Creator Wizard Seth's Blog

Above is a preview of some of the things we will be creating today.  Today the idea is to go back to creating structural entities. Creating an environment can be completely experimental and aimless and this is a great way to learn. Simply placing objects without a specific blueprint or goal in mind and being completely flexible is the best way to teach yourself how to do things. However this type of process isn't optimized for making something specific, which would require you to have a plan. Planning can be abstract or it can be concrete and there is a spectrum of different configurations between. Extremely abstract would be "Let us have a building of some type, and let us place it on top of this hill". Extremely concrete would be, "My building will have a doorway that is 163 centimeters tall and 253 centimeters wide and it connects to a hallway that is 42 meters long and halfway down the hallway is an entrance to a corridor that leads to an upper level that has a t...

 The Interplay of Structures and Terrain With my accepting of using terrain in the earlier version of my map creation I am seeing the challenges and the flexibility in the terrain. The flexibility is literal, as it is a flat plane with a texture and using certain editing tools I can pull it and move it around and stretch it as if it was a piece of cloth or clay. I can make it fit around buildings as if someone had taken a shovel and excavated a foundation for the building and then filled in dirt around in to make it look nice. There is a lot more visual flexibility and potential for beauty in placing trees as a gardener would or an architect choosing a place for a tree to be placed. Terrain certainly is a challenge to get used to but the benefits and potential are well worth the invested energy. My alternative is to invest energy into easier and simpler but worse and less beautiful methods and then my time will have been used less effectively and trying to market the game becomes h...

So the theme of this post is to try and figure out a way to finish and release the level I was creating in my last post. In time we will find out my decision was actually to trash the level and once again start from scratch. I have realized the problem with my design approach is that I am seeing two things, the structural foundation and the structural interior as two separate entities and I'm not designing the proportions of each one to take into the account the appearance and feel of the other. So basically, instead of creating a building I am instead creation a structural entity and than trying to design a foundation underneath it. This is leading to disorganized structure and a foundation that does not fit what it on top of it very closely. I am also attempting to avoid working with terrain in completing this level because It's a new obstacle and challenge and I am learning that in the long run I am required to use terrain in order to make things easier to create. One thing ...