‫Hello and welcome.
‫In this lecture, we're going to be pulling apart the modular asset pack to figure out what building
‫blocks we've got and use that to put together our first design.
‫Let's dive in.
‫So here's the project.
‫I have closed it and reopen it.
‫And you can see we're in our dungeon level.
‫That's completely black at the moment.
‫So we need to have a think about how we're going to populate this level.
‫Well, first things first.
‫Let's go to our content draw.
‫And I want to open up the medieval dungeon demonstration level because we're going to pick this apart
‫and try and figure out how the modular system of assets works.
‫So the first thing to note is that it's quite hard to understand what's going on with all this moody
‫lighting going on.
‫So there's a button in the top left of the viewport that says Lit, and this is the default mode that
‫we're in.
‫But you can actually view the scene in an unlit mode or a wireframe or lots of other options here.
‫So if we click on unlit, you can see that this just shows us the textured surfaces of our meshes without
‫actually giving us any of the lighting to confuse things.
‫You could also have chosen wireframe and that doesn't even texture the surfaces, but it can be really
‫hard to figure out what's going on in this view.
‫So we're going to switch back to the unlit view instead.
‫And then the way I like to take apart these levels is to literally take them apart.
‫So I go, okay, well, this floor looks interesting.
‫Let's click on it and go, Oh, okay.
‫There there's the outlines of a chunk of floor.
‫This is what it means by being modular is that the floor is made up of loads of tiles that are all the
‫same size.
‫And if I wanted to check that out and see what size this is, then just move the tile and you're going
‫to see, okay, that's that's what the tile looks like.
‫Cool.
‫Okay, what else do we have?
‫What about this wall?
‫Is this something interesting?
‫Yeah.
‫Okay, so it's created another tile here that acts as the wall.
‫And you can see that actually the the plank of wood and the chains are all separate actors here entirely.
‫So you've got this wall and it looks like the wall is the same size as the tile.
‫So this is a modular set where things try to match up with each other.
‫They have the same set of standard sizes.
‫We've also got a ceiling panel, which is a similar size.
‫We've got these arch panels.
‫You can see I dip down a little bit and have a look at the arch panels.
‫You can see there's a couple of different building blocks.
‫It's very much like Lego.
‫If you've ever played with Lego, you've got a single piece, you've got a double piece, you've got
‫this triple piece here as well.
‫Then you've got the central block.
‫And what about these pillars?
‫Let's have a look at the pillar.
‫Yeah, that's just its separate thing.
‫And we've got the arches a separate as well.
‫Now you might want to be making a note of the name of these meshes so we can bring them in to our own
‫scene later.
‫So if I click on the floor, you can see that the floor mesh.
‫I click on General and scroll down to the static mesh selected and hover over it.
‫You can see it's cool, it's under the dungeon folder and it's called SGM Floor.
‫Now I did mention that the crypt is slightly different down below.
‫So down below we've got a slightly different looking floor.
‫And if I hover over the mesh there, it's called crypt floor.
‫It's actually slightly smaller, I think.
‫But we can easily check this out by going to a little four pane view that we can get to in our viewport.
‫The top right, there's a little four pane icon.
‫If you click on that, then that splits out our viewport into the 3D view that we're used to, but also
‫a top down, a right side and a back side view of our level.
‫And we can move around this to see what the different sizes of things are.
‫In fact, if you were to middle click in this view, you can see actually start counting in unreal units.
‫So I can try and select from the top to the bottom and see that the floor is 500 units or five meters
‫and I could go and have a look and it seems like the floor is the same in the upper levels.
‫So if I select a floor that is just a straightforward SM floor and then middle click and drag to the
‫bottom, you can see aha.
‫No it's not.
‫It looks like it is, but it's actually 600, so it's six meters.
‫So the upstairs works on a different scale to the downstairs and we'll have to just bear that in mind
‫that these are actually slightly different scales and we may want to choose to use just one of them
‫or multiple.
‫We can see that we've got stairs as a component that we can use.
‫They're modular as well.
‫So you can make the staircase as long as you like, like so.
‫And we can have a look at the ceiling height as well.
‫So if I take the back of you and I have a look at one of the crypt walls, so if I look down in the
‫crypt and select one of these walls like that, and you can see the mesh is called crypt wall.
‫And if I go and find that highlighted wall in one of my side views.
‫And we can check out how tall a wall is in the crypt.
‫Looks like it's 450 units versus perhaps a wall that's up in the dungeon.
‫Select a dungeon wall and we can see that the dungeon walls height is 600.
‫So much, much higher ceilings in the dungeon.
‫So let's take stock of what we have with this modular asset pack.
‫The main components here are floors, ceilings and walls.
‫These are essentially the building blocks of our level.
‫We could start off just by using floors, ceilings and walls to build out the vast majority of our level.
‫We can then pretty fy and beautify this by adding pillars and arches on the corners and on the edges
‫just to make it stick together.
‫Architecturally, we've also got these cell walls to build out cells inside our dungeons.
‫We've also got stairs.
‫These are architecturally obviously important.
‫If you want to have a multi level dungeon or crypt or whatever, then you're going to need to use stairs
‫to bridge the gap between the two.
‫And then we've got lots and lots of variations on the theme.
‫So we've got walls, but we've got different types of walls as well, so that it's not monotonously
‫always looking the same.
‫So with all these building blocks, I'd like you to design your own level and here's the brief.
‫So remember the sizes of your modular assets.
‫We've got 600 wide elements.
‫We're going to be doing basically a floor plan design of our level.
‫So think about the sizes, whether you're going to want to use crypt elements or whether you're going
‫to want to use dungeon elements and include at least two levels so that we have somewhere to use our
‫staircase and a little bit of intrigue and interest and create multiple areas blocked off by some sort
‫of obstacle doors or secret walls, secret passages, a trapped or that sort of thing, which we can
‫later add a moving component to so that we can open it up and the player can explore the level more
‫fully and ask yourself, what is the puzzle going to be?
‫What's going to make it challenging for the player to find the way through your level and explore your
‫design?
‫So pause video, have a go, be creative and be inspired by other students work.
‫So once you've made a design, it doesn't matter if you don't think it's particularly good, go and
‫share it in the discussions for this lecture pause video and have a go.
‫Hello and welcome back.
‫So I think it's quite instructive for us to take a look at literally the first drawing I drew of the
‫level that we're going to be building.
‫And it's pretty rough.
‫So I just warn you, it needs some talking over.
‫Basically, this is as rough as it gets for a level design sketch, right?
‫So we've got over here the entrance doors and I just kind of drew a pair of doors.
‫My drawing's not particularly good here.
‫As you can see, I had a table and chair just like they had in the demo level.
‫And then I've got four cells here and we know that we've got this kind of blocky level design.
‫So we've got one square here, then an empty square, then a square here, two empty squares in the
‫middle, and then a square here, empty, square, square, etc..
‫Then I've got a staircase that leads down to the next level and we've got a slightly smaller set of
‫things down here in the crypt.
‫What I had originally considered, and I don't think I'm going to do this actually in my final design,
‫but I had considerably have a corridor that goes both ways and it initially looks like where do you
‫go?
‫And there's this actual secret pit here that drops you through, and then you've got the challenge of
‫trying to find your way out in this under corridor here and in the under corridor.
‫You have to go and steal something.
‫It gets blocked off by some rail over here.
‫And so you need to put a vase in its place.
‫But then you've also got to push a coffin from or pull this table over here so that you can step up
‫out of the secret pit again.
‫So I had a few ideas of the different kind of puzzles that we were going to do, but I have decided
‫to simplify this down to just the corridor that leads to this little section with a rail that blocks
‫it off.
‫Anyway, that's my very basic, basic sketch.
‫Obviously you can spend more time on this, but it's just to get an idea.
‫And once we get in and building our level, you may find that your ideas change.
‫So I'll see you in the next video.