Viking Village: Witcher 3 Reference
Why White Orchard? Because this is the man the CDPR Witcher 3 team wanted to open with. White Orchard was the first map players got to explore and familiarize themselves with what KIND of game/ immersive experience Witcher 3 was trying to be, intro levels are often the hardest to make so I thought it would be nice to recreate that level in particular and I also just like Witcher 3 a lot.
The hardest part of designing a level is, starting. Since I was working alone in this project I could let loose and had no restrictions. Which was the problem working without restrictions opens up too many possibilities and one could easily get decision paralysis so I started in the most simplest way, drawing. Mostly done on paper but here's a digital remake of what I drew plus more references from TV and Films. I had a really big Viking phase at the time because I was watching Vikings the TV series and decided to take a crack at making my own Viking village.
Getting Started : The pain begins!
So many Trees : Optimization phase
As I was building the level and placing down objects in the game world, my game started to lag. At the time I owned a budget pc that was already 6 years old, so I thought maybe its just the computer. But now what if I could make a level so optimized it ran well even on a potato pc? that thought wouldn't leave my mind and that's when I discovered and fell in love with level streaming. Other optimization methods like Unreal's Nantie system were very buggy at the time so I chose not to use it in this level and instead opt for some old school optimization tricks like asset streaming and custom LOD systems.
Are we done yet? No. But actually Yes.
After weeks turned into months my progress slowed, I had to make sure my rent was being paid and bills were piling up which means some projects had to be set aside. But we didn't stop entirely as the passion keeps us alive. I worked on making sure my little White Orchard was maintained and gave it one last push to finish what I started. Was I happy with the end result? Yes, could it have been done better ? Absolutely, but I am glad I was able to finish it. Here's a video of the final result.
It's Alive ! : Adding life to the landsacpe
Though I would've loved to have live NPC's patrolling with basic AI code, I wanted to learn how to add "life" without actually adding people. I thought this challenge would be an interesting way to tackle the "emptiness" of a map and help me understand how to make my landscapes look alive even without NPCs. What I learned was the value of imperfections and how to think about your characters as people and not just NPCs. I was forced to think about what they do. Do they chop woods? Do they fish ? How do they spend their free time? Where do the kids play ? All of these details helped to magnify the landscape into more than just a game map.
