A New World: The First Voyage of Captain Rohit

Welcome back, the blog has been dark for quite a while. After switching between watching a lot of tutorials and trying some basic level design, I realized I wasn't getting anywhere with all that. So I finally mustered up my courage and decided to do something interesting with what I had learnt.

I've always been a Lord of the Rings fan and thankfully, I've got a few friends who are as crazy about LOTR as myself. We used to watch the movies pretty much all the time and one of my favorite scenes in the series was the Battle of Helm's Deep where the brave Men of Rohan make their last stand against the massive Uruk Hai army from Isengard. I had always wanted to play some game where I could visit the fortress of Hornburg. Of course there were a few strategy games with this content as well as a few fan made maps for FPS games. But except for a couple of them, most were made a long back when there were a lot of limitations on the graphical capabilities of our systems. So I decided to built the Fortress and the Helm's Deep valley on my own using Unreal Engine 3. At times, it felt a bit too ambitious for a beginner such as myself, but then I thought... What the heck?? I quit my job for doing things that I loved to do. I might as well do it right now. And thus started my wonderful journey into the recreation of the Fortress of Hornburg.

The main problem I faced while starting the project was with trying to understand the scale of the buildings relative to the size of the player. Since I did not have any knowledge in Photoshop or any similar software other than in editing my own pics :P, I decided to make some rough sketches of the castle from different angles to get a broader perspective about it. Well that ended up with the following result and a much better understanding to kick start the project. Of course the photos needed a little bit of editing to give it some life.

Side view of the outer walls.

Front view of the whole fortress.

The inner walls and the main hall entrance.

Elven army entering through the main gates

There you go, a very basic outline of the main structures of Hornburg. In my next post, I'll discuss the work that is being done on the actual game level. Until then, Goodbye.