Week 2 Meeting

Hey what's up guys. First of all, I want to thank you guys for being so "hands on" with the project and keeping up to date with what's going on and for the good attitude overall. Also thanks for posting your ideas and opinions on the blog, that's also been very useful.

Now I will make a quick recap of the meeting today. I will address the subjects that we talked about in the same order the meeting plan had them stated .

First of all (Paper Map):
It is crucial that in order to create a level we have a paper map. This will provide order and flow into the level. I came up with a paper map, that will suffer a couple of tweaks after what we talked today and depending on the overall concept that Gene will make of the level (I will talk more about this a bit later) the changes will mainly involve scale of the main city, building placement and size.

Here's a scan of the paper map:



Concept art:
Second thing in the agenda was...(agenda haha sounds kinda fancy, anyways...) the concept art. We talked about what we had so far, how would we improve it and what needed to be done by Thursday.

We talked about the overall concept that Gene made of the level and how we are going to modify that into the style that we want. The first concept had a bit too much of a "mine" and wood look, and we are going to shift away from that and embrace more gnomish, and technological elements. We are going to keep the layout and the mine carts and all that cool stuff, but there is a list of things or ideas that we are going to follow with the whole level, when concepting and when modeling as well as some other ideas for the level. This is the list:

-The main material is metal, with some wood
-The tones and materials used will be, gray, blue, green, golden tones. Using materials like copper, brass, iron, etc. (instead of the brown wood-like tones we had in the 1st concept).
-There's going to be big, clunky, "clockwork-like" gears.
-All the main structures must look majestic and pretty.
-We are going to keep the mine cart tracks that go through the island and connecting with the sides, we are just going to reduce the amount of tracks so it doesn't look just like a mine town.
-We are going to have a big fancy bridge that connects the cliff side with the main island. The bridge will have again lots of gears, be really grand and majestic, as well as including a cool pulley system.
-Our 4 main vistas are going to be: a) the bridge, b) the entrance to the mine (where the witchdoctor* will be), c) the town square and d) the overall thing, the crater with the main island.
-There's going to be some geysers in the level to support the idea of the volcano in the background.
-Very industrial, and "inventor-like" feel to the whole level. Emphasize this using hydraulic arms, gears for windows, pipes and steam powered and crystal powered (I will explain the crystal thing in a second) mechanisms.
-There will be a tall tower in node 3 (the second smaller island).
-The island in the middle will be beneath the mouth if the crater, but above the path height. As well as surrounded by a wall that is taller than the player for optimization purposes.
-There will be waterfalls falling from the main island because there is a geyser that flows on the inside of the main island, and drips out as waterfalls. This is how the gnomes get their drinking water.
-The door in the houses will be bigger in proportion because even though the house is small for gnomes, the door is bigger to allow more races to get in.
- We will NOT model interior of ANY of the buildings.
- The town and all the elemnts in the townwill be powered by crystals that charge up with energy that is purified by the statue. This is a key element of the story and I will explain it more in detail on Thrusday because it's kinda long, but very intresting and cool. (Maybe I'll write it up tomorrow when I have a bit more of time.)

*We might change the race if the witchdoctor to something else yet to be determined because we're not sure if the erudite (being a scholar and all) would turn into a witchdoctor and stuff, so we all have to think about what race will the witchdoctor be.

So that was all we talked about the concept, I know a lot of progress, that's why important that you come to the team meetings. Only three more things to go, the asset list, the time schedule for the work and the stuff we need to get done by Thursday.

(I will put the rest of the stuff in a separate post cause this is getting ridiculously long haha)
All the files are already in the dropbox including the schedule and the asset list.