Planning our first project – the brief

For purposes of demonstration we're going to be working on a hypothetical game as part of a team. We have a design document and the art lead has tasked us with creating the exterior map for the "Volcano Lair" of the evil Doctor Yes and his sidekick, Professor Maybe. Our game features the propitious handsome hero "Guy Goodwin" on a mission to thwart the evil plans of an organization called "DEAD Certainty". The team lead is really enthused and promises it will be great, not really.

Our task is to turn concept and sketches into a detailed virtual environment using GROME as part of the toolset so we can export it for different game engines.

Already we can take away some information about what we can build. The characters sound over the top, the tone of this game is clearly humored, larger than life. It's a first-person game meaning ground detail will need to be pretty high in player accessible areas. This part of the game takes place on an island which has the following key locations as listed in our brief:

• A volcano (with interior access via a bunker)

• Professor Maybe's villa or laboratory

• A power station

• Coastal docks

• River with a boat event

• Airfield (with getaway plane)

Creating a rough sketch of our map, we get a feel for relative positions and scale of the terrain we need. We keep main story locations clustered around the origin of the world to reduce precision problems on the destination platforms.

What we can take away from such a sketch is the rough outline of major features, in this case the shape of the island. We can import this at a later stage and use it as a mask in GROME when creating the heightmap.

Generating terrain can be done procedurally which is what we're going to do for our game example. Then we'll use our sketch to create masks we can import into GROME. These work just like masks in programs like Photoshop and GIMP.

If we need to go back and change the position of key locations (for example; the project lead might want to move two places closer together to speed up story progression), we can do this quite easily in GROME using masks or a clone brush tool which we will explore later.