Tri-circuit

Level Design & Environment creation

During the creation of this level, I mainly wanted to challenge myself with the visual aspect of the map. I took a 1-year-old level layout that I created for Unreal tournament 4 and started arting it. I thought using this level layout would be good practice for taking a level from start to finish completely on my own, making sure things such as proping, lighting and decals didn't change the gameplay intended from the initial design.

(Environment screenshots)

When I created the layout for the map I went through many iterations that tweaked a lot of things. The first draft I created, put down the core of how the flow of the map was suppose to work. The major changes I did from the first iteration to the last, was changing weapon placements, accessibility of different areas, teleporters as well as removing areas that didn't see much activity and making hallways quicker to travel through.

(First iteration)

One area that saw the most change was the area located north on the level. At the start, the area felt a bit empty and when a player was on the elevated area, he/she had too much control of the flow and outcome of the game. It was simply a bit overpowered. To balance this I added 3 new paths that lead to the elevated area. When I implemented this into the map, the player had a harder time keeping control of the elevated area since there was more paths enemies could arrive from.

(North area)

In the west area of the level, I previously had a much larger playing field. The size was around double of what it is now. The main reason why I changed the area, is because it didn't see much activity. The area became more of a transition zone before the change. When I removed half of the room the activity increased and it felt more like a combat area.

(West area)

In the earlier iterations of the map I had a few hallways,  after a lot of testing, I felt that the hallways were a bottleneck on my map. They slowed down the gameplay speed because they took to long to run through and which lead to that the map seemed empty. To solve this I placed out jump pads on both ends of the hallways. This meant that the players transitioned through the hallways quicker and entered combat faster.

(Hallway A)

The south area had a similar problem as the north area. The problem was that the player who was on the bridge had a height advantage, this was because enemies could only come from below. I needed to add a specific path that could flank the bridge from above. When I did this another problem was created, players could now stay on the flanking path and have the same advantage they had on the bridge earlier. To solve that problem I made sure the path was very thin in width so if a player stayed there too long any explosive projectile hitting the wall behind her/him would lead to taking damage.

(South area)

(South area finished)

(Hallway B finished)

(North area finished)

(North area connection finished)

(Hallway A finished)

(West area finished)

Gameplay screenshots