30.09.2022 - Development Diary

After going through the asset packs, I got a renaissance Italy feel from them so began research paintings from the period for house interior design. I'm also looking at the layout of Venice and how the buildings are right up against the canal.

The Docks

The dockside ground has been difficult. The options were cobbled stone with moss and mould on the or a more smooth granite stone. As I'm learning towards the renaissance period I went with the smoother stone for the docks. But I used the tile ground from one asset pack and the albedo, metalic, normal hight and occulsion materials from another asset pack.

The docks are set at an angle to the rest of the map so I cut that away in sketchup and straightened it out, imported it into unity via blender.

But I had to do it again because several faces weren't visible in unity. I took away the buildings and reduced the entire map down from 1.5 to 0.75 of its original size as it was just to big and would have increased development time.

The docks are supposed to be two to three buildings deep but at the 1.5 size it would be five buildings deep. Keeping it that size would increase the number of assets and having even more buildings the player can't enter.

Resizing it to 0.75 reduced it to the blockout size is the best move.

The Lighthouse

I included a lighthouse off in the distance and so I took some reference images of light houses and built a small rocky island with a light house on it.

Dockside ground has been completed. I added the boats for scale but I may also keep them in.

I've been playing with the idea of rasing the upper dock to a higher elevation, if it doesn't work out I'll change it back. I'll have to add stairs and raise the existing ground but I may encounrter some issues with the edges that may cause me to rethink it.