Good evening all!

Today I'm focusing on the town just outside the titular Adventure Tower.

This place is kind of a pop-up town only there to service the goal of investigating the tower. As a result it's very small containing only a Lab, Shop, Blacksmith, 3 Houses, a Windmill for powering the place, and a Save Corp Hut.

Although this isn't a traditional dungeon crawler, I do like the idea from them of a town you often return too with your spoils to sell so you can purchase new upgrades, armour, or resources for delving deeper into the Tower. The game won't have RPG mechanics taking more of a Monster Hunter approach, your weapons and armour are how you improve, not your character stats. This is to keep the complexity under the hood to a minimum as I'm far from a number guy and balancing a game like this will be slow already, even more so if I'm having to take into account character levels, exp rates, and so on!

So, how does the town look?

Tadaaa! Ok it's not very impressive to look at from up here, I'll grant you that!

As you can see I've developed a small circular town with walls of a looping forest image to give the effect of a dense forest without having to use loads and loads of 3D trees. I've then used a small amount of 3D trees to make everything feel less flat. 

I've also tilted the Tower back to give the effect it's so big it's growing up into the sky (fun fact, it's actually considerably lower than the clouds), and wrapped another tree wall around it so you can see small tree tops poking up around the bottom of it to give the effect it's much further away than it really is. I also added an extra few walls of forest raised and tilted to give the effect of the forest being much deeper than it is, towering over the little town.

In the centre of the town is a well, I tried to give it some character with an old machine attached to it to winch the bucket up and down but a more modern pipe system fed directly into it to suck up water as needed. Alas I really feel the well doesn't fit the town very well so it remains as a place holder for "something" to fill the open space in the middle of the town, but it's not gonna be part of the final product (at least not in this location, I may recycle it).

The town isn't finished yet though. I'm going to add path to the place, some bushes, and little sticking up bits of grass around just to give the town some more clutter, and closer to the finished game I'll be adding some NPCs into the town too which should make the place feel much more alive!

Next up I need to learn the particle system of Unreal Engine 5 so I can add some smoke to the multiple chimney of the town to show life going on inside the buildings, especially the Smithy!

So, that's all for todays Dev Log! Time for bed I think!

All the best!

-Timbo