This week represents the first sprint where we’re working on what will become the final game. It’s both incredibly exciting, and super nerve-wracking. Our vertical slice taught us a lot about what it’s going to take to build this thing and how players will react to our game, but it was by definition a bite-sized pice of the full experience. Setting up our levels and laying out the architecture we’ll need in the weeks ahead makes it feel a lot more real.

On my end of things, this first week was all about getting a grip on the open-world portion of the game. I’ve always loved using Unreal’s Landscape features, and this is the chance to go buck-wild. The map we’re working with is six times bigger than what was in the vertical slice—it’s gotta be the biggest blank page I’ve ever stared down. Thankfully, we know what needs to go on the page, and had a super productive brainstorm using a real-life whiteboard to get our ideas down for the high-level design of the area

We’re not artists, but this image was my savior when I sat staring at the enormous blank page of our landscape. After a few days of chipping away at it, the above layout is ready to go in-game pretty much 1:1. There’s now some subtle elevation around the top of the map to accentuate the location where the player initiates the end of the game, as well as a giant half-pipe made out of the landscape itself. Landscape splines have been super helpful in creating these modular components and are huge landmarks that we can enable and disable at runtime (hopefully…).

Filling in this huge space, and making sure it stays performant are two massive hurdles that we'll have to face. Getting the map roughed in, though, is the first step to solving those problems.

Jimi