Hello people. I'm kicking off a new series called Brick by Brick. My goal with this series is to follow my design/building process from beginning to end, and share some insight into why I do things the way I do them. The first Brick by Brick will be following the map Autumn (now renamed as Vessel). I just released Episode 1. Give it a look, and feel free to share you thoughts, agreements, disagreements, suggestions, etc. Here are a couple of resources I referred to in the first episode. Check them out! lvlworld Goldleaf Autumn Preview ________________________________________________________ Episode 2 - Completing the Blockout Episode 2 Video ________________________________________________________ In episode 3 I discuss my personal approach to weapon set, weapon placement, and weapon times. Episode 3 Video ________________________________________________________ Brick by Brick episode 4 talks about balancing initial spawns on asymmetrical maps, and goes over what I consider to be the fundamentals of placing respawns.
It's cool to see a documentation of your process, Chunk. I think the point you made about remaining flexible and not investing too much in art before entering the testing phase is a very important one. I look forward to future entries in this series. From a video editing standpoint, I have to say that I found the little intro clip with the music to be pretty unnecessary in this context.
Thanks for the feedback. I almost left the 'Intro Clip' out. Perhaps I will on the next one. It's so easy to get sucked into the trap of making something that looks really cool. I keep getting distracted with that myself, and then have to re-focus on the design itself. I feel like this is going to be especially important (at least for me) in Halo 5. I could easily get sucked into beautifying a map for 3 or 4 hours at a time in previous games, and I could see myself spending far more time doing that in Halo 5 just with lighting alone. I'm sure there are people out there that can do structure and aesthetics at the same time and not have it be detrimental, but I'm not one of those people. I'm a really slow forger to begin with. Taking that approach would double or triple the amount of time it takes me to produce a playable map, and that's not time I can afford to lose. For me, and probably for most people, it makes more sense to solidify the design first, then test, and THEN beautify the map once I'm content with the design.
This is an awesome Idea, I can't wait for the next installments! I have always wanted more forge content, it is extremely helpful to be able to peek into the minds of other forgers and get a glimpse at their thought process behind every decision. It's like forge fundamentals for the advanced. Just remember... there are no rules! EDIT: Maybe recording a very long forge session and speeding it up in the background could be something worth trying, as in this video not much is actually built.
I enjoyed the lesson chunk, it gave me the right push towards sorting my time out and essentially cut my time into a more proper in and out.
Looks great so far! I too am one of those forgers that gets easily distracted with aesthetics and am better off waiting until after I've blocked everything out first before arting it up... Especially back in the old Forge days when you had to minimize piece usage, you could swap pieces out easier this way too. It's cool you already have your theme picked out and I'm looking forward to see the space ship theme in action. Always been a fan of your work Chunk and I like most forgers enjoy getting a behind the scense glimpse into another forgers process. Really appreciate you sharing and doing these videos and the articles before them. Keep up the good work.
I totally agree. I considered doing that for the first episode, but just didn't have time to do a long enough forging session. Ideally, the second episode will be me forging the remainder of the blockout. Awesome to hear! I'm glad you've enjoyed them. The whole reason I've done this stuff is because this is just the kind of thing I wished I had access to when I was learning the in's and out's of forge. While most forge related stuff is second nature and common sense to me now, I remember when it wasn't, and I know just how valuable tribal knowledge can be both to individual forgers and to the forging scene overall. The point about 'Tribal Knowledge' is an important one to me. Everything I know and everything I share is only the result of what I've absorbed from other forgers and level designers. This is just my way of passing that information on.
Honestly I prefer the slower speed of forging to a sped up timelapse. This way we can see exactly what you are doing, and we wouldnt have to slow down and distort the film to see + hear what you are doing / thinking about. Maybe you could do half and half if you really want to show a faster version, or slow down for 'important' bits where you might do interesting or unique building methods.
Thanks for the suggestions. This next episode will be a time lapse. To be honest, I don't really like how it looks. It goes too fast to really tell exactly what's happening, and the fact that it's from the first person point of view means you can't really see the big picture of what's being build most of the time. I suppose some people might find it interesting though. That said, I expect this series to go on for as long as I have interesting things to say and show. When I do blockouts in the future, I think it would be good to focus on a particular section of the map, and show it at regular speed, or maybe only slightly sped up. I think a time lapse would be best from an overhead view, and could work well in combination with slower sections like you suggest, but I don't think there's a way to capture an overhead view? Anyway, I appreciate the ideas. I'll definitely keep them in mind for future episodes.
This is goddamned beautiful. It's awesome to peek inside the mind of another forger WHILE he's forging, and I hope other people decide to start doing this as well. Honestly, I would love to even watch a multiple hour stream of you or someone else doing this, similar to Wyverznu's Forging Sandtrap, but with original maps. I'd thought about making a series similar to yours and calling it "Forge Journey" or something stupid like that. Would have been less of an educational thing and more of just a documentation of myself growing as a forger. Decided against it though, because I have a tendency to scrap my projects when I realize they can't really be fixed.
Yeah, that's what I figured. It means someone would have to hover above me as a forge for a few hours, and they'd have to record it also. Probably not going to happen. I wouldn't even feel right asking someone to do that. If I was rolling in money, I could buy another XB1 and do it myself, but that's not happening either, lol. Oh well, there are plenty of other ways to show the blockout process.
Episode 2 is up. It features a time lapse and a walkthrough of the completed blockout. I talk a bit about scaling and various other subjects.
Yeah, I tried that. I forge too slow for doing a time lapse like this. I literally placed like 3 pieces in the slower version, unless I used the part where I was just duplicating blocks and placing them in the center, which is pretty boring to watch. I think the better fit for me will be to show a specific small section of a map that may be helpful for newer forgers. I probably would have done that with this episode if I hadn't promised a time lapse ahead of time. Lesson learned. The real value of the series ultimately comes from what's being discussed. The video footage is just there to support the audio content, so hopefully people will still find this episode interesting enough.
Episode 3 is here. In it, I talk about my personal approach to weapons, focusing primarily on weapon placements and weapon spawn times.