Plan for Todd Pickens

Time for a Long over due update.

"The Swamp"

This one was a bear...well not really, but when you slate ten eight hour days to completely develop an environment, you don't have time for a research project filled with experimentation...which is what this became. Add to that, the flu and a few other goodies to screw things up and your schedule can go the hell very quickly.

I have done a lot of environment development, and I can pretty much knock out all the necessary assets for just about any outdoor environment and mock up a good demo map of it, all within 2 weeks. Can't count the number of times I have done that. It can be a real challenge, but it also guarantees quick satisfaction for your efforts.

On the down side, it does not allow for the level of polish I would like to put into an environment. To that end, I will be adding a few days to the end of the Environment Pack development schedule to give these environments some well deserved polish, which I hope will benefit everyone who uses them.


The swamp was going to be typical of the southern United States...But Age Of Empires 3 beat me to it. So I started doing some research and settled on a bit of an experiment. The end result is this Mayan (snake theme, see the stone relief in the screen shots) temple complex, that is being swallowed by the relentless creep of the swamp. I would REALLY like to blow out all stops and do this as a stand alone pack and really develop it, so that it could be used for FPS, RTS, or RPG, but that will have to wait. For now it is pretty solid, and I am on to the next environment. Stay tuned, I will post some shots soon.

Here is a link to about a dozen shots form the demo map for the swamp environment. The map is a little bit sparsely decorated in these shots, but you get the idea. I'll flesh out the map during my polishing pass.