As part of the Environment Design module of my Game design university course I was tasked with creating an environment based on a theme and a sub theme. Initially, as mentioned previously in my asset design blog posts, I planned on creating a sci-fi environment with a sub-theme of corruption. I changed my mind on this rather quickly as I figured that my initial idea wouldn’t have been the most original and in addition to that, my complete lack of experience in both maya and unreal engine 5 proved to be quite big obstacles that I had to try hard to overcome. For this reason, I chose an environment idea which at the time I thought would be easier to create.
The theme I chose was ‘Fantasy’, with the sub theme of ‘Family’. My plan for this was to create a medieval-fantasy setting, I had a few ideas of what I could implement into it to convey both the main and sub themes, so I started browsing the internet for inspiration and gathering some references along the way.
I wanted to create a family heirloom of some sort for my asset, so keeping that in mind I looked around for appropriate settings within which I could place something like that. What immediately came to mind was something along the lines of the Belmont Hold from the Castlevania animated series, the remains of a large repository, museum and library located underneath the Belmont Estate where the Belmont family lived for generations.
Unfortunately after a few days of trying to get this idea to work I wasn’t sure exactly how I would achieve the effect of something like this. I was concerned that the scope of this idea was a little too big for my first unreal 5 project, so I decided to scrap that and look in other directions for inspiration. Rather than making up the story based on the environment, I decided to try and get a general idea for what the narrative of my story could be, this helped me hone in on what type of environment I ended up creating.
I settled on the idea of a modest homestead so I researched the typical vernacular architecture of medieval houses, finding that they regularly consisted of wood, stone and later brick, along with timber framing, often painted with oils resins and crushed egg shells to give the now widely recognised typical medieval white walls.
At this point I was pretty confident with my idea and moved onto unreal, I wanted to mess around with the landscape tool and try get a decent base for my environment. I did not block-out my environment as it didn’t involve anything too large or complicated, instead I hoped to start building the house straight away after laying down the landscape. When it came to this project I felt like it would be more time-efficient to create the bulk of the environment, the large details and the building, to then be able to experiment with assets in the project itself than trying to plan ahead.