This week at FIEA

This week in FIEA

This week I finished my second Level Design project where I recreated the first level of Bioshock. ]

Concept and Planning.

Rather than going over my concept and planning again for recreating the first level I will talk about the redesigned room part of the assignment .

This part of the assignment had us redesign one of the rooms in our chosen level to be our on spin on the space. With that I decided to go with the first room in the level when the player arrives at Rapture.

My concept was to expand the room with adding more bathyspheres, suit cases, and dolly's in this space to better sell the environmental and narrative story telling upon entering Rapture. When the player first enters Rapture they are greeted with a grim room ruin down and upon entering the next room the player can barely see as it is dark but what they can make out is rubble with the room cluttered with suit cases and flipped over dolly's. In the original this was used to start giving and immersing the player with the story of the fall of Rapture showing that the area they were in was not only where people arrived to the city but also were the masses tried to flee during the collapse of Rapture.

When I played this it was really hard to see the original environmental story telling which was the main reason I expanded this room to be able to show and tell clearly to the player that Rapture is in ruin with destroyed structures, bathyspheres, cluttered with suitcases and flipped over dolly's.

Planning this out I made a new version of my map to design the space to start with. Once I did that I went back into engine and got measurements of the original space and the space all the objects are relative to each other.

Development Process

My development process when creating my redesigned room was first making the size of of the floor and the walls with the measurements I got and making any adjustments. After that I knew I also wanted to add a statue of Andrew Ryan with that the area in between the bathyspheres needed to be larger. With that came adjustments and constantly feeling out the room to see what it looked like each time I either expanded or shrunk the area and adding temp walls to get the best feel possible. Once that was achieved I continued to use cube grid to build out the floors, walls, and windows. Once the base structure was created I moved on the the part that made this room sell the environmental story telling. Using the UE5 modeling tool, merge tool, and pattern tool allowed me to create all the props needed using primitive shapes quickly. Once those were made I used the suit cases, dolly's, tables, chairs, pillars, picture frames, railings, and couches placed around, with the suit cases dolly's, couches, and picture frames cluttering the space and being thrown around and flipped around. The railings were bent and broken to display the destroyed state of Rapture. Doing this created the end result improving the environmental story telling to display to the player upon entering Rapture.

Along with using cube grid, and the UE5 modeling tool I also made use of sublevels. Using sublevels allowed me to be non-destructive when designing the original level and the redesigned space. Now they would be independent from each other rather than the redesigned level affecting the original.

Challenges and Solutions

When it came to challenges I faced when creating the redesigned room was way less than when I was creating the original level. The few challenges I faced was continuing to make sure my scale of the space was accurate and makes sense. The solution I used to ensure this was using measurements from the original and constantly going into play mode to feel out the space, and comparing my self to certain parts of the space. For example putting myself against the windows to see if they were too short, too high, and too wide.

Overall this was a very fun and challenging project that allowed me to see skills I need to improve while at the same time grasping a better understanding of the skills I need improvement in and strengthening the skills I already have.

Here are pictures of the end result for the redesigned space of Bioshock.