Environmental Concerns

Recently I’ve been working on a lot of the “zoomed in” features of the game like physics, interactive doors, vent covers and so on. Now that I have a good-sized toolbox of toys for the player to engage with, I’ve moved back to creating environments for the player to explore.

When I previously tackled building environments I felt like designing on paper was too 2D to be useful and that jumping straight into grey-boxing was too fiddly, so I’ve created a process that works for me. I first create a 3D box map without interiors and an associated mind map describing the flow between sections as well as markers for important gameplay contents, so that I can see at a high level how the player’s exploration might flow through the planned environment, as well as double check logical consistency of the layout such as bathroom and vent locations. Once that’s done and I’m happy, I can then replace the big boxes with grey-box layouts to actually play.

It’s a rewarding and very quick to iterate process, that gives me a 3D map for “free” should I decide to include one in the game!