- back to square one -

Due to some very helpful feedback on my level design process and workflow, I have decided to redo this design from the ground up.

This time around I will be focusing on some key factors of the level and my workflow that I would like to change. Some from my personal issues with the map as it was before, and some new insights into the level design process obtained from my recent Interview with Blizzard Entertainment.

• The level was too flat and linear, and did not give much in the way of path options for the player to take.

  • To fix this I will be broadening the original floor plan to include more route options to get to the center point, and adding a second set of pathways on the second story of the buildings within the level. These additions should open the range of choice the players can make, yielding more diverse and interesting game play and strategies.

• The level as it was, did not feel alive. It might sound a tad hasty to say this, as it was at such an early stage in development, but being the designer of the level, I had a clear vision in my head of what the end product would likely be. Given this, I could see that the layout made for a very disconnected environment. This is supposed to be a research lab, and in such a confined (and Hazardous) space, it should be a well connected and well oiled machine, but in my design, there are many buildings that serve no purpose but to be a safe zone.

  • My plan is to slightly increase the number of buildings, and to tie them into a singular goal across the research facility. For example, spaces I had blocked out for smaller buildings could become control stations for mining rigs that would be placed in the scene, and mined material could have a transport unit connected directly to the main lab, or side building could have probes monitoring safety data etc.

    Essentially, I just need to find a way to make the whole facility feel more unified.

• I will be sticking to the Graybox stage for a longer period of time.

  • One of the main tips I took away from my interview, was the necessity of staying in the gray box phase of the design, “Until you are absolutely sick of it” (Aaron Keller). And as it was pointed out, I tend to do unnecessary modeling and texturing too soon in the pipeline, both wasting time and causing more work for myself if there needs to be changes further along in the process. A clear example of this would be the stalactites, volcano wall, and lava in the original progress pictures of the level.

    As a result, my next set of update will be primarily focused on blocking out the level, putting more emphasis on the underlying geometry, and ensuring the structure of the level is a solid building point for the more intricate detailed geometry to follow.

I am currently in the blueprinting phase of the new design, and will post here once I am satisfied with the direction I would like to take.

If you would like to see the original map design, please click on the button below.

On to the revision

Here I have redone the original floor plan design. As you can see, I have abandoned the idea of making a purely symmetrical or mirrored map. Instead, I have decided to focus on balancing a level that is not quite similar. So if one side has advantage in a certain area, I will adjust to give the opposing side advantage in another.
This is a rough block-out of what I would like the main structure to be. The next stage will be gray-boxing in Unreal Engine 4. In that stage I will be adding in the other levels of pathways and building changes.

Update One: it is a small update, but I am beginning to block out the major geometry of the scene, and getting a feel for the sizing.

Next update will include more added buildings, and the additional upper pathways.