this workflow worked we decided to continue that way. Of course not all assets were done this way, there was no need for it, but we were free to make changes to each other assets.

One more asset, that I probably like the most from all level, is the drill, and it was done the same way. Alex Modeled it using my concept art and UVed it (perfectly I must say, I didn't have to change anything). The drill concept was especially useful, because as we decided to go with hand painted textures I was able to sample bits of painting from the concept art and apply them to the model. There still was plenty to paint in, but amount of work was reduced thanks to previously made concept art.

After that I've been assigned with making of small assets that were going to give our level more unified look. Like snow piles, cracks, explosion craters.The goal was to create simple geometry planes and just make nice diffuse map with alpha channel.

To make cracks look better we supported diffuse with actual geometry.

The Boss.

Building the mesh took some time, but it wasn't that hard with all the concept art. 

I tried to make it look as similar to concept as I can. Some details been changed/added to improve the silhouette. I tried to keep him aggressive and use sharp edges, that also helped to keep polycount low.

The hardest part, however, was texturing. Even though I had a concept, I still had to reinvent a lot of small details to make boss appear bigger. As well as adding decals,patterns and some cavity lines to make design more interesting.  

Asset Concepts

After finishing environment concepts, first asset that I designed was the train concept. As a reference I used war trains. This was the initial idea, but we've been asked to change it to less sci-fi.

Here what we came up with ( 1st design on the image)

For cargo I used this reference moodboard.

The Drill.

Next thing in the list was the drill.

We already had an idea of how it's going to look from our environment concepts, but just in case I made a few sketches, and we decided to go with a first one.

After that I rendered it in Photoshop.

The Boss.

The last thing to design was the boss. All other assets more or less can be found in the real world and are simple, like hangar or helipad, for a mobile game, they don't really require concept art, photos can be used as reference. Mainly, concepts were provided for the things that can't be found in the real world, like alien tech.

I started brainstroming the boss by making some silhouettes.

From that I kind of knew the direction and was able to make some more detailed sketches.

After some time of discussions and disagreements we decided to go with number 5. I made a more detailed lineart of that design.

Everyone was happy with the design and I was able to start rendering it out. 

In the render I tried not only to show the design of the boss but also set up the mood for final boss area and show the scale of the thing.

Environment Concepts

As soon as we decided on what theme we are going to use I started making some concept paintings to set out the colour scheme, mood and atmosphere. Environment concepts were rough as I had to make them quickly, I am not really experienced in environments too.

This was the very first concept I painted. In the brief it was saying that aliens are withdrawing their tech from within the planet. So we decided to add some sort of drills. At the same time I tried to show what kind of mountains we want in our level. I added the plane to show the scale, we had some ideas about remaking the player ship, but decided to concentrate on the level instead.

After that we discussed what kind of things we want in our level and made this plan. 

The keypoints were 

-Military base

-Bridge/river

-Point where player and train split

-Canyon

-Boss area

Here is Screenplay explained.

Screenplay -
Scene 1- Camera looks at the train convoy that the player will be defending.
Scene 2 - Camera watches and follows the helicopter dynamically as it takes off.
Scene 3 - Camera switches to top down view and follows the train up the route with few alien craft battles.
Scene 4 - Train reaches the bridge camera still in top down view, with an increased number of enemies.
Scene 5 - Towards the end of the bridge player gets a slight glimpse of the final boss passing through the water as it takes out the last 3 train carriages, also breaking the bridge in the process.
Scene 6 - Still in top down view the train turns left off the bridge into a new area with stronger enemy ships.
Scene 7 - The train enters a narrow tunnel too small for the player to pilot through so they must try to tail the train through a mountain path on the left.
Scene 8 - camera switches to third person as the player flies up at a 45 degree angle dodging various rock formations.
Scene 9 - Still in third person view the player is forced to take a path through a cave taking a sharp turn into a straight drop down weaving between enemy technology and rock formations.
Scene 10 - Route connects to a river passage which leads out of the rock over a waterfall.
Scene 11 - Player still in third person view has regained sight of the train and watches as the boss appears from a crater and destroys it, knocking out the boss's defences and all surrounding enemy and friendly technology apart from player and the boss.
Scene 12 - Boss fight ( yet to be decided, concepts under way for next week)

After that I made second concept painting of two key areas- canyon and train split.

Here I came up with an idea of canyon being blocked by drills and spikes so player would need to dodge them.

We made a blockout according to our concepts and plan. It's still very basic and will be altered later as we need to add more hight variety.

Level ideas

Environment.

First of all we had to decide where scene will take place.

City with modular design, variation,

Great wall of China, random wall pieces, contrast in level

Military Base – destroyed evidence of alien presence

Large castle area

Bridge

Large beach, D- Day, turn into third person toward the sea, defend the beach

Old roman city, coliseum 

Desert/ Wild west level Train running through

Utah

France

Grand canyon, multiple routes

Favela

Space/Moon location destroy rocks find weapons

Japanese old style city/town

Great blue hole, sea level, islands

Yellow Stone park

Crater impact zone

Snow, Antarctica

We had many ideas as we were not limited. But we tried to use our freedom effectively. We thought about things that would make our level more visually interesting like water, snow,rocky mountains and decided that desert and sand can be a bit boring. But we took the train from western idea. 
Decision was made towards the snowy environment with some implication of water. As our backup plan we had Chinese Wall idea. But luckily we didn't need it.