Chapter 4. First Person Shooter Part 1 – Creating Exterior Environments

Now that we have experience working on all parts of the game in 2D and 3D, let's spend the next few chapters creating a full-featured game. We will be creating a first person shooter; however, instead of shooting a gun to damage our enemies, we will be shooting a picture in a survival horror environment; similar to the Fatal Frame series of games and the recent indie title DreadOut. To get started on our project, we're first going to look at creating our level or, in this case, our environments starting with the exterior.

In the game industry, there are two main roles in level creation: the environment artist and level designer.

An environment artist is a person who builds the assets that go into the environment. He/she uses tools such as 3ds Max or Maya to create the model, and then uses other tools such as Photoshop to create textures and normal maps.

The level designer is responsible for taking...