Game design is a fluid process, things have to change and adapt as development progresses due to any number of factors from a designer changing his mind, to hardware limitations, this is just as true for level design. Or in my case reading a map wrong at the start.
After spending quite a while perfecting the roads in the first area of the map and placing houses I noticed something wrong. This level was always meant to start from my house, because I know the distances from here to everywhere else better than anywhere in the town. But after placing my houses on the street I started to think, hey thats too many, the map must be out of date or something (which i knew it couldnt be because these houses have been here since the 60s) I kept looking out of the window trying to get an accurate count. I have already walked the route plan of the entire campaign so I am fresh with the area, but one thing I had not done is manually tally the number of houses, as I was going to rely on my google maps to tell me, which is all well and good if you are pin point accurate of your starting position on the map.
Which I was not; my first two designs (which can be found in earlier blogs) were a good 8 or so houses further up the street. All I can say is, things are a lot different from a few thousand feet up. So I had another walk again today and noted down all the houses, making sure I knew which were detached and which were semi-detached for the first street. Although this makes the map slightly shorter by hundred yards or so I hope the scale of the level will not be effected, if it is I can always make more changes.
Below is the new design, effectively the same, just shorter. If I had not had such a slow couple of weeks before I would have noticed this and made the change earlier, but now things are really into gear again, expect lots of refinements and screen shots soon!
