midk said:
I read the description and it's an interesting idea, kind of The Sims-y. However I think you should do some more with the rooms (well, you only showed one in the three screenshots).
It's like a box with a wall.. you should make some seperate rooms and give them doors, add some light sources, maybe a window to look outside and have some light streaming in. It looks like you just have one hugely bright light in the middle of the room and it looks bad with the white spot on the ceiling.
Just try and give it some detail and variation, it's too wide open right now. A living room connected to a hallway, connected to a bathroom, maybe a closet.. with a locked door that would be assumed to lead out to the hallway of the hotel. Also try and break up the repetitive textures (notably the floor) maybe with a few rugs or something. Maybe make a bathroom with a tile floor, for example.
Also, the bathroom looks awkward - the toilet's in the corner, okay, and the bathtub's edge is like sticking over the seat.. you definitely need space between these things.
Keep at it, try and just build on this basic room and add some interesting lighting and style to it. :smile:
I agree to most points here, a simple solution to the 'blockyness' in maps that i usualy use is to make each wall from seperate brushes, when you use seperate brushes instead of a hollow block, which it looks like you've been doing, it allows for much more creativity with much less effort (eventually).
Seperate brushes might take a wee while longer, but if you'd try to be just as creative clipping your cube, using vertex manip on it, and stuff like that, you'll have way more errors and it'll cost way more time in the end (in my opinion), the only thing you really need to be carefull is not to spring a leak in your map if you use seperate brushes.
(seperate brushes meaning each wall you make a new bush -example: 6 brushes could be a cube...)
And remember, don't be too hastey, a map takes ages to create, then another couple of millenia to test / improve ususaly, so be patient and try to be creative. (drawing out ideas is a good way to help yourself in this, simple drawings like layouts of a map.
Also like mentioned above, be very carefull on how you texture a map, textures / lights can make or break a decent map very easily.
Good luck.
~BioPulse