I have decided to build myself a bedroom.
Allow me to elaborate.
For the past few months I have been working - slowly but mostly surely through a dvd course on level design in the Source Engine (the engine used to create games such as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and many other games with 2 in the title). I am nearing completion of the course (whereupon I will start one of the 6 OTHER DVDs in my drawer), and am looking for a small project to test it out. I could create a multiplayer map, and indeed I have a couple of plans to do this. I could create a single player map, and this is our eventual goal. But first I'm looking for a project, small in scope but allowing for expansion and improvement as I practice and learn.
My brother (as we develop our attempted buisness we continue to set each other goals and deadlines as an encouragement to productivity) set me the innocent sounding goal of building a recreation of my bedroom as a test. At first this seemed simple enough. As I learned more about level design and the tools involved, it began to seem far to simple. As I learned even more, I began to realise that there was an amazing amount of potential for this simple idea to become wonderfully complex.
This will need to be done in several stages.
Stage 1: Creating the physical space itself. This is easy enough apart from one corner (my room is not a perfect rectangle, it has a dip in one corner behind an old fireplace), but for authenticities sake I will need to do some measurements of the real bedroom and convert this into in game units.
Stage 2: Adding non-moving parts. My bedroom is an old room that's been renovated a few times over the years, it used to be a dining room that connected the front hallway to the back study, but has had an extra wall added in to make it a seperate room that connects onto the hallway. As such it has a few quirks such as an asymmetrical roof design (beams and plaster), an old sealed over fireplace, built in wardrobes and a wall pattern that juts out from the wall slightly. As these are all fixed and don't move they can be added in using fixed geometry, along with the window, which I will leave opaque for now.
Stage 3: Adding moving parts. Door to the room (which, unless I build the wallway, I will need to leave locked), wardrobe and cupboard doors.
Stage 4: Placeholder props. Bed, TV, Various shelves, desk and computer. These will be placed using in engine props, meaning the bed will not look like MY bed, etc, but this will certainly do to start with.
And that will complete the room. However, there's plenty more to be done. Firstly, I have a course in designing 3d content and props, so my eventual long term goal is to attempt to create props that match the content of my room, so I have my bed, my computer, rather than whatever the source engine has available. If I feel particularly crazy, I can even use photographs as actual textures to ensure they match adequately.
Once that's done, I will look to see if anything can be done to fix the opaque window. The simplest solution seems to be create as much of the outside as can be seen from my window (fortunately this is very little, just a fence and a portion of the neighbours house), and then leave the rest as blank, as it will never be seen in game. The same approach could be used for the hallway to allow the door to my room to be opened.
I'll be uploading pictures to my facebook (and here) as I go, to show my progress. Work will hopefully begin tonight.
No comments:
Post a Comment