Blueprints and Block-outs: Designing Warden CliffsAfter spending the better part of 2 years researching, iterating and designing the layout of Warden Cliffs, I realized it's not easy dreaming up an entire town.
I decided to start out making a list of vignettes and points of interest that I want the player to experience. I wanted to player to feel like they were in a small 1950's American town.
So I did lots of research, starting with watching an endless array of movies and tv shows from the era to get a feeling for those worlds. The Twilight Zone and the Andy Griffith Show ended up being great references for this period. I roamed Google Earth looking at the layouts of small towns and ancient walled cities. I used procedural city generators to see what would organically develop. I studied urban planning at the turn of the century. I emailed city planners asking for advice.
I'll share a few iterations of the layout which were eventually blocked out and prototyped in engine.
I started off with a typical grid layout. This was heavily inspired by Back to the Future and Pleasantville. I explored the block-out and found myself easily getting lost and bored with the 90 degree turns.
Taking a turn at making the layout feel more organic, now. After the block out and exploration, it took me about 5 minutes to walk from one end to the other and while I liked the lack of 90 degree turns, it felt too foreign.
At this point I'm about 20 iterations in and over a year of design, block out and exploration with every iteration telling myself "this is the one!".
At about this time, I took a trip to Walt Disney World and dove head-first into the design of vintage Disney. I liked the experience of theme parks, how the hub-and-spoke design felt organic but also organized. You don't get lost and people enjoy walking through them. After a few more iterations, I realized that I would still need to have staples of urban planning in order to make my vignettes work in the theme park layout; there still needed to be a town square, row houses, streets with cul-de-sacs and farms for it to feel like a real place and not some fantasy land.
And this is what I landed on.
My original block-outs were pretty rough, being composed of white boxes and roads. I took it a step further and blocked out buildings and large props with an extra level of detail to get a real feel the world.
I spent a lot of time in VR exploring the world to get a feel for scale and to make sure it didn't feel like a chore to walk from one end to the other. I'll talk later about how I found the sweet spot and why I decided on creating a small open world.
Thanks for reading.
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