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  • Writer's picturemarvin chatting

I don't plan to design every detail and layout for the entirety of my world, as I intended for a massive setting with alot of exploration but I do want to design the overall layout and how the areas will connect, and the basic idea of the layout. I think it'll be fun to base my setting on the london underground as those with the real world knowledge of the underground can use that for the game.


This is a simplified layout of the railroads in the london underground

and this is the design i've done for the layout

I removed alot of the tracks to make more singular routes and removed entire tracks, which I felt overcomplicated the map, sorry piccadilly line. This I feel is a good base for my world setting and helps establish what the world will look like.


Icons

I used the small blue houses to indicate towns, these would have two or three npcs and maybe a house, where the player could stop and get quests or interact with the characters. The larger blue wall is for communities which are basically big settlements with lots of npcs, there would be shops, healers, and mainstory quests.

The yellow apple is farms, I intended this to be where the player could get food, and would further help establish how the world can continue to function despite being underground.

The red cube is for resources, this is harder to explain as I want a core part of the game to be the player character looking for different resources for specific objectives and to help out communities.

The purple skull is for danger, meaning that monsters, or obstacles are there and the player should either avoid these areas, or exercise caution, when exploring.

The green leaf is basically these are areas with extreme greenary that have overtaken the area, making hard to continue along that route.


Communities

Paddington - This will be the first city the player is introduced to, the community is friendly to strangers and accepts the player into the settlement without too much trouble. This community will be prideful of their long history and will basically help introduce the player to the world.

Baker Street - This is a town down on its luck, having many of the npcs living there having died due to monster attacks, this community having a large graveyard, this town wont react much to the player characters arrival.

Charing Cross - This town will be rude and hostile towards the player character upon first meeting, not trusting strangers and being wary of the player character, the player character can either charm themselves into the community or complete quests for them in exchange for access.

Victoria - This town is closed off from alot of the railway making it hard to get to, here lives a community of people who believe themselves to be "higher class" than the rest of the communtities only accepting the rich and beautiful into their community.

London Bridge - This is a town full of criminals, theives and mercenaries, a tough town where the player character does not fit in, this town is dangerous.

Waterloo - This town is overrun with monsters, no living souls remain here, this is a very dangerous area for the player, but will have great resources and is close to the river. There maybe a cult living within this community that worships the monsters called The Church of Radiance.


I started by doing tests with the particle systems to figure out the best way to optimise the blender models so that the model wouldn't lag out while also being detailed and intersting to look at; the biggest problem being the grass and moss on the walls, as this would be a few thousand objects generating in the scene, which is alot.

I was pretty proud of the moss I created in the test and its looks super realistic, however due to the realism it became way too much, with the number of faces from the mesh creating a huge amount of lag making the scene unusable in the end. This helped me decide how to do the moss and leaves in the real setting.

I tested out using the decimate modifier for these shapes to create a more low poly and random design.







I used weight painting to spread out the particles and to make sure that they were generating where I wanted them to be, this was actually very hard to figure out but once I got the hang of it things went pretty quickly. In the image the red is where the particle will generate where are the blue being not, I created multiple of these for the moss, rocks and grass.





I also tried testing the preset textures and the noise textues for the materials such as the wood and the tiles. This worked out much better than I thought it would but was very fiddly.


I then went straight into creating the real envirnment.


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