The Innovation of the Greybox

As I've gone though this project one of the sticking points for the project so far has been the overall feel that the greybox gives to the player. As shown in previous blog posts the greybox felt very lifeless and nothing like a place someone would live. As shown below:

So after having some conversations with friends and lecturers I decide to do a complete redo of the greybox to make it feel more lived so after some time I ended up the the first version of the greybox shown below:

I much preferred this version of the greybox over the previous one the changes to the buildings not being in a uniformed and better playout added a lot more to having the greybox feel like a real city/town that. As well as that having the overall shape of the town be more of a ellipses allowed for more creativity in the layout and design of town. However even with the changes made I had lost one part of the first greybox that I wanted to incorporate into this greybox which was the claustrophobic street feel where as a player you knew you were in a big town but you could only ever see the the few houses around you creating those tight alleyways and narrow streets. So while having a chat with a few people I decided to take this general layout of the streets and housing and redo it to fall more in line with that claustrophobic feeling I wanted this town to give off. In turn I ended up the the greybox below:

As you can see from the image the overall shape of the walkways has stayed very much the same but the designs of the builds and overall of the builds as changed completely. This version each building is made using sections of walls that I have created in Maya that are then snapped together to create buildings overall this allowed me to create more unique building. One reason I preferred this was after getting some feedback on the second greybox from a couple of people they were all concerned that after I create a busier scene that the buildings would end up feeling repetitive and not much difference in the design of the town houses. Whereas with the way of creating the buildings although the sections have similar aspects the different shapes of the houses would add to the authenticity of the town. Overall this version of the greybox feels like the most suitable for what I want for the game.