Ideas and References

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League of Legends

Teamfight Tactics - Boards, champion carousels

Given that each "season" of Teamfight Tactics has a different theme, there is plenty of ideas to choose from when it comes down to creating a new board for the game.

Currently the themes done so far are;

Space/Galaxies - (Odyssey)
Japanese cherry blossoms/festival inspired (not pictured) - Fates
Elements (ocean, earth, wind etc)

Sonic The Hedgehog

"Miniature" stages

Sonic Stages Dioramas by Gonçalo Torrinha on ArtStation.

The Sonic stages are fairly simplistic but very diarama friendly in my opinion. You can really do a lot with just a few "panels" and some assets to either have a corner set or just a small floating stage with a lot to build upwards with.

Current idea is to go ahead with a stylised diarama of a Sonic level, or a new Sonic level in a similar style but a more modern style to it (there has not been a new Sonic game in 3-4 years..).

Maybe draw some ideas from previous games and then look into modernising them a bit more to make them feel like they would fit a Sonic level made in today's Game Engines.

looking up diarama examples

Looking into what sort of style, or rather, angle I would like to go for in my stage model. I think a good approach would be something like the middle images, where it's a long stretched out area instead of a small squared corner platform. With something like that I could put the platforms higher up and adjust the thickness/blocks of the ground so some areas are thin - like the bridges you can see in the middle areas that have no groud beneath them.

Beach level

The idea is to make a beack-like stage, or at least something along those lines with water surrounding it. From the top of my head there are only a couple of stages that currently are beaches in the Sonic franchise since I would imagine that it could easily get repetitive if you add on more as keeping the "beach" aesthetic seems fairly limited to me.

Currently this is my initial "sketch"/blockout if you will, and everything is very simple shapes with a lot of boxes. I am unsure at the moment how and if to make a bigger and longer/wider stage with more options and to what scale. I would like to maybe add the classic, loop, to the stage with maybe some more water (the lowered areas) and find some other simple props to put in like maybe the Chaos Emerald somewhere.

Initially I wanted to sketch out some ideas on paper or in Clip Studio but found it a very weird way to approach this part as I basically only have experience drawing characters as opposed to objects and enviroment. So I decided to model it out with simple shapes instead to get an easier overlook as to not only how big it would be, how much space each "prop" takes and how big I want it to be in general.

I did not put too much thought into how the loop should look as this is just a "sketch" to show what I am thinking of making. If I were to go ahead with this idea I would need to make it a bit bigger in area size, but smaller in model size as it is currently not to the grid.

Feedback and changes

After some feedback and a talk with my module tutor, he suggested that I look up "Voxel terrain" as it could be an interesting way to render the enviroment I am modeling. It will make it look like a classic Sonic level, but in a slightly different style.

A video on how to create voxel terrains in Unreal Engine, as shown to me by my tutor, Chris Pearce.

Voxel terrain

Some video games that use Voxel rendered terrains;

7 Days to Die - voxel-based open world survival horror game

Blade Runner - used voxels to render characters and artifacts.
Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun - uses voxel to render vehicles
Vox - voxel based exploration/RPG

"A series of voxels in a stack, with a single voxel shaded" - Wikipedia

Voxel Terrain by Mari K on ArtStation

Maurits Cornelis Escher

Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints.

"An endless ring-shaped band usually has two distinct surfaces, one inside and one outside. Yet on this strip nine red ants crawl after each other and travel the front side as well as the reverse side. Therefore the strip has only one surface. " - Escher's own words

His work includes;

Impossible objects
Explorations of infinity
Reflection
Symmetry
Perspective
Truncated and stellated polyhedra
Hyperbolic geometry
Tessellations.

Some of his work

Drawing Hands, 1948

Convex and Concave (B. 399), 1955

Waterfall, 1961

3D rendition of Escher's "Relativity" from 1953, made by Lucian B. on 3DWareHouse.

This is a 3D rendition of Escher's "Relativity" from 1953, you can see that it is difficult to see where it starts and ends, and which way is the "right way up" etc. With a voxel styled enivroment I can stack platforms on top of each other to make it look "undending" or that it keeps going as I build on it.

Not only will this allow me to put in more detail and assets into the enviroment but it will also challenge me better than a "simple" small platformed area would.

The screenshot here shows what I currently have plans of making, they are all in cubes/blocks because I thought it would make it easier to imagine what it would look like in a voxel styled terrain where it's all basically just blocks built upon blocks.