New Chiba City - Unreal Engine 4

Having worked in Unity for some time, I had always wanted to also learn Unreal Engine 4 - not only because of UE's reputation for graphical excellence, but also to see the core differences between the two engines. For my first foray into both UE4 and large-scale level design, I decided to also fulfill a long-held desire to put together a cyberpunk city level combining elements of my favourite films - Blade Runner, Akira, Ghost In The Shell (the original anime, not the live-action remake), the Patlabor films, Armitage III, The Animatrix etc.

 

There were three 'goals' I wanted to achieve with the level - the level would be built for a first-person view, there would be three accessible planes to the player (rooftops, street level and underground (subway)) and the level would run at 30 fps or above on my machine. To orient myself, I initially started by putting together a multi-tier, top-down 2D illustration of the level; showing both below ground, ground level and above ground (visible in video 3). Once I had a concrete idea of the overall layout of the level, I started putting together a moodboard of inspiration images and concept art to draw from.  Using the top-down map and the concept art, I started greyboxing to determine the size of the level and the routes available to the player, using basic cubes and a few BSPs. After, reaching an equilibrium between impressive architecture and playability I started dropping in assets and began to build the world. 

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In the midst of dialing down the the final look of the level, there was quite a bit more scope creep than I intended. Starting from having only a downtown/CBD type area, the project eventually grew to encompass approximately the equivalent of 14 large city blocks. While not all areas are accessible, the majority are open to the player to explore. In addition to the size of the level growing, I wanted to capture the feeling of visual over-stimulation that I feel society would naturally progress to at the onset of a cyberpunk age. This required about four times more assets that I had originally anticipated, but ended up providing the minutiae of detail for the level that I'm hoping shines through. Dilligent BSP use (I chose to make most of the assets in-engine), free 3D assets and the Epic Marketplace for asset packs helped alleviate a lot of the effort of having to model each item in the world. I originally gave myself a deadline of two weeks to complete the level, which eventually ended up ballooning into around a month's time - however by the time the deadline rolled around, the world was complete enough that I felt comfortable releasing it. This does, unfortunately, mean that there are still a lot of parts of the level which are incomplete, not to mention quite buggy. The mall, for example, currently sits abandoned but still accessible (check partway through video 2) while the larger of the flying ships often takes liberty with the direction it faces.

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Once the basic outline of the level was done and I knew there wasn't going to be much change to the architecture, I started programming the subway system (which is functional in-game), a dynamic day-night cycle, pedestrian AI, flying vehicles and other movement platforms in the level. Once everything was in and working, I started optimizing section by section. Unfortunately, I couldn't fully optimize before the deadline had come, but the optimization was enough to meet my objective of getting the level to run at 30fps consistently (sometimes even higher).

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At the end of the day, I'm hoping my vision of a cyberpunk world comes through in the videos of the level. While I still consider the level a work-in-progress, I think the results achieved compared to the time taken are pretty good; and it was definitely a mach-speed learning session in using Unreal - which has since become my favourite game engine to work in. It's a heck of an engine.