3D City, Blender 2.53, Level Design book

I was starting to do some research on creating a city and determining how much work it was. If I wanted to be super smart, I could also do research in the field of urban design to learn about how cities are constructed. That would be too in-depth, since all I really care about right now is creating an engaging and fun environment.

Level Design

My mode of attack is to be taking an assortment of 3d models from the Google 3D Warehouse and alter them into a level. Creating hundreds of models for a city isn’t something very feasible for one person, so I will prototype it with other models that are close enough. After looking at a bunch of cities with different games, it is becoming apparent that I know nothing about level design.  Just throwing a bunch of buildings and roads together seems like a haphazard way to make a level.

I hate doing things terribly, so  I ordered a book on the subject called Level Design for Games: Creating Compelling Game Experiences. It should be coming in a few days, so hopefully that will give me a good foundation. I can’t wait.

Blender 2.53

One thing that has been stopping me from picking up Blender 2.5x is the lack of native support for .blend files in Unity3d. After some thinking, it seems almost better now to NOT have native importing support. When Unity3d compiles a game, it packages everything in the assets folder, so it seems wasteful from an optimization standpoint. There is too much wasted information with blend files. Keeping working files separate from finished files seems to be a good practice as well. It saves on load time and can allow you to  use new Blender features.  The interface is pretty different for the new version, but familiar enough to get up to speed relatively fast. I will try to do all of my new 3d content using the newest version and see how it goes.

There is another awesome book that is coming out on 3d game art creation using Unity3D and Blender in October. After looking at the table of contents, it is a book that I cannot miss. Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone with Unity. I better read that level design book fast!

Next

I will try to do some sketches and present some ideas on how I will construct the level. Hopefully I can use some level design principles to embellish and make the experience more enjoyable. I will also be modeling my character in Blender 2.53 that I talked about last time. Posting doesn’t really take that long to do, so I will try to make a better effort at explaining more about the process. Merely giving summaries of what I did isn’t good enough for documenting it well. There are so many things I learn that I don’t have time to write about with these types of posts.