I'm mapping out the Residential sector.
It's becoming a congruent area. Previously, I wanted to split it up into smaller bits to make easier to manage.
But I found this a bit problematic. First, I couldn't take my imagination into it. I couldn't invent what corridor that was to follow because I just didn't know what it was about.
Second, the idea that we jump from one mini-scene to another might have seriously impeded the stealth/combat gameplay. I imagined that the combat gameplay would be played out in a wide area where the player character would be able to avoid the robots by being clever with corners and hiding places. That entailed an 'arena' of sorts, and sequential corridors don't the bill.
As an adult, I can't take for granted that some creative techniques don't necessarily give you the tools that encourage to 'follow the fun' and actually be creative. The making of this Residential sector has given me some interesting discoveries about myself.
I didn't have any specific rationale on their placement on the map. I simply just drew out the CTB, my first centre of interest, and placed everything else around it
Usually at this point I would feel a bit anxious. This anxiety almost always revolved around the rationale of something, of whether there is a mechanical reason why this here building is here and not there. Sometime I can have anxiety about whether this map will work well in isometric perspective.
But I wasn't anxious this time. I believe it's mainly because I just made the CTB as my focal point. And the logic of where things were placed became less important. The level itself was more satisifed with having a centre intereset than it was about having some rationale of why things were put where they were. After all, in the real world, things end up inexplicable locations, too.
After the top-down map was drawn out, I jumped into 3d to execute it. This normally fills me with anxiety, too because I've been in this road countless of times before. I didn't actually know how to express the top-down map in a way that would excite me.
Then, when I was figuring out a way to express doors/doorways, I unlocked something in my brain. And its importance surprised me.
For a while now, when I usually want to depict a door, I create a solid rectangle and place it flush against the wall; that's the representation of the door. Whilst it certainly looks like a door, it doesn't look like it's trying hard to be one. Understandably, I've always been unhappy about this.
So I tried reversing it by modelling a doorway instead:
That looks better certainly. It looks better because it feels there's some volume at play, that the door/doorway depicts a recess and that leads you into the building; it reads much better. But why did I say it was so imporant?
What it really does is that it helps my imagination move forward. It's a step towards the correct impression of how the level should be. Obviously, it is not the final shape, but when used to generically populate every door entry, it brings my imagination to a level where it has something more to chew on.
This brings me to the creative techniques, and specifically to greyboxing. A greybox is literally what you see in the screenshots above. You might have heard this word in the game dev scene. In greyboxing, you place rudimentary shapes (primitives) into the scene as stand-ins. As you can see, that is what I'm apparently doing, and yet in deeper sense it isn't at all.
For a long time I had struggled with greyboxing because as an activity it felt like a creative dead-end. Perhaps it's because in greyboxing the designer is told to 'play around'. However, it wasn't actually fun to play around with boxes; I don't play that way. On its own greyboxing was not feeding my brain with something to play on and imagine further. Cylindres were literally just cylindres, and boxes were literally boxes; grey was literally grey, and though I did use greyboxing for programmatic aspects of the game, it was a creative dead-end.
Then the doorway modelling happened and I learned two things.
Greyboxing is too trivial and self-explanatory an idea to be worth any name given to it, and that I should never have paid attention to it at all.
Second, and more importantly, find ways that feed your imagination; find ways to play off the work and make the work play off of you. Your work should speak to you and cause you to engage with it all the time. Let's say: if I moved this wall or that, or added something, do I think 'wouldn't be great if this were a place where the homeless hung out"? In this case, creative activity is prompting new ideas back.
When I look at the map now, I can see how I'm feeding off of it. I've since introduced more shapes because I can start the see how the level itself it going to look like. But when I began I needed to see something much more then boxes.
There's also a problem of too much detailing. Once I sketched a medium-sized level as an isometric drawing. I thought that it would be easier to imagine and design the scene in pencil. This was not actually the case for me.
Drawing offered me no creative advantages, and only made my workflow more tedious; I still turned out unsatisfying designs. But what really was the problem here was the same problem as greyboxing: all the while I'm drawing my level, I'm feeling extremely uninspired.
It's not my disposition that's uninspired. Instead, the drawing is not talking back to me. As I'm trying to give it its form, is it feeding anything creative back to me?
I see now that whilst it's not simply about which process is better. Whether I'm doing things in blocks or detailing, following workflows might blind us to what this is all in aid of. For me, every creative process must elicit more imagination from me. Drawing is not always the answer, and neither is industry advice.
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