Oh damn it's been a long time.

Even though no-one reads this, I might aswell update it since I haven't done so in like, FOREVER.

Been working on a few projects. My favorite of which being the level design project. As you may know, I fancy myself as a bit of a level designer, and naturally, it really shun through with the level design project. It was using the Unreal 2.5 engine, which I did surprisingly well with considering I hadn't touched an unreal editor in roughly 5/6 years. Once I got started, everything came flowing back. I remembered every reason I loved the unreal engine, all the nice tools, the nice 3D viewport, the intuitive controls, the nice import system. However, all the negative points came flowing back with them. Unreal 2.5 is the buggiest, piece of S**t I've ever come across, preceeded only by the version of after effects we have at college. If you try to manipulate more than one light at a time, it crashes, if you try to compile it often locks up. If you put a light too close the wall, it casts a shadow of itself. Just lots of little bugs which remind me of why I switched over to the source engine. Thank you valve for putting in the time to make sure all your tools work how they should. Epic, you should be ashamed. It's a nice engine when it works, and the benefits outweigh the negatives, but for me, theres no point using it when theres a perfectly good source engine to be had.

With that out of the way, I'll explain a little about my map. I came up with the idea for a adventure/horror game, where you're a curious young man who goes snooping around an abandoned silo in a military base near his house. Upon entering, you become trapped, and have to look around for a way out, solving puzzles along the way and generally pissing your pants. I went about looking around for pictures of a particular type of silo which housed the Titan II missile, which was used in the cold war. I found some pretty cool stuff, lots of pictures taken by people similar to my character, only they didn't get stuck. They showed a very dark, dank underground silo wihch was slowly becoming flooded. It was very atmospheric, and if you were trapped in there, you'd piss your pants, because it truly did look terrifying. Whoever took the photos had some serious balls. whilst searching through the photos, I found some blueprints for the bases, which I took, and based my level plan on. I kept the whole feel of the base, and the way it conencted all the parts, but changed it around for the sake of gameplay.

Realism is something you learn about only through practise when mapping. When trying to recreate a place you've seen in real life, it's better to base it on the place than to recreate it, because alot of the time, it doesn't make for fun gameplay. The plan for the silo had alot of incredibly long thin service tunnels and access shafts which were so thin and low down that it would've been hard to navigate, and harder to enjoy playing through. So what I did, was I shortened down the tunnels, and generally kept most of the features, but condensed them into a smalled area, with a strong overall theme throughout which matched the photos I found. I also gave each area a main feature. Giving each major area it's own distinctive feature help to keep the level varied, and also gives the player a feel for where they are. Knowing where you are in relation to other things is very important, especially in adventure games, because you'll often need to find your way around a puzzle quickly, so giving big visual hints makes this easier.

I very much enjoyed working on the level, and for my final project, I'm recreating the level in the latest version of the engine, expanding the level, and giving it a coat of polish. More on this later... If I remember.