After making my 3D prototype scene I wanted to look more into various urban environment, different city, towns and buildings that could inspire levels and environments for my game. At the moment my game has a very metropolitan style to it. with blocks of buildings with skyscrapers etc.
The problem I have with this is that it very much feels like you are either on one roof or on the floor there is no in between in an environment like this, obviously wouldn't be the case everywhere but I think finding a more applicable urban environment would make the setting of my games environment more believable. Instead of a metropolitan city I looked at the idea of a more rustic city with less emphasis on the highest points in the area and more on the densely packed areas.
The architecture of these types of cites make for very interesting environments at both ground and rooftops, these buildings still have a variety of heights with town houses being three stories high.
As well as this some of the buildings I saw looking for inspiration had very interesting architecture like this spire on the left building and the archway on the right. I think these buildings having a lot of character but aren't perfect for the environments I want to make. So now I will look into a variety of other styles of rustic cities to see which one suits my level design style.
This is a shot of Venice and due to the main way that you move around the city being by boat it means the buildings are very densely packed and perfect for chunks of playable areas for my game. this would narratively help as to why the van wouldn't just pull up and fix the issue at the location.
Next was Ecuador and this was definitely moving in the right direction lots of vertically as well as space. Metropolitan city design had verticality but only on one or two neighbouring buildings, these clusters of buildings built into a mountain was perfect way for abilities to be meaningful in the game. Despite the risk of jumping building to building it is perfectly possible where as jumping up one whole story wouldn't be possible without specific terrain or gadgets.
Ecuador reminded me of 'favelas' the name for outskirts or shanty town surrounding the cities in Brazil, my next step for inspiration, this unique way that buildings are almost stacked onto of each other like a obscure version of Tetris is perfect for real world inspiration for my games environment. Not to mention that the basis of it being third world county would support the narrative point of the populous being rapidly introduced to more and more technology being instated onto and around there homes as they are quickly getting technology that has been developed and installed in first world countries as a slower pace. These two pictures show perfect example of the buildings rapid climb just a few meters in Fromm the road and the spacing rooftops with gradual as well as soap inclines across the city.
My next step is to research the structure and design of favelas from a building and neighbourhood point of view and then a individual person point of view seeing how people would move around them.