I am trying to come up with a building style for a battle arena. The style should be colorful, flexible and there should be contrast between walkable areas and walls/cover. I did some digging around, found some reference material and ended up with a style that is a mix between old wooden playgrounds and airsoft fields.
Although this style works well for ‘playground-like’ areas (like free-for-all arenas, practice arenas), it does not work well for ‘team-based’ areas. For team based maps I would usually I would switch up the color palette to indicate which sections belong to which teams, but I am having trouble color coding the wooden structures. The brown color palette doesn’t seem to mix well with other colors.
Another downside of this style is that the floors, walls and roofs all contain the same shade of brown, so it might not always be easy to quickly identify an area as ‘walkable’.
Someone suggested to try out two different ‘styles’ so there is no more need – or at least not as much need – to develop one style that works well with different palettes. I know there are games that use this approach such as Team Fortress 2, where the red team’s structures are moslty built out of wood and the blue team’s structures are more industrial focused. But I want both building styles to still fit within my colorful, vibrant environment as opposed to the generally more barren, rocky, desert-like areas of that game.
Does anyone have tips on how I can change my style to be more flexible? Or does anyone have any suggestions or reference material that might help me achieve the right building style? Tips, feedback, pictures, links to other Roblox places or names of games that do something similar are all appreciated!
You should think about what parts of a wooden house people often customise. This can include window shutters, window frames, glass colours, door colours etc. For arena areas you will need two distinct areas. You could experiment with a small GUI that is a minimap so if not already clear players can see the variation.
Unfortunately this does not work well for in-door areas and/or alleys.
Your idea of totems and tipi’s is definitely interesting. Though I am not sure how I would make that work. When the structures are still identical, players would have to look for the totem landmarks to see where they are. Preferably that process of identification should be unconscious, which is often achieved with contrasting colors and different themes/styles. I feel like with this approach it is easy to fall in the trap of adding too much detail for area identification, because both teams will have different totems, but they’re still the same ‘thing’ so you need many of them to improve contrast.
I think using the previous assets that you have described as ‘playground-like’ would go nicely within a lobby, if the game you’re working on requires it.
You could probably make a wooden focused structure by mostly using different scaffolds and planks that you could CSG to look broken, or use wedges to create that effect. Also, sheets of metal and plenty of broken debris would look nice for each of the bases.
If you keep this within a relatively low-poly, plastic style, I think it could look good.
Don’t forget you might want to dim parts of the lighting in areas.
