3D Environments Mind Map
I have created a mind map that looks at 4 different levels within my game and the environments that I want for them. Even though 3 out of the 4 levels are city environments, they are all still very different from each other.
The 1st level of the game is set in the City of Dawl. This is the city where the player will go through the tutorial and first interact with the world and the characters. As a first level, I wanted it to look quite nice and inviting, before getting to some of the harder levels where the aesthetic can be a bit gritty and darker to match the difficulty increase. This city is very inspired by the city in Mirror's Edge, which has a very futuristic look to it that goes against the recent trend of making futuristic cities look dark and apocalyptic. Mirror's Edge uses bright whites and reds to decorate the city-scape.
From Dawl, the player would be able to get on a train to travel to the other cities.
Frison Bay would be a sunny beach / seaside city, loosely based on LA. It would have a bright colour palette, using yellows and bright blues to give it a fun, sunny look. The beach are would be quite big, with multiple interactive elements for the player. I would make a lot of palm trees and wide roads with big white buildings.
Okolina, the games title city, would be a very nature based level. While it would still be a city, it would look very different from all the other cities in the game, as the city is built into the natural environment - treehouses, buildings inside mountains and behind waterfalls, etc. The colour palette for Okolina would contain a lot of green, browns and blues. In my games narrative, Okolina is the last place in the world were nature like this can be seen (rather than artificial / man-made green areas).
Meldonis would be a 1920's / 1930's style city, inspired by San Francisco and New York City. The city is still in the future (as the whole game is), but it would be stylised as 20's / 30's, taking insipration from the Art Deco movement and using a colour palette of browns, oranges, silvers, yellows. Similar to how the Fallout series is set in the future, but has an american 1950's aesthetic. I want to mix old arcitexture with new technology in this environment, so I think it would be a really fun level to make.