Graveyard Game Environment

Hello everyone, my first project that I started working on was a mysterious graveyard scene in the mountains. Now remember, this is my idea for the game, but I will probably only be able to create one of the whole environment's locations.

My process was as follows:

1. Give myself 5 weeks to work on it.
2. Spend the first 1-2 weeks doing research and planning everything out.
3. Model and texture some environment objects for the scene.
4. Build the scene using Unity 3D and make a realistic looking environment.

First I did a lot of research and when I say a lot I mean ALOT. I did research on geography, different cultures, burial practices of those cultures between 1300-1700s, looked for lots of reference images, and made a story to go with the game idea. As you can imagine this took quite awhile since certain information can be tough to find. I finally came up with an idea that I was happy with. Dargavs in North Ossetia, Russia probably gave me my best inspiration and a vision for the game.

Just to give you some background so that you can follow along a little easier with my process, I will give you a brief summary of my video game idea.

STORY FOR (CITY OF THE DEAD)

The planet is at peace. The ten kingdoms of that world finally work together in harmony. A massive plague breaks out and spreads through the entire land. In an effort to stop the outbreak and save their kingdoms from annihilation the four largest kingdoms of the North, South, East, and West counsel together to determine the fate of the infected. It is decided that the infected must be outcast into Terram Solitariam, a harsh mountainous land located in the center of their world. The infected will be provided with provisions for their journey and then will spend the last of their days in Terram Solitariam.

Over 500 years has past. The land in still at peace after the great plague threatened the world. A mad magical scientist vagabond happens upon this massive mountainous graveyard and hatches an evil plan. He will attempt to reanimate the millions of dead gathered here and bend them to his will. When his army is raised he will proceed to conquer the world.

In the early developments of his re animations he doesn't have complete control over the individuals and monstrosities that he raises. You are one of these dead. You are snatched from paradise and brought back to the world of the living unexpectedly and against your will. You, a wandering skeleton, are charged with the quest of finding out what is going on and save the world.


Second I started to model some old weathered gravestone markers for one of the villages (I am using the English for my reference for this village).

Blocking out of some mountainous landscape:

Some early grave marker modeling, UV mapping, and texturing attempts:

I was told that my textures looked really flat and needed something more to make them "pop" (have more definition). Here is what I did from some of the suggestions given to me.

1. Bring models' UV into Photoshop.
2. Added moss to the textures and painted dirt onto their surfaces.
3. Take final texture into Crazy Bump to get diffuse, displacement, occlusion, specular, and normal maps.

Then the models looked like this:

I also modeled a plague grave stone marker:

(I'm not quite satisfied with this one at the moment)

I started to paint another texture onto my terrain and integrate some of my models into Unity:

The farther away from a portion of your terrain that you are in Unity the more blurring effect it has on your scene. Unity does this to save rendering power. The textures have a higher resolution the closer you get to them. I will try to integrate more textures later.

Here are the textured gravestone slabs in Unity. When I have finished placing them in different locations on the hill I will also use the terrain sculpting tool to add earth mounds next to them.

I wanted it to be pretty foggy so that it would be mysterious and you would be able to see just enough to continue exploring for clues that show up.

Part of hill.

Plague marker in Unity.

My 5 weeks are up, so I decided to continue on to my other projects. Hopefully I will finish the others fast so that I can get back to finishing this one.

I was finally able to get back to this project a week or so before my senior show, here are some of the changes. I will post a video at the end of these blogs in a post called "Demo Reel" which will show some of the game play ideas I was thinking of for the game, still very basic, but I am not going to give up.

This game would be more like a mystery game where you find messages and clues that would lead you to the next location. The portion that I programmed was set up so that by exploring the graves you would get memories of what had happened to you.