Studio 1 - Weekly Progress - Week 10 HH

By Harry Hughes

Almost fully recovered now, I was able to spend a good deal of time this week building my map up. With the Terrain Editor I expanded my map from last week into three distinct levels: the town and seaside at the top, a forest in the middle, and a valley below (the valley was the first and only section I had built last week).

On the top level I built a lake, body-of-water and mapped out some roads and paths. I then built and decorated all the buildings, loosely basing them on a small coastal town in the Scottish highlands called Ullapool. I added a church, graveyard, a park, a pier and a gas station to round it all out. To be honest, I found this process extremely gruelling. I spent a lot of time duplicating doors and windows and then rotating and scaling them to fit. It sucked but I'm pretty glad I've done it all now.

Next up I sort of started turning the middle level, just downhill from the park, into a dense forest. This was done simply by adding dozens and dozens of different types of trees. So far it's looking sort of interesting but I'm not sure exactly what I want to do with this area. Some ideas are forming: maybe you start the game in the dense forest and eventually find your way up to the town, which would be a kind of nice surprise. I have a lot more to add down here and to the valley below, and I think as I start developing a storyline, these areas' purposes will become clearer. For now I quite like that they are sort of empty and explorable jungles. They really do remind me a lot of walking around the highlands in Scotland where I have spent a lot of time, and I generally enjoy exploring open-world video games at my own pace.

I think next week I should spend a bit more time on the story and gameplay aspects rather than on world building. This will be a nice change after the grind of putting everything together. I'm really not sure how the festival aspect is going to work or how I'm going to add NPCs to the world. Lots to do, but I'm fairly satisfied with my progress so far.