The level came about when I was researching games that where similar to ours. I found this style called “dollhouse” that fit our brief perfectly. The article below sums it up.
I began by drawing a sketch and splitting it up into 7 sections. This was to help us write and asset list and know where everything in the level would go.
I went through several iterations of this design and we eventually decided to make the level shorter and longer. This would allow the player more movement and would allow us some more room for assets. I decided on a pie slice of a tent as I wanted that doll house effect. This is in no way a realistic design as the tent would have had to be a continues donut shape for this to make sense. I chose this angle as I thought it would easily translate a level across but also cause a small amount of confusion in the player. I thought it would help to make them guess where they are in the tent. I think it helps create a pocket dimension where we can really play about with the atmosphere.
I then grey boxed the level in blender to make sure that it was doable and would be successful in the final project.
I used cubes as the main building blocks as we just needed to see where things would go and if they would look good in a composition together. When I make the level for the game I will need to tweak some of the sizes as we will be rendering it through a 1920 x 1080 camera. I used a prefab model from Thingiverse to help me scale the level and assets.
The goal when making this will be to make the grey box area and then replace the assets with there final pieces as they are made and introduced. We are doing it this way because it will be easier to fix any mistakes one at a time rather than import a large list of 3d models that could all be different sizes.