Let's try a more industrious method to enviroment creation

Right-o, so for a long while I've been on programming duties, but yesterday after finding out I had coded duplicate functionality for something else my partner had done (lead designer also). I decided that 1: I have no idea what's going on in the design, 2: I enjoy doing art better than programming, 3: whatever man, there are still 3 environments to go (which I hope doesn't change on me later). So yep, now I'm going to work on two of the three outstanding environments (the apartment could use some more love too) which are a gym and a park. I had set a self-imposed deadline of having level blockouts done one per day so that I would have a start for both by Friday, but level design is one of the many things I under estimate.

Whatever, enough words, here's my progress so far:

To be a locker room

To be a transition area between the locker room and the main areas

To be a gymnasium, setup with basketball nets and a suspended indoor track

To be a workout room overlooking the pool

To be a pool

To be the entrance to the environment with a snack area

Coming up with floorplans are suprisingly a pain in the ass for just arranging blocks. I tried to plan for lines of sight - so that there is always something interesting to see and explore, and to have very short travel times when walking between main areas. I've tried to design the floorplan for the gym a few times before and always got sidetracked placing areas that the player would never go to ( like offices) or having unacceptably long and winding corridors between areas.

As you can see yes I have blockouts of the level, no they're not any good at describing what the final product should be, so I think I may need another day working on these images. What I'll likely do is use my poor painting skills to paint over these screenshots and see how that works out. Once these poor excuses of concept art are done and approved, I'll be doing the same for the park - maybe even the hospital if they turn out to be not terrible.