Riverwood - Unity
Recreation | Open Town Hub
Experience:
This was a project I did on the side separate from college class and homework. I wanted to merge two game styles together. The finished product was creating a town from Skyrim using assets similar to Warcraft.
Skyrim's Riverwood takes place in a cluttered forest with Norse mythology inspiration. While Warcraft uses a look closer to a generic fantasy style most people come to expect and with a hint of a cartoony art style.
The final product here resulted in less clutter than Skyrim has so the openness matches what you would see from Warcraft III but keeping the town busy enough to look lived in.
Project Breakdown
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2 weeks (roughly 4 or 5 hours a day)
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Developed in spare time
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Created using Unity
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Recreating a Skyrim town using assets that look akin to Warcraft
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Focus on merging to styles of games, and creating an open ended town for players to approach from multiple directions
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Current State - Finished
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Asset Store/Plugins used:
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Modular Fantasy Village - EpicForge3d
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Standard Assets 2018.4 - Unity Technologies
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Reference:
Finished Product:
Reflection
The two biggest elements that I gathered from creating this map was environmental storytelling, terrain, and readability.
Riverwood is a perfect town to begin players in. It's lushes, busy, and full of life. It makes for a good starter when beginning a new adventure in a game. Elements such as movement make the place feel alive even without NPCs such as the water wheel or windmill. But it wasn't until I added little elements like barrels, crates, and misc. items that added clutter to bring the world to life.
One of my biggest struggles was mastering the terrain tool. It's one thing to added landscape, it's another to make terrain fit naturally with the environment. Skyrim's towns are BUSY with a lot of foliage, but Warcraft leaves more positive space in it's games. World of Warcraft needs this for readability through a sea of players, and the old RTS games need this to see the units through the play-spaces.
In the end, the compromise between the two was leaving plenty of open spaces to contain the readability from Warcraft's games while using Riverwood as a template for it's beauty and liveliness.