Warcraft Campaign Milestone 2: Blockout

This week was dedicated to blocking out the map. With other editors, it was easy enough to get a feel for where everything would be, so it wasn't super critical to make sure I had a blockout first. However, given the camera angle of an RTS, it was important to me to make sure that no matter where the player was they never felt lost.

As such, repeated playthroughs, consistent fine-tuning, and mild deviations from the papermap were key to finishing this milestone. The goal was to have the village feel like a typical Warcraft III dungeon while still taking place in a village. Additionally, while there are tilesets for "dungeon" cities, I still wanted the terrain to be hills and grass rather than city walls and bricks.

This is where some of the challenge came from. Using walls as- well, walls- is a lot easier than using buildings. Rather than a very finite barrier that the player can see around and understand, using props means that many of them have to have their own blocking values added manually. It also means that it won't be a perfect square outline of black that indicates the player can't move there, but instead varying sized buildings that cut off the camera if not placed properly.

I constantly looked back to a great Blizzard campaign level for ideas on how to make a location feel like a village while keeping it explorable and interesting. I'm sure much more tweaking will be needed in the next milestone for cosmetics, as each different building added will bring its own camera issues. However, I'm excited and confident that by next week the level itself will be done and it will be onto mechanics!