Redesign

After local play testing between the three of us and some friend play-testers, we found that our initial block-out was too small and not complex enough for the gameplay we had designed. We found that we were trying to fit the map into a building that was too small to begin with. We designed the house in a modular way, so changing it was a simple case of rescaling rooms by duplicating blocks of wall on our initial 3D visualization in Maya.

For the level to accommodate 4 players (1 burglar and 3 guards), we had to make sure the layout was significantly complex in order to allow for the burglar to have a chance to escape.

Initial Design (Ground Floor)

New Design (Ground Floor)

We found the new concept to be significantly improved, enlarging appropriate rooms,  shrinking others and repositioning many of them. 

New Design (Upstairs)

A large part of our old problem was that the upstairs was too simple and easy for guards to catch the burglar, and so this needed more room to expand, which we achieved by widening the entire house, and adding a few windows extra length too also. We also decided to add a new tactical vantage point of the balcony surrounding the downstairs dinning hall.

  

To do the new block-out, after learning for our old mistakes in making the last one along with our new and vastly improved map layout, we decided to not only work for a blue-prints map textured floor, but also use a more fully-made concept model from Maya for correct scale and more accurate positioning. A semi-transparent shader was applied to this so that we could see through it to the brush-work.

This far cleaner block-out was created entirely a lot more with the final product in mind this time round. Thus, we set scales for walls, doors, windows, and even making sure we followed some rule of how wide and long the walls should be to ensure static meshes created at a later date would fit perfectly to them.