Creator Wizard Seth Multiplayer FPS Dev Log #6

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So things have taken a new interesting turn. Although I have been completely saturated in my quest for mastery of concrete, brick, and plaster structures and I have put off the development of terrain thinking that I could get away with structures only and a courtyard with a tile or brick floor. While this is possible, it is becoming clear that it is more difficult than it looks to produce a result that is good enough for even a version 1.0 build. I'm not looking for perfection, I am converging on a threshold of quality for the release of my game. Balanced between releasing utter garbage such as a map that is simply an array of cubes on a flat plane and spending 10 years perfecting the craft and creating multistory interconnected super complex structures and labyrinth mazes with realistic levels of detail. 

So we have a gray terrain that is randomly generated. Randomly generated offers us something that is guaranteed to be balanced although the procedural nature of the terrain does make it feel like your living in a world that is an algorithm. My job is to take this noise and turn it into something that feels natural. 

Painting the hilly areas with rocks, and the flat areas as dirt and simply placing a couple trees makes the environment look like it is already coming to life.

From a topdown view we can notice the grouping, clustering, and organization of the trees. This is something that is very hard to do with a programmatic approach and is probably impossible but may be able to be assisted with some AI. I am more than happy to place rocks, trees, and even grass by hand.

A first person view of some trees in the foreground and background with a very simple primitive structure gives us a preview of the magical environment I am about to create. Now imagine how it would look with some trees and grass and much more detail. This is a very primitive N64 look so far compared to what is possible.

Now showing some bare terrain, restarting from scratch once again. I need to paint the terrain to look somewhat natural before proceeding with placing trees and things of that sort.

We can see a very big leap in my work from struggling to create simple structures that make sense to creating interesting natural environments and placing all the trees and rocks by hand to ensure a natural, non algorithmic look and feel to the world. Wonderful, tune in next time to see what's next. Yalls have a good day now.