A blockout in game design is something that designers use to help plan and design the layout of the level. This in turn can help out other team members in terms of level design such as player-to-level scale, environmental assets, trial and error and configuring choke points in a map.
When it comes to developing games, you wouldn’t start by putting in tons of high quality assets if you don’t know where to put them, so by blocking out a basic level design, you are able to see what things are going to look like without putting in too much work and wasting time. It is fast, efficient and easy to do.
Here are some examples of blockout’s in famous video games, starting off with Uncharted 3’s Chateau level.
A reallu useful tool for Blockouts is Probuilder, which I wrote about way back in September, this post can be found here [LINK].
A game that has used Probuilder is Tinertia, now I’ve never played this game but looking at the gameplay videos on YouTube, you can tell how much something like ProBuilder would have sped up the level development. In this game, there is a lot of jumping around and going in and out of tight spaces, with ProBuilder, they would have been able to easily map this to how the character jumps and moves around. Unity have even confirmed that probuilder was used in Tinertia. Some more games to mention would be SuperHot and DeSync.
JORDAN | GLITCH ARCADE 