Fools Rush In - Part Six
Sleeves rolled up, this is where the work begins.
Where to start? I looked at Section 1. Figure Out a Backstory as I went along and that's enough to keep us amused for now. In with Section 2 is the scary notion of changing the player persona so we'll deal with that in the only sensible way and completely ignore it for the time being.
Section 3. Create the Map Geometry is looking like a good place to start. I'm pretty happy with the notion of butchering one of the levels that came with the game to save time and work. Some mod-makers will scoff at such wholesale avoidance of mappmaking. For many, creating new levels is the essence of making a mod. Not for me however, not at this moment in time. I'm inexperienced at it and it'll take ages to make an entirely new environment and I want to get to the writing part.
I briefly mentioned 'Sulferon' earlier, a desert level. This is what is looks like in the game, complete with the fort-like structure you are tasked with first capturing and then defending:
The fort is too big and too familiar we decided, so let's delete it and the host of other bits and pieces that go with it. Here's just the desert without the fort:
Now we need to model some kind of bunker/shelter that the Angels will use as their base while they wait for the dropship to arrive. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about how the mesh was created (unless anybody *really* wants to know) but here it is in the map:
It's a kind of circular bunker with a firing step and an inner room for communications equipment, a much tighter and intimate space that means we can have all of our NPCs in the same vicinity at the same time when we need to. Here are some more shots of the structure (I'm going to call it 'the foxhole' from now on because that's the name that's stuck in my head, even if it's a far more elaborate structure than the hole in the ground you might normally associate with the term):
So quite rapidly we've got a stage to put our actors on. Sure for the most part it's ripped-off and cobbled together, but it's more than adequate for our needs at this moment in time. Later on we might add more custom work or texture the terrain differently, probably add more details, but the important thing is that we can move ahead with the rest of the project without waiting for something as grand as the original fort to be made. Anything we choose to do later will be icing on the cake and we don't have to sacrifice momentum right now to make it happen.
Next time we'll look at creating the timed events that will mark the pace of the hour that our game will last for.
Comments: on the _blackbored