Environment Project - Starting out with ideas

So, I’ve looked into how some game companies go about their environment designing, as well as my own thoughts. Now to see how it plays out.

I thought of various basic ideas for a scene and to possibly expand upon a few of them:

Desolate forest

Rich desert

Crowded street

Overgrown buildings

Sea coast

On a ferry

Car park

An experimental facility

A sinking/submerged submarine

An isolated island

So I was thinking of which game genre would best suit some of these ideas. For example, I find that the desolate forest idea could work well for a survival horror or an RPG, or a car park or ferry could work well with a 2D fighting game or a survival horror.

So now I’m faced with a problem, how to make my environment interesting. Trying to merge some of the ideas together would be a good start I guess. One thing I probably shouldn’t do though, is look at other games for ideas and inspiration as I could end up being very unoriginal (not to mention probably executed much more effectively that I could hope to imagine at this time).

I so some of the ideas I’ve merged together are:

The crowded street and overgrown (plant life) buildings

An experimental facility and submerged submarine

Rich desert and a ferry

Isolated island and sea coast

Out of all of those ideas, the one that interested me the most is the idea of a ferry and a rich desert.

I like the idea because I like the feel I got from thought of a ferry stranded out in the desert, giving it a feel that is has been stranded there for a long time as the perhaps once existed sea dried up. Or that it could be a ferry that travels on the sand, giving a rather fantasy feel to it.

So with this idea in mind I began to look into reference images to get a feel for this kind of environment on top of my initial thoughts. I pieced together images of wrecked ships and deserts to get a feel of how I could link the two ideas together to create an interesting environment.