Scooter Looter Environment Art Breakdown

Give it a go! :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/scooter-looter

I thought it might be of interest to some people to explain my process for creating a lot of environment assets in a short period of time.

Best advice I can give is modulate everything you possibly can and when you cant do that anymore use texture and Uvs to create variation within your assets.

The first challenge was scale. A great way to deal with this early on is to block out the levels as fast and as loosely as possible - allowing for quick changes and iteration. This will be yours and everyone else on the teams reference of scale.

Below is a screenshot of my first block out. Already you can see our intent for this game.

Scale changed from this as we decided that we actually wanted the player to be able to go on the pavement areas and be able to go up and down the level instead of a linear progression.

By end of day one I had started creating the actual building assets and I had my road sorted. A good solid first day.

Day two for me was just the grunt work. Making the rest of the assets!

I tried to break my work up into 3 groups in order of importance: 1. The buildings 2. The dressing 3. Extra requirements

The buildings where the most important assets as they were the basis of our level. Basically our walls to create that street feel.

I created 7 variations. As you can see the silhouettes are pretty similar. A lot of the variations come from texturing and a few extra details.

Once I had create something - for example a window, I would iterate upon that shape/mesh to create something that felt different (without having to start from scratch). Each thing I made was built upon the previous creation. I feel like this is a great way to develop the style you are going for as well as save a bunch of time.

Next I needed to tackle the dressing assets. These again were split into two categories for me. Important game assets and just fun things. The important assets were ramps, lampposts, speedbumps and anything else that would impact/affect gameplay (positive and negative). After this I started to make more assets like cones, barrels and boxes which were just fun things for the player to knock over and populate the street with.

The final stage was the extra requirements - Maybe something we should have looked at earlier but tbh when you have such a large task something had to come last!

Extra requirements for me meant basically capping the levels. How are we going to surround the playable areas and block off areas in a visual way. Our solution for this was simply a tunnel.. Not the most visually pleasing but it just needed to be something that inferred a wider world.

The last thing to consider was the front areas of the playing area. We needed areas that the civilians could enter from in an organic way. A very simple solution to this (as time was getting short) was implying a park area beyond! I quickly created some modular pieces that meant we could place segments in unique ways to add some more variation in each level - allowing for multiple variations.

Very simple but can be pretty effective!

And finally a little explanation about textures. I'm a big fan of atlasing and using simple tiling textures when it comes to Ludum Dares. Its the fasted way to generate a good selection of materials. Even easier with this project we decided to go with a soft, mildly cartoony vibe meaning no need for normal maps or any other maps. Simply a diffuse would do! This saved a great deal of time compared to our other entries to Ludum Dare were we attempted full PBR workflows.

Below are the textures used on the environments (excluding the atlas alpha map for the signs - maybe a little too naughty for this post! ;))

Lighting and putting the levels together was a job we shared across the team. Each member getting to create a level of our own. We all loved getting involved in the creation of this game so it was great that we had the time to each contribute to this. Plus it meant more content for players to enjoy allowing us to add levels of difficulty as well.

Hope you enjoyed this post! And thanks for reading :smile: https://youtu.be/0NIqZB6LVqs

Please give Scooter Looter a go and let us know what you think! Can you beat the levels and not get caught?!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/scooter-looter