I have been looking at a blank zone in Unreal Engine 4 over the holiday day week for server days now. I knew what I wanted I was just being lazy. A couple of random nights and this zone shaped up quite quickly. It is on the shorter side with how I have the player just going up the coastline of the river on one side.
While this zone is a bit simpler than many I have created so far in my game. Sometimes it is just nice to have simple and focus on adding some character to little side areas for the player to explore. Not everything always has to be an extremely time-consuming process. Not to mention if you go overboard performance starts to become quite an issue anyway.
I first put down a base layer for the ground in approximately the size I felt the zone was going to be. I can always add or delete sections later on which is in fact what I did. For now, it’s good to have a decent amount of area to work with.
Since I have quite a straight main side that I will add side pockets into for the player to explore I focused on working on that first. I tend to leave these dungeons quite open as I work on them until later on where I add in things like missing ceiling rock.
I did add a single layer of the ceiling at the start. This was more about helping me judge the size of the space than anything else. I understand from using many of these materials before the size of an area with it being spawned into my overview for working on the zone.
This just makes it easy for me if I need to select and move large chunks of a zone around. This is why I leave most of the ceiling missing at this stage. Sometimes you work on something and you discover once you run around on a character that the portion size needs some adjustment.
I then with the Unreal Engine 4 erosion tool started to add shape to the coastline and where the river was going to be. I also added in the water layer which is just below the landscape layer. That way once I had shaped enough of the landscape layer the water layer would be seen making it easier for me to see how it was turning out.
Since the other side is not going to be reachable by the player and is mostly a straight line of rock walls. I just mass-selected the side I had already completed copied it. After that, I rotated it around 180 degrees so it would not look the same. After that, I patched a couple of areas up that needed it.
Once I had both sides to this cave zone done. I simply finished off enclosing the two renamings shorter sides. I also added in the rock ceiling to finally enclose the zone.
Then it was time to run around the zone spawn in as the player for quite a while. I was looking for gaps between rock meshes and holes in the ceiling. Those areas needed more rock mesh to cover up any light bleed and from being able to see the blank outside world. How scary indeed would it be for the player to see the outside!
Adding In Details And Side Areas
The next step was to delete some rock meshes leaving enough room for the player to get between boulders and create side areas. It was also time to add in things like foliage, pillars, and anything else I wanted the player to come across. All these screenshots were taken after the fact once the lighting was finished for this stage to tie it all in.
I always have a fair amount of fun working on side areas in general. This zone itself would be quite boring I feel without them. Every so often as the player is following the coastline of the water I want them to notice a little area for them to duck into and kill some monsters.
Some of these side areas are bigger pockets where the player can see it all as they approach it. They don’t need to travel too far from the path they were already taken. These larger pockets might not be something the player will be able to skip over either as the monsters will see the player and head for them in some cases once I add them in later in the year if they are not taken care of.
Several more narrow paths lead the player away from the coastline for a short amount of distance. This is not a zone I was looking to make huge so these tunnel areas are quite short and don’t lead to a large room to clear out either.
With all of that done it was time to working on lighting. This involved placing over the entire zone a total of 22 light mass importance volume volumes. They were broken into smaller chunks to make it quicker to compile.
There were also 12 reflection capture points added in for dealing with the water layer. There are some spots along the cave where the landscape layer decreases a little bit giving some puddles of water for the player to walk through. I also made sure to cover the bigger water feature of the river with reflection capture volumes.
All of this comes together to tie the zone in nicely. This might not feel quite nightmarish yet. Later next year I’ll be adding in the monsters and if needed messing around with the final settings in the post-processing volume for the zone as well. Giving it a darker more nightmarish feeling as needed.
Invisible Wall
While I try and avoid using invisible walls as I know from a gamer's point of view they tend to be a bit annoying and feel a bit cheap. There are just some cases that were the desired effect I want requires using them.
In UE4’s case, an invisible wall is just called a blocking volume. The name says it all it stops anything from crossing it as long as there are not any gaps that a player or an NPC could find. In this instant I wanted the Nightmare Oasis map to have quite a linear path of just going up one side. As a result, the player can only walk into the water a little bit in some locations.
As far as why don’t I want the player crossing over there? There just nothing over there to kill. I also did not do any testing to see how deep the water is in those parts. Some of it did get hit with a heavy hand of erosion for shaping the landscape so the character could go underwater which might cause their view to be somewhat glitched. This is why I prefer to keep water around weight deep or less as I’m not going to be spending time on a swimming system or water dynamics to an extreme degree.
With only one side of the zone with lighting, it helps give this area a bigger feeling than it is. It is true between the lighting near the water from the glowing mushrooms, and the number of indirect bounces I currently have enabled along with some atmosphere effect you can still see the cave walls across the body of water if the brightness on your screen is up high enough.
There are also some areas where the player can still wander several inches into the water itself. There are several curves along the beachline to add some character to the shoreline along the body of water. Otherwise, it would be quite flat and rather boring.
Once I come back to this zone later on and finishing off some of the other phases of this level from effects to the final touches for lighting. I do expect the far cave wall to be difficult to see for most that have decent colors of black on their monitor and are not one of those players who crank the gamma up to max.
Bug Fixes
As always with level design, you are going to come across quite a few unintended bugs. This is why playtesting is so important. While sometimes you might not have a clue at first why something is occurring the way it is. There are other times where they are no duh moments and a quick fix.
We can see in my above screenshot from one of my playtesting sessions that something is not quite right. While I do tend to spend a lot more time in some areas such as a player start. I always make sure to run around the character everywhere the player can and even in some cases can’t get to.
In this instance, we can see the slope in the terrain level. That should be covered up by the water layer being seen to the player. While it is there for performance reasons once the player is this far out from where the water is started it becomes invisible.
This was quite an easy fix by just breaking up the water layer into server different sections. That way if I further optimized by controlling the cull distance or put in a cull distance option for the player they won’t have a very strange popping in and out of sight water layer.
This was the biggest bug at this stage of the level design. Outside of some mushrooms in my foliage spawning on top of the larger hand placed mushrooms. This was an easy fix by selecting with the lasso tool and deleting them from the zones foliage layer.
Final Thoughts
I don’t have much more thought about this zone other than it feels great to have it finished before the end of 2020. I was not in a rush to do so as I’m ahead enough in my schedule I could have spent more time on this or just taken off the last several weeks of the year.
At some point, I just had the motivation to turn what I could almost see in my mind, what plans I had written down, and the rest is now shared in this post. I’ll be making induvial zone trailers next year perhaps once more work is completed to further show things.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Unreal Engine 4.
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