A workflow to make game levels that look great, THE EASY WAY!

One of my life long ambitions is finally coming to fruition!

If you follow my work, you know I’ve been working on a new environment art tutorial for quite some time, provisionally called “Spanish Town Tutorial” so far.

My ambition with this tutorial was to record my entire process of making an actual game level, which is something that I couldn’t find anywhere else. There are many excellent tutorials on how to make environments, scenes, props, etc… but none I could find that would guide you through the creation of an entire game level, especially your OWN game level.

My biggest challenge with this tutorial so far, and the most time-consuming for sure, has been to convert my process into something that can easily be understood, and I think I finally got there :)

In this post, I want to explain how the tutorial is structured and what you can expect from it.

The challenge for contemporary environment artists

Nowadays, there’s an incredible wealth of information available online. One can literally learn anything for free. The difficulty is having an optimized path to follow, something that shows one how all the pieces come together. It can be very overwhelming to start a new project and don’t know how to proceed. And that’s exactly my goal with this tutorial. It’s a framework that you can use to create all kinds of environments, while taking the time you need to accomplish each stage.

If you are a beginner, this will be a great way to get good fast. If you are a seasoned veteran, this workflow will allow you to tweak your process, and you will get faster, better, and able to handle more complexity.

The best analogy to following this tutorial/course will be like going to the gym with a personal trainer by your side. Instead of spending your neurons figuring out which exercises to do each day, you just have to show up and follow the program, put all your energy into the training/work/learning, and the results will come naturally with time.

What can you expect?

With this tutorial, you will have access to a program that you can use to build your own game level, with your own ideas, and at your own pace, following an easy-to-understand path that will get more complex increasingly and allow you to master each aspect of level creation well, before getting overwhelmed halfway through and giving up.

Because you will be creating your own level based on your idea, it will also make it more likely that you will stick through to the end and complete your project. As I said in a previous post, making environments is hard and takes time! Don’t expect to watch a tutorial and become a grandmaster in 3 months… it takes time, hard work, and perseverance to accomplish your goals!

How is the course structured?

This tutorial is structured very differently than other tutorials that hold your hand and tell you where to click so you can replicate the results easily. That format is great for learning specific skills, such as, making props, making textures, etc… but that format breaks down when it comes to tackling large projects, and I learned that the hard way as I was structuring this tutorial.

The course is divided into weeks, and the goal is for you to spend as long as you need on each stage before moving forward.

It might be that you are a beginner and will need some time figuring out modeling tools in the beginning, or it might be that when you get to the props section, that’s something you have never done before, and you need to spend more time there. That’s totally cool! You can take the time to go find that information somewhere and come back later to finish your environment. The important thing is to only move to the next chapter once you finished the current one. That will guarantee you can focus on one thing at a time and not get overwhelmed.

WIP Course structure.

There’s also no way that I can cover every single aspect of environment art creation, and it’s also probable that you might want to make your environment in a different art style than I did. That’s totally cool because the tutorial is structured to be flexible. If there’s something you need to learn that I didn’t cover, you can take some time off to learn whatever you need elsewhere and then come back to the process.

This process is also engine agnostic. Even though I use Unreal (and a lot of things I show are Unreal-specific), the same concepts carry over to Unity, Cryengine, and other 3d engines. You will just have to adapt some tools and techniques, but the process will be the same. This workflow is the same one that I’d use to make a racing level, a soccer stadium, or a Spanish Town environment :)

The end result you can expect

If you follow the course, stage by stage, by the end of one year (give or take), you should have an environment art piece that you will be very proud to have made! This piece will reflect who you are, what you are passionate about, and your dedication to environment art. If you follow everything, I’m sure this year will be a quantum leap in your career.

The content of this tutorial is the stuff that, without a guide, it can take you years and years of frustration and unfocused effort to learn.

This will be a project that will challenge you and will be hard at times, but if you persevere to the end, you will have an artwork that you will be very proud of and that will open many doors to you.

My long-term commitment to this project

The project is by no means complete yet, but it’s totally workable already. The version 1.0 releases to everyone who pre-ordered by the end of this week. I’m still not sure when it will be available publically, but I’m hoping that in the coming months. I want to make sure it’s as smooth as possible before I release it.

I will listen to feedback and requests in the coming weeks and tweak and update the material as needed. Once it goes public, and there’s a demand for more subjects that I didn’t cover, I will be very glad to include more content. This will be an organic project that will evolve with time.

This is definitely a long-term project, both for me and for anyone who embarks on it, and I’m sure that the rewards we will reap will be totally worth the effort.

In the same way that if you choose to make an investment and acquire this course, I will invest my time in making sure you succeed :)

I’m very excited to finally get this out of the door and to start working directly with you!

I honestly cannot wait to see all the amazing environments that you will create following this course!

Thiago