A Very Flat Place

The goal of the last couple of weeks has been locking in the park layout with final assets. The first step in this process was figuring out the terrain. I've relied on displacement techniques or UE's terrain tools in the past, but my approach this time is lower-tech. I sculpted a pretty detailed terrain broadly representative of the area's geographical features. Hollow Hills is a real area in the Mojave, so I've got plenty of satellite and photo ref to work with. I cut chunks out of that big terrain sculpt which were UV-ed LOD-ed etc.. The result is a few square-ish terrain carpets that I can smoosh together as needed.

One of the big geography-related challenges from a level design perspective is that the area is very flat, making it potentially boring from a traversal standpoint with uninterrupted sightlines in all directions. Once you get closer to the mountains things get more interesting, but for narrative reasons I wanted to stick to the flatter areas. The superficial unremarkability of the location is a key element of the story, what's lurking underneath is the attraction. Hollow Hills is kind of an anti-Zion National Park (The real Hollow Hills is actually a fascinating place to visit but that's beside the point). There's a long history, especially along the highways of the southwestern U.S., of making destinations from non-places. Or perhaps more accurately systematically striping places of their meaning in order to build back a fantasy.

My work-in-progress solution to the flatness problem comes from the narrative: Decades of excavation needed to take place to get at the valuable resource for which the park was eventually constructed. It follows that all the soil and rock needed somewhere to go. The first place was a large spoil tip which is now the center of the park. When that pile got too unwieldy, dirt was packed behind retaining walls creating terraces. This work was initially carried out in secret under the cover of researching methods for underground storage of strategic oil reserves. The area was converted to a public park decades later in the period when the player comes to visit.

Navigating around these terraces and excavation sites make for what is hopefully a more interesting exploration experience. Earthworks and other land art-type experiences were added over time to make the park into a cultural as well as a scientific destination. These increasingly elaborate artworks also hint at the influx of private capital laying claim to the site.

I'm trying to bring the whole park layout 'up to the same level' in terms of detail and specificity before moving on.  Since the park is one big contiguous space this isn't too difficult to keep track of. In the past I've had a bad habit of focusing too much on early or otherwise exceptional areas while neglecting others until late in development.

Surfacing

I'm starting to address colors and surfacing. I'm using a muted sandy palate and naturally weathered materials that blend with the surrounding landscape. This will contrast with the more abstract, bold and surreal sequences outside the park. I'm mostly using tiling and procedural textures with a few hand-painted assets in key areas. I added an adjustable world-position gradient into the base material which grounds all tiling/procedural materials better into the world.

Thinking About Dirt

When I was researching building materials for the park, I came across the technique of rammed earth construction. It's basically what it sound like; dirt packed tightly into some kind of framework, sometimes with mixins for extra stability. I like the sedimentary look of some of the references; time is made visible and tactile in all the distinct layers. The geological quality blurs distinctions between manmade architecture and ageless natural processes.

With the ground in place, I could start building back up, replacing temp layout with final assets. These models are intentionally a bit simple with the expectation that I can greeble them up later with structural elements as needed. I'm going for a blocky or slab-like look for most of the park architecture incorperating hillsides and excecated area where possible. The forms are meant to look functional and monumental at the same time.