Problem: Vegetation (trees, shrubs, rocks, etc) placed are all the same angle and size, which can easily look very repetitive and cheap.
When placing vegetation, there are settings to randomly vary its size and rotation. This stops it looking repetitive.
Problem: Vegetation (trees, shrubs, rocks, etc) are being placed where they shouldn't.
You can control the angle the ground needs to be, and the elevation (height above 0.0 metres) the ground needs to have for given vegetation to be placed on it. You can use this to, for example, stop trees being placed on sheer cliff faces, or rocks getting placed along what should be a clear, flat beach.
Problem: The island has large areas without any features (trees, lakes, rocks, shrubs, etc).
Make a huge vegetation brush and just paint like mad across ugly empty areas on your terrain, making sure to vary the size and rotation of the trees. The only people who should have empty areas are people who decided to make a desert, or people with large surfaces of water (eg, for an archipelago or a huge lake). Fixing this takes a few seconds, so there's no excuse for not doing it.
Problem: I have a large area I want to be empty (eg, a desert or huge beach), but the terrain texture looks repetitive and ugly.
You need to add things that break this repetition. The main way is by adding features that aren't repetitive. Some options are:
- Apply many decals all over the place to add features.
- Paint small shrubs as vegetation (making sure to randomly vary size and rotation).
- Tricky but effective option: Make a terrain texture that has larger tile size than the repetitive one, and give it low opacity (eg, something like 0.05). Paint it over the other repetitive texture so they blend together.
Problem: I want to use Windows Movie Maker for my trailer.
Please don't. It doesn't give you much control over what your video looks like, and the default title screens and style options looked ok when Windows Movie Maker came out over 5 years ago, but now they're overused and cheesy.
I'd suggest using Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, or Adobe AfterEffects for your videos. AfterEffects can have some really slick-looking effects you can add to your video to make its style suit the atmosphere and emotions you're trying to convey.
Problem: I put my picturesque sceneries really far from each other. What can I do to make the user travel faster between them?
You could try placing a vehicle. I'd recommend a 4 wheel drive or a speedboat, since helicopters are too free-roaming.
If this doesn't cover the ground fast enough, you can use a flowgraph Jules put together during this week's class, and attach it to an area or proximity trigger. The flowgraph is shown below. The instructions that go with the flowgraph are:
- you can start game mode at any location
- there are 2 triggers
- when you enter trigger.A, it will take you to a location you entered in the flowgraph (not the trigger.B)
- to add more triggers, just copy can paste the graph and change the locations.
The full size version of the image can be found here.
Problem: I don't know how to control where the user goes in the map.
This can be controlled in several artistic ways. There is a kind of formula you can apply to controlling where the player goes, and how they feel a sense of suspense build.
I could write 2000 words, or I could save you the headache and link you to some videos :) They're pretty interesting and get in to some good level design (and architectural design!) ideas that you, frankly, won't hear from many people teaching at the FBE.
Halfelife 2: Episode 2: Lost Coast Developer Commentary:
Portal 2 Developer Commentary:
There are some developer commentaries for Halflife 2: Episode One and Halflife 2: Episode Two, but I didn't have time during the lessons to find decent YouTube versions of them. If you're keen, you can look them up yourself :)
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