Level Design

Night Map

Technical Summary:

​With the final significant landmarks of the gathering phase map added, we were finally able to begin adding elements to the night map to make it look like the level had been conquered by the Redcoats, and making it fit with the overall design and aesthetic that would go with the 16 - 1700s style. Being a game that heavily revolves around stealth based mechanics, we wanted to achieve a similar element of providing cover to the player, so that they could remain undetected without having to use the invisibility and stamina resources they have. This worked well with the crate model, working as a simple model we could easily stack on top of each other and together. We also developed some standalone assets, such as the barricades and the canons to act as siege weaponry, to just build the story of what the Redcoats intentions with the town truly is.

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We also wanted to keep some similarities between the Day and Night, not changing the significant areas too much so that they became unrecognisable to the player, but we still wanted to really create the sense of the Redcoats have successfully taken over. Several of our assets are made in a way that we can easily change some of the materials to be different colours and styles to remove the need to totally re-texture or change the model further. Since the trees and pots could easily have the material instance modified, we could change the colours a lot to be anything, but went with a red to fit with their colours a lot better. We also switched the holograms to be Redcoats saluting as a sort of propaganda element to the level. Since a lot of the alternative designs were separate assets from the original, instead of placing the new asset several times and copying the location of the old one, I used the replace asset button to help make this process a lot faster and easier.

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Finally, to make the scene feel like it was set at night, we modified the lighting to sell this effect. We once again used the Environment Light Mixer to achieve the lighting effects, and modified the intensity of the scenes lighting, but modified the sky atmosphere to create our blue lighting. When we did some research into how the environment of Mars looked during its night period, we discovered that the lighting was a blue colour, so we wanted to recreate this in engine. To help with this, we messed with the Sky Atmosphere's Rayleigh, Mie, and Absorption, changing the colours to help create this bright alien blue, as well as helping change the sun itself to be blue.

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