The York trip and a team catch up

All the teams planned a day out to York to gather textures and reference just how wonky, tightly packed and dirty the houses would have been in the 17th Century. 

Ewa, George, Anna and Shay (the amazing photographer) all went to York (as we had the best cameras) and spent the day going to the museums and exploring the Shambles. We all really enjoyed the experience and it helped us to understand just how strange and lopsided our buildings had to be. 

We collected various textures, orthographics and atmospheric to really try and understand just how cramped it would have been. To help better our understanding of scale, we used George (who was the same height as the Crytek default character) as our scale reference. We have many pictures of him standing in front of buildings, doors and assets to see just how many George's the average building would have been. 

This window is one George long

We found lots of fun Easter eggs in York, for example we found a copper sculpture of York that was interesting because it gave us a strong visual of how the streets and buildings would have been planned out. 

Other than going to York, the group has been working on their assigned assets.

Jamie, Anna and George have been working on their modulars. Getting the textures finished and starting to build the variants in Cryengine so we can further develop our blocked out map. 

Anna and Michael have also been working on making a basic block out of our map and play testing the scale, layout and talking about what we could change about the map to make it feel more like York and less like a summers day in 'Candy Land'. Hopefully a video should be posted up soon. 

Including all the Cryengine work, Michael has made the Cranes for the second open space of our map. The cranes were used to pull cargo out of small ships in the Thames and in all the etchings they seemed to be big pieces of wood.

Finally, Ewa and Shayleen have been working on some of the more iconic buildings of the map. The poultry shop (by Ewa) and the Tavern (by Shalyeen). Both buildings are built directly from the York references we took during the trip, with them being built from first hand reference it really adds a realistic quirk and character to the buildings. 

By Ewa

By Shayleen

This week has been a busy one, and we are all feeling exhausted with our late hours and mental strain of figuring out so many new things. But at the same time the team seem really excited and happy with our progress. Like we wanted, he have started to really kick it up a notch and create something we are happy with. We are aiming to have a walk through video done by Friday and to have another video explaining our idea in depth. 

 - Shayleen