CryENGINE 3 Game Development: Beginner's Guide: Discover how to use the CryENGINE 3 free SDK, the next-generation, real-time game development tool with this book and ebook.

In the previous chapter, we saw that majority of the games created on the CryENGINE SDK have historically been first-person shooters containing a mix of sandbox and directed gameplay. If you have gone so far as to purchase a book on the use of the CryENGINE 3 SDK, then I am certain that you have had some kind of idea for a game, or even improvements to existing games, that you might want to make. It has been my experience professionally that should you have any of these ideas and want to share or sell them, the ideas that are presented in a playable format, even in early prototype form, are far more effective and convincing than any PowerPoint presentation or 100-page design document.

As mentioned earlier, the CryENGINE 3 SDK has a huge amount of out-of-the-box features for creating games.

Let's begin by following a few simple steps to make our first game world.

Before proceeding with this example, it's important to understand the features it is displaying; the level we will have created by the end of this chapter will not be a full, playable game, but rather a unique creation of yours, which will be constructed using the first major features we will need in our game. It will provide an environment in to which we can design gameplay.

With the ultimate goal of this chapter being to create our own level with the core features immediately available to us, we must keep in mind that these examples are orientated to compliment a first-person shooter and not other genres. The first-person shooter genre is quite well defined as new games come out every year within this genre. So, it should be fairly easy for any developer to follow these examples.

In my...

Let's follow a few simple steps to create our own level:

You must have created a new map to follow this example.

Having sufficiently beaten the terrain system to death through explanation, let's get on with what we are most interested in, which is creating our own heightmap to use for our game:

There are still two other methods we have not yet explored for creating terrain. Before experimenting with either of these, I recommend that you create a new level.

Generating procedural terrain

Use the Tools menu in the Terrain Editor and click on Generate Terrain; you can modify many parameters when generating new terrain procedurally like this:

Applying a good set of terrain layers depends heavily on the environment in which you wish to create your map. In this particular example, we will use a somewhat straightforward setup of rocks, forest, grass, mud, sand, and underwater.

Without further ado, let's bring some life to the map we have been working on.

Now, the time has come to adjust the overall lighting of our level. The fastest and easiest way to achieve a huge variety of atmospheres and settings is by using the Time of day feature in CryENGINE.

The sun in CryENGINE is approximated by a colored, directional light without distance attenuation. This is important to understand as its properties are similar to that of a regular light, and properties such as color and specular level can be adjusted. There is an important distinction, however, to the sun and other lights in CryENGINE, as the sun uses a technology called cascaded shadow maps.

In this chapter, we've found out that gameplay needs an environment in order to take place, and so the creation and design of a level's environment is a critical factor in developing top-quality games. The level's environment is just as important as character design and presents several unique challenges to designers.

Designing levels breaks down into two distinct parts. The first of which is the look and feel of the level's environment, which we've gone over in a good amount of detail in this chapter. The second, which we will explore in the next chapter, is the design and challenge of the play space itself. The whole purpose to this chapter was to provide the space and ambience to host the various challenges of AI enemies, puzzles, and trials within our game.

Having made an interesting environment, let's fill it with some gameplay, using entities and objects essential to making our first game example!