Environment Scale and Feasibility

My initial goal was to create a huge sprawling mansion with lots of rooms and a large exterior garden that could be explored. Ideally I would like to create all the rooms you would expect to find in a mansion but time constraints and the amount of assets required for each room, will play a pivotal role in what I am able to create. Below I have organised the areas of the environment into three different categories. I think this will help me narrow my focus and spend my time effectively with what I model. Unfortunately it is a case of quality over quantity, and as much as I would like to create a fully fleshed out game world, I feel it is preferable to have a few really well polished areas rather than lots of mediocre ones.

Achievable

• Exterior Facade: A portion of the mansion exterior so you can get a sense of the location and scale. I want to add elemants such as vines and damage to the exterior to drive home the abandoned feeling.
• Entrance Hall: Complete with staircase and assorted furnishings.
• Dining Area: An ornate dining room with a lavish fireplace and dining table and chairs.
• Master Bedroom: This room will include elements like a curtained four poster bed and broken mirrors. I feel this room is quite important as it is meant to give a sense of who the former owner of the mansion was.

I think these four distinct areas should be achievable and give a sense of the story and environment. The beauty is that as the environment is an abandoned mansion, I can use the in-story exscuse of having certain areas be unreachable because the place is in ruins. I am planning on modularising as much elements as I can to speed up the asset creation process.

Possible

These are additional areas and details that I may have time to create once the essential items are in place:

• Library: Assets will include shelves and lots of books. This environment may be achievable as it is rather modular in design.
• Bathroom: This will be a smaller room. Its main purpose is to add some nice visual variety by having puddles of stagnant water everywhere.
  
• Basement: This was a room that I really wanted to include. It would be a dimly lit area with lots of objects that the player could discover. I wanted some things to be covered by tarps to protect them from decay. It may be unlikely to model everything I want to put in the basement, so it seems pointless to include what is essential just a dark room if there is nothing to see in it. This will all depend on if I can create enough visual interest with the assets I have.

Unlikely 

These are the elements that I would really like to include to fully flesh out the environment and make it feel like a completed game project:

• Kitchen: This will be a lavish food preparation area. I wanted to build this room in particular because of all the interesting things that can be found here such as rotten food, busted kitchen appliances and large hooks for hanging cuts of meat. Due to all the unique assets that this would require, it does seem unlikely to happen but it's at the top of my list if everything else is completed.
• Exterior Garden: I wanted this area to show off vegetation as I feel the inclusion of trees within an environment adds a lot of realism. I wanted to use this area to visually communicate to the player the level of degradation the mansion has reached. Overgrown plants, obnoxious tall weeds and dried up fountains all add to the creepiness factor. Unfortunately creating vegetation will add a lot of time to landscape elements and I don't want to devote too much effort to this when landscaping isn't my main focus with this project.
• Statues: I want several distinct statues to decorate the environment and give the player information about who once lived in the mansion. However character modelling is not one of my strongest areas and I feel including badly modeled statues will serve as a detriment to the environment in the long run. If everything else is done, I would like to try and create at least one of these.
• Full Mansion Exterior: This would be the completed mansion. You will be able to walk around the entire building and be able to enter and exit from different points. Of course this won't be feasible unless all the rooms are complete but it's something that I would love to have modelled if there is time.

Below I have created a quick floor plan proposing the rooms that I would like to create. The plan is not to scale and room dimensions will likely change when all assets are imported into unreal engine for level creation.

The green zones are areas that I am confident I can create. The Blue zones are possible locations and the Red areas are rooms that I am unlikely to have the time to complete: