This was a Triumph

Hello, hello! Long time no update. As our third round of games descended upon us, I found myself the only artist with a mighty asset list that needed most of my attention. Before I knew it, I'd gone weeks without a word ...which also meant weeks of information to post to this blog. Considering how much we covered, this was a very intimidating task. I'll be breaking this up to prevent one very large post with far too much content.

First most significant thing was a teamwork task of creating an environment in unreal engine. One person would create the landscape, another person would populate the landscape, and a third person would create the skydome for the landscape.

KC was in charge of creating the landscape and chose a volcanic theme. All the lava, rock, dirt, hills, mountains, and valleys were placed around by her.

Dave was in charge of creating our skydome. Unfortunately I think he accidentally got stuck with the hardest part of the project. It came out great though.

Finally, I was in charge of populating the environment with the assets provided which included an amazing collection of rocks...and grass.

It was a pretty huge environment. 

So like my evil Cathedral, I took the time to make various points of interest on the map. I'll try to give a tour best I can.

Here's where you start off on the map. There's about 3 different ways to go from here, so I'll just focus on the one leading up the lava area for now.

I treated the whole level like the lava was an obstacle to avoid, so there are rock bridges placed throughout for the user to get across.

I also used rocks as a climbing tool. Jump from rock to rock to get to the top of that hill!

                                      

For here, I wasn't sure what to really do so I tried to make a path of rocks that you can run through. It's kinda entertaining and visually breaks things up.

From here I simply placed random things. Mostly rocks in the lava and huge rocks to keep a player from falling off the level or getting stuck in the terrain.

Also lookit dat skydome.

Returning back to our original spawn point, this is what you see if you head the exact opposite direction of the lava. There's a rock bridge, and across from that is a small flower patch. Follow the burnt trail and you find...this silly little hideaway. It's a rather dorky point of interest but I figure if people are going this way I might as well end it with something. So crawl on in, jump around the rocks. Random rock hut?

Probably my favorite point of interest is the flower altar. There's two ways to get to it, which is either through a rock pass in the first image or a different direction of the player spawn point.

Here

I really like the flower altar. I accidentally thought of it in my sleep because I was building environments in my dream that night. So thank you random dream for giving me a great idea.

For all the lava I tried to make it's origin point have rocks around it so it seemed like it was coming from there.

From the flower altar there was one more hill in the center of the map that I put rocks around so players could scale it if they wanted to. Sadly it doesn't lead anywhere too fascinating. Although it does give a good view of the rest of the map.

The lava 'sparkles' were pretty. Also I had one last rock climb just in case players jumped off that high point.

That pretty much concludes this massive map. I was only allowed rocks and grass for environmental assets and I think I did an alright job making something a little entertaining with that limitation.

Next post, we'll revisit the Cathedral again. Because apparently FIEA can't keep me away from flaming landscapes.