Dolmen

What its all about

After hitting a brick wall in the redesign of 60 seconds in Unity I decided take a break and ignore my own advice and start on a big project. Im calling it Dolmen for the moment.  I can always get a few months into this project and go back and finish 60 seconds when I'm in the right frame of mind.
I've had a rough idea floating around in my headbox for a while now. I want to build a game with discovery and utter isolation as the central ideas. The game will be first person so the recent popularity of the walk em up is good news for me. I have a rough direction for the game to take and an idea of how I want it to eventually look. I wont have any dialogue,text or tutorial in the game.There will be no combat and no other characters(maybe....). Ill be taking more than a few leaves from Journey's book methinks. The story itself is slowly taking shape and something Ill be keeping under wraps.
But I do think its important to start prototyping now to get a feel for what works and what doesn't. I'm very excited actually. This will be the first proper game I've worked on. Again the scale of this is very intimidating but I can always try and recruit some help at a later stage if I think the project is in any way viable.

A Starting Point

First off here are a couple of screenshots from two areas that I have started to block out. Please keep in mind that these are very rough block outs and virtually no texturing or effects applied.

I am looking to have a good variety in environments for the player to work through with environments ranging from very tight internal spaces to wide open landscapes.

Building A Level

The corridor in the screenshots above is assembled from four basic geometric shapes. I've decided to build my levels in a modular manner but with bespoke sections as needed. The advantage of building a level in this way is that I can change the layout relatively easily. I begin by modelling some shapes that I will construct my level from. I import those shapes to Unity and use the vertex snapping  to fit everything together. Vertex snapping can be a little fiddly but works just fine when you get used to it. To speed things up I assemble a section of corridor from the shapes, which I then child to an empty gameobject. I then copy and paste those objects to speed up level assembly. Its quite like Lego and very fast. I'm only scratching the surface but I've started to add some minor details to the few corridors I've built.

Designing A Level

I now have the basic tools to make the bare bones of a level. I have modular geometry, a control scheme and the means to trigger doors, moving platforms and so on. This is the scary bit. I can't hide behind learning the tech now to create my level. Its all me from here on in. My initial thoughts are to have a tower and have the player start at the top and have to work their way down. I did sit at the computer and try and design a level as I went but that didn't work out too well. I need to draw out a general floorplan first before sitting down at the computer. Its too easy to waste hours in front of a pc messing around doing nothing. The next image I hope to upload will be a sketch of a floorplan.