The scenario is that the main character has been injured due to a car accident and is approaching towards the house to seek help from her friend. The game starts off with the player walking towards the house on a stormy evening/night, and it's supposed to be a short segment at the start of the game which would take no longer than 5-10 seconds. The environment for this scenario is set in a forest, a house which is located at the outskirts of a town, in a forest.
I researched a few games which had similar environments to get an overall idea on the design of the forest. The games that were looked at for references are games such as Resident Evil 7 and Martha is Dead (the start of the games mentioned). The reason for recurring reference of Resident Evil 7 in this project (same as Incubo/Isolated House) is because it's still the same project, but that map was abandoned due to some issues and changes in the story from the writers.
The first thing that I wanted to do was to make sure that the start point and to the end point was the same duration (5 seconds-ish) as the programmer and writers wanted it to be. So, I made a basic landscape and copied the house as a placeholder to determine where the house would be and started to map the path that the players would be taking towards the house and time it. Once that was done, the next thing was to make a path visible enough for the players to understand where they should be going.
Figure 1: The box represents the player start, from where I timed the duration.
Another small thing that I implemented was that I made sure that further ends of the map and the house was not visible near the spawn point, and for it to be slowly revealed as the player walks towards the entrance. This was done so the player won’t be able to notice the foliage loading that is not present at the further ends of the map as the foliage was not needed in those parts of the map.
Here’s a timelapse of the development of the map: (The resolution is not 1080p as my recording software didn’t capture it properly for some reason, so I apologise for the bad quality)
After the overall map was basically finished, the last things that I had to do was to change the aesthetics of the environment to a stormy night. I used an asset pack called Ultra Dynamic Sky (UDS) from the Epic Games Marketplace (Ultra Dynamic Sky in Blueprints - UE Marketplace (unrealengine.com) ) which was very helpful to set up the aestheitc along with the weather system very quickly to get the final result that was needed for the game. Unfortunately, I forgot to record the tweaking of the weather system to get the final system, so I could not include it in the timelapse.