PUTTING IN WATER

As part of the design, water is an essential part as it helps to represent the purity and peacefulness. For building the water I opened up the Content Browser and clicked the ‘Actor Classes’ tab and went to the ‘Fluid’ category. Two selections will show, these being FluidInfluenceActor or FluidSurfaceActor. I selected FluidSurfaceActor and then clicked FluidSurfaceActorMoveable.

You can you can resize the water by righting click on the map and you will see the ‘FluidSurfaceActor’ option and once clicked, can resize to fit the areas of the map.

 When I have finished with putting in the water I then add a texture to give the transparent water effect by dragging the texture onto the surface actor.

BUILDING THE NEW MAP: Layout

Now that I have finished the planning I can move onto building the map. The first thing I’ll be doing is the layout.

I have created a brush build based on a rough size of the character in-game. Changing the dimensions of brushes can be changed through right clicking on a brush. The size for the X and Y axis are 32 and the Y axis is 96. I have created this brush build as it will be used as a reference to make sure everything is to scale. This will help ensure that I won’t have to rescale everything later as this can cause problems for some of the blocks that I have built.

Using the brush build tool I will be constructing the layout based on the overhead map.

The maps layout will have more additional structure once certain sections have been finished.

In some sections water will be used. The water will be seen in areas around the walkways. This will help give players a clear look at where paths are. The water will sit on a brush build made lower than the walkways. The water will be shallow yet reach the height of the paths making everything look even.

Once the layout has was finished I applied a texture to the grounds. As in the design seen in the concept art I produced I will be using a black patio tile styled texture.

After finding my texture I went into the ‘Content Browser’ and imported the image. I then created the texture by right-clicking in the browser and selecting ‘New Material’.

A window is shown with multiple options and next to it a blank space. I dragged the image in the window and then dragged from the black square on the side of the image to the ‘Diffuse’ option. Once this is done, the texture will be made.

The texture had appeared too large and so I made it smaller. I did this by double clicking the texture which then brought me to the 'Surface Properties' window. From there I can change the size along with various options such as the alignment.

CONCEPT ART

I have done some concept art for the level. We will use these pieces of to help create our map and ensure that we stick to a specific look. These will give each and every one of us a reference for how our buildings and environments should look when building our individual sections of the map.

The grounds will have black with a patio tile texture to them. This was decided as we intend to make our buildings whit so this way they stand out. As part of the environment, the map will sport both grass and water as elements in the design. The map will also have foliage such as bushes and trees, more specifically, cherry blossoms. This was decided as we wanted to make our environment appear peaceful. 

The canteen area has been designed to fit the colour scheme of the rest of the map using white and different shades of grey. Objects such as tables and chair will be in bright colours so that they stand out from the rest of the scene.

OVERHEAD MAP

We have come up with an overhead map to help us plan out the layout of our map. The layout is important as it will guide us in building our map correctly gives us a clear idea of where things will go.

The centre of the layout starts out as a circular platform extending out in four different directions horizontally and diagonally. This takes the players to the main inner section and to five building. A couple of them will be the main buildings that each of us has focussed on and others will be secondary rooms acting as single classrooms and other spaces. Outer Spaces will include more the same sorts of buildings.

The map may potentially expand but will remain following the initial layout here.

My section of the map is going to be the canteen. The layout is based on the same one used for the canteen at college. The tables will be the first thing you see following the kitchen space. The kitchen space can be accessed and can make good use of acting as cover from enemy fire.

REVISING THE MAP

The map my group had originally built is being scrapped in favor of a new one. We felt that it moved away too much from our original idea and the overall look.

Our original design was going to be a futuristic version of the college and give it a sleek and neat appearance. We felt that the map had detracted from this goal. We also saw a good number of design flaws. The first and main one was that instead of the desired setting, the map appeared to be set in a forest of some sort. It also became a problem as our buildings did not match the scenery.

The map had also become an issue as the map was too large and there was nothing else to fill it with. Another design flaw that has made this map appear somewhat boring in terms of the layout was that the buildings were just simply placed in each corner of the map. This resulted in another flaw as well as moving from one building as it took too long.

We hope to fix these issues with our new map.