The second week of the project has been a big turning point where I decided to set up a new engine file, I had already changed the scope of my project, initially it was something larger than most of last year’s fmps, a few days in a I scaled it down again to be a much smaller environment in which I can focus more and creating a forest atmosphere with lots of density regarding foliage. By Wednesday however I had decided I need to scope down again, it was still far too ambitious to create a forest with a consistently good quality using the assets I had, it was the sort of project that would need months of work.
In my new engine filed I quartered the size of the landscape and brought my background mountains closer which resulted in them having am much greater and grander feeling size. I reused the walls from my previous engine files to wall off a small garden were I immediately stated to replace my foliage assets to create a more garden like environment, opposed to a forest. I went back to my pinterest board to gather ideas and inspiration, now looking at new ideas including Japanese gardens and shrine to adapt my new environment around. Fortunately there were a lot of assets and textures that could be reused in the garden however there was a lot of foliage I had created for background purposes that up close lacked quality. These couldn’t be used in this new smaller environment as there just wasn’t an angle in game in which they could be seen without looking terrible. Fortunately though, because of the quality I didn’t waste too much time making them, I did however still feel massively behind because of this set back, by this point I was in full salvage mode to get what I could from the project.
The silver lining to it all is Im no longer winging it as to what I intend to create, with my old level I sort of felt as if I was just going along, modelling and texturing as much as I could before time ran out, having move to a much smaller level, placing the assets that I do have in, and having a better understanding of what it is I want to create, it felt to get it to a standard I was happy with was straight forward, not necessarily easy but at least now I knew exactly what it was I had to do. Below is a few screenshots to show how many old level was looking as I left it.
