(BA) Game Art - 3D modeling and Design: Level Design - Thracian Training Facility planning

The year was 2088, not much has changed. In fact things were getting a lot worse. The poor we're getting poorer and the rich was also getting poorer. Technology was the only thing improving in the world. People were desperate and trying to find newer and better ways of Living. Space was still a mystery. Are we alone?

The idea of there being other life forms out there was sounding more stupid each year. Every year there was 'breaking news' that some rich scientist found something somewhere in space. Got to a point that no one listened or cared anymore........ Until E-Day.

I have started researching for my level design. looking for futuristic films and spartan history to create the ultimate training facility for my own characters ' The Thracian's'. The Training facility is a selection process to hand pick who is good enough to become a Thracian soldier, The best soldiers in the world. based in the future I am going to design a training facility to test all the skills needed to become a Thracian.

I choose to do a Greek/Spartan theme as everyone knows that the Spartans were the greatest warriors of their era, With every aspect of their lives and society geared towards warfare, Sparta dominated the Greek world and produced arguably the finest soldiers of the Hellenic period. Trained and hardened in the Spartan Agoge and Krypteia, their warriors and leaders are the embodiment of military discipline and virtue , and the Greek training and way of life were unique to them and actually alot of our ways in the UK are based on the Greeks methodology. When I started to design my character I wanted to create a future spartan but that wasn't really original. there was so many designs and versions out there for example master chief out of halo is a 'Spartan'. so I researched into the Greeks and the Spartan way of life and i found that the Thracian ( citizens of Thrace) are not to different from the Spartans. they had great training which produced great warriors, they even had the same style helmet. Also the legend Spartacus was a Thracian. So i decided to go with creating a future/sci-fi Thracian.

I'm not going to go into to much detail on the character, I'm going to concentrate on the level in this post but I thought you should know why I'm doing this style.

Research

I have look at films such as the hunger games as I like the way they have made the training arena for the games. it looks futuristic and I wanna use the idea of holographic targets etc. I'm also going to use the idea of the training arenas being inside some sort of dome, My arena being underground I wanna have fake atmosphere like weather simulators and sky all controlled by a central hub like on the hunger games film. Also this kinda of facility really test your survival and fighting skills so it relates to what i want to create.

Resident Evil 6 have a similar idea with a underwater training facility for clones and different scenarios. The arenas are in domes underwater and each one is custom to different skills trained.

The theme I want for my level is a futuristic Greek/spartan arena so I am going to add the traditional columns and Greek style architecture with a twist of future design.

Once I got enough Research i started to make plans for each room in my level, making rough blueprints and writing down what assets are going to be within each room. I had to plan out the blueprints for all the rooms to fit within a 2048 x 2048 x 2048 unit scale.

After roughing out the basic blueprints of my level I started to block out my level on unreal edititor (UDK) I started by blocking out the floor 2048 x 2048 then the walls which were 16 units thick.
below are pictures of my progress.

level blocked out, no assets.

Lobby rough Concept:
really rough quick concept of how I imagined the lobby will look like. later you will see how it looks different to this concept but you can see where alot of the room is the same and where ideas have come from etc.