First and foremost, I am a programmer. I have the most experience in coding and designing things is just a hobby of mine that I like to do. For Astro Shipping Co. we wanted to create a level that players would want to explore and play with the character's platforming mechanics. But to make our lives easier and instead focus on developing the mechanics, we decided to import a temporary level. We ended up importing the Bob-omb Battlefield level from Super Mario 64. Note... if your game is inspired by another game  ... like Astro is (Super Mario Odyssey) I definitely recommend you try to either find a level from the game, or blockout the level and use that as a dev map. For Astro, I was able to map out my player speed, jump and work on other game mechanics with the Bob-omb Battlefield map. I found a FBX model on Sketchfab and used that for reference. The problem with this however was the collisions. The model we imported did not come with the correct collision data so I had 2 options: Manually create collisions on the level or Use complex collisions. I decided to create complex collision data which is pretty taxing but for whatever reason after doing so, our character Zazi would just fall off after jumping. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why that was happening but I had no luck. I decided to instead just create a level blockout using the FBX as reference.

UE Level Blockouts

There are many resources out there that cover level blockouts much more in depth but the one that I found most helpful was this: Create a Level Blockout. In this course, the instructor Patrick Haslow goes over the designing process and how the industry would handle creating levels for games. For Astro, since I had a solid reference for the level I wanted to blockout, I was able to use the different perspectives to place primitive actors and geometry. While doing so, I found these Keyboard Shortcuts to be the most helpful:

• Group & Ungroup (Ctrl +G/Shift + G)
• Cycle transform (space) & Transforms (W/E/R)
• Snap to floor (End)
• Focus (F)
• Fullscreen (F11)
• Perspective/side/top/front view (Alt + G/K/H/J)
• Play - Simulate (Alt + P/Alt + S)

I also found myself using the Lit, Player Collision, Wireframe and Lighting Only view modes:

also  sometimes, I found that I somehow managed to change the pivot point of the object I was transforming:

to fix this, click on the world/local space button:

Level blockouts take a while and have a lot of thought process behind them. You will have to take your time and just get it done!

author: Munnie Singh