Last month we mentioned that the Usual June team has been focusing a lot on building Fen Harbor, the fictional town where the game takes place, and that means it’s time for you to meet Cameron Bragg, Level Artist for Usual June! Social Media & Community Director Aster Wright had a chat with Cameron about his work bringing Fen Harbor to life.
Aster: Fen Harbor is a fictional midwest city. What kinds of things go into making the town feel realistically midwestern?
Cameron: Other than the wacky stuff, Usual June is really meant to capture life in a Midwestern, Michigan, Everytown. A big part of that is featuring not just big, historic buildings, but the local flavor of mundane structures and spaces. Like a small, rundown apartment or an outdated university basement. When we do make those fancier locations, though, we try to find a historical precedent for the area and era. The observatory in the demo, for example, is an amalgamation of four or five real observatories around Michigan and Ohio (with a Spooky Device attached). We’ve done the same thing for the library (pictured above)—there’s a a ton of Carnegie funded libraries all over the Midwest and northeast that we looked at for reference before settling on our favorite bits to make our library come to life.
Aster: How do you go about building a location in Fen Harbor? From where do you draw your inspiration? Can you walk us through your creative process?
Cameron: The history of the town is important in Usual June, so we’re building a lot of older locations, and all of those older locations need older furniture. Conveniently, I’ve got two massive 1970s Auctioneer catalogues that include very detailed photos of historic, antique furniture with dimensions and everything. It’s so much fun going through those to find what works for our locations and translating them into our style. And, of course, googling ‘old chair’ is always an option. I try to use entire pieces as reference when I can to keep consistency, but in some cases, I have to pull a few elements from one thing and some from another. That happens a lot with bigger pieces, like giant boilers or machinery and stuff that needs to have a unique flavor.
And when it comes to full buildings, those are always a hodgepodge of decade appropriate, but scattered references. A large part of my job is gathering those scattered references and translating the elements from realism to our style, and then wrestling with proportions until it fits nicely into our kit. The process of building a space usually starts with a day or two in VR playing with digital blocks. Placing walls and sketching in features is much more flexible with a headset, and it lets me really get the feel of the space before it's ever built in the Unity editor. I try to think of how the grid and pieces that make up a space could work as I’m sketching it in, so that when I get to the actual modeling phase everything is already lined up and just needs refinement.
This is an old picture of the cemetery in the blockout phase. Doing this in VR means we can toss walls around and draw whole new sections of ground with a hand gesture. The speed and flexibility means it really feels like sculpting, and the lower fidelity means we can rapidly change the whole scene if we need to. Its super freeing and so easy to collaborate—I can copy and hand someone a whole tree asset and then we can both place them around the level. Here you can see some basic grave stand ins and some dirt paths drawn on top of the grass while we figure out placement.
And here's how the cemetery is looking today!