First Concrete
There’s a moment in every project where it stops being a document and starts being a thing. Today was that moment. I opened Unreal, created the project, and started blocking out the hideout. And honestly? Extruding tunnels out of cubes at raccoon scale hits different when you’ve spent a week designing every system that’s supposed to live inside them.
The hideout is a storm sewer. Concrete tunnels, alcoves carved out for stations, dead ends for boundaries. I’m using UE5’s Modeling Tools — Cube Grid, PolyEdit, extrude — because I don’t need real meshes yet. Just shapes. Shapes I can walk through and go “yeah, the Pantry goes here, the Raid Board goes there.” Seven stations need to fit with room to walk between them, and the whole thing needs to feel cramped but navigable. Like a place raccoons would actually set up shop.
I also spent time setting up reference boards in the wiki — sewer photos, brick tunnels, utility corridors, pipe junctions. The kind of stuff that makes you go “oh, that’s the vibe.” Having those images right next to the block spec while I’m building is genuinely useful. Not just mood boarding for fun — I keep glancing at them to check if my proportions and layout choices feel right.
The wiki itself got a pretty big restructure too. Killed the old GDD/Pitch/Overview split and folded everything into one landing page. Blocks got reorganized into subfolders so each one can hold reference boards and supporting docs without the Blocks folder turning into a wall of files. And the site needed some Quartz fixes — .avif images weren’t rendering, the gallery CSS was fighting with the layout. Small stuff, but the kind of small stuff that makes the wiki actually usable as a daily tool.
Next up: Finishing the hideout blockout, then setting up L_City as a sublevel with NavMesh and the first two building targets.
Changelog
- Created Unreal project and started
L_Hideoutblockout (Modeling Tools geometry) - Restructured all 10 production blocks into subfolders (
Block XX/index.md) - Added aliases to preserve existing wikilinks after folder migration
- Created reference image board system with
image-galleryCSS class - Added
.avifto Quartz’s supported image embed extensions (ofm.ts) - Fixed gallery CSS:
inline-block→blocklayout, removed fake hover interaction - Merged GDD, Pitch, and Overview into single landing page
- Added mermaid flowchart to core loop documentation
- Expanded City Map Sublevel section with concrete UE5 setup steps (sublevel config, NavMesh settings, actor placement checklist)
- Adjusted hideout scale to human height for prop scaling