Raven Red, level design news

I am new to level design, so by now this single level model is the biggest model i ever made.

Things turned out to be not as i expected. Designing levels is not just drag&drop an asset everywhere, and you are free to go. NOPE. Mobile games has so much nuances that you will drown in the world of pain when you realise how much you have to redone now. But thats not the topic for now.

i`ve wasted a lot of paper drawing the way the player will walk through level, and when i finally had a primirive view on a walkthrough line, a made a scetch of what i wanted.

I wanted a freezers room, a lockers room, a little conference room, kitchen, library, tech room where the mechs are contained and the main exit - big round room with a collapsed ceiling and nature taking over it.

But when the work started i realised that :

1) You have to tile you model with actual wireframe. Because every texture should be stacked in one gigantic texture map. More maps means more materials, means more drawcalls, means mobiles dying in horrible suffering.

this is like 1\8 of whole texture, and there are 3 of them wich is BAAAD as i know now.

2) you should pack this textures in one map as tight as possible, but always leave some space for adding more - you never know what cool ctuff will get in your head when you get to the modelling the next room.

When you run out of space but desperately need to add something, UV`s on those 140 models should be moved. And you cry in vain, wiping you not-manly tears.

3) Unity static batching is not a saviour. Even if it works and save some drawcalls, it is still slower then just having one horrible gigantic mesh with only one material.I dont know how it works, but its the reason you cant just drag and drop stuff all around.

You got to pack it, merge it, combine it. With this way It gave me exellent 60 fps on a 130$ samsung with 4 static meshes and one mat in scene, 70 000 verts in all.

4) If you will create every room from scratch you will get old and die, before you finish, of course.

So - no more unique modelling as with the room above. And here we come to :

5) Blocks. As obvious it is, i did not get it from start. Every piece of work you do should be reusable. Wich means there should be a lot of blocks with the same lengths to connect with each other so you would only ctrl+C ctrl+V them everywhere, making variation editing after.

So by the end a had all this, and thats only, like, half :

I just started with randomly created plane, saying, you sir, will be a measure for everything from now.

Then i just copied the floor squares making rooms sceletons and then attached all blocks like legos.

So much fun at first, so much dreaming about killing yourself after 1000 blocks placed.

But result came out so juisy and tasty i just gotta show it !

In the result map became twice bigger than it was designed. Its hard to stop when you like whats coming out, heh.

Thats all for now !