One of the core tenants of game development is how when a project starts, it rarely reflects the final product. I believe one would be hard-pressed to find a better example of this than the progression of our sandbox level. My name is Jacob Schultz, I'm a programmer and one of my tasks has been taking the Full Store Sandbox from a rough concept into its finalized form.
Below is the original "blockmesh" layout of the full store created by our artist Brooke Mahoney. It certainly isn't anywhere close to a final product but it does seem to resemble a store with shelves, checkout counters, and the like. This was passed onto our programmer Darin Belleau who was tasked with making this into a functional level you could play in.
Darin took that block mesh and created the level below. There are items on shelves, clearly defined "departments", and it's starting to better resemble a grocery store. However, the scale was completely off. It felt more like you were running through the world's biggest Walmart than your local grocery store. This is when I was handed the project so Darin could focus on the mini-games he was put in charge of.
So my first point of order was to scale everything down. We decided that the scale didn't represent how we wanted the store to feel. We wanted it to feel like the kind of grocery store you'd find in a medium sized town. I ended up cutting the store into a quarter of its original size. To give a sense of perspective, in the images below, the shelves on the left are the same size as the shelves on the right.
The next obvious thing was to start filling up the shelves with grocery items.
And that leaves us where we are today. We're currently in the process of filling up the empty shelves and updating textures, but I hope it's clear just how much this one level has progressed over the past year. As a team, we've taken this side content that we argued over whether or not it should even be included, into one of our primary levels. I'm confident that by SGX the store will be full of items and it will feel like you really are running around a grocery store causing chaos.