Ruiner's Arena

 Yo!

While I was at GDC, I helped a fellow FIEAn, Mr. Elon Grant, make a map for their Tech Design project, Ruiner's Arena. Working on a level for a work-in-progress game is always fun, but you've got to be quick willing to iterate. Fortunately for me, rapid-iteration is my middle name!

In our San Francisco Hotel, Me and Elon worked through some details for the map. Ruiner's Arena is a first-person hero shooter with a focus on comboing abilities together. There were some notable details for the level I needed to keep in mind- Firstly, all the heroes had, by default, a wall-run and a wall-climb, so gaining elevation would not be a problem for anyone. At the same time, high-mobility was expected, but cover was crucial. 

Although there were future plans to build a unique gamemode, we started with simple deathmatch. In order to get something usable for testing quick, I built the level in Blender (as I tend to do) and sent it off. Here's what the first draft looked like.



We wanted the map to be symmetrical, and inspired by a nearby San-Fran Japanese garden, Elon requested a Japanese-Garden theme. We mostly just went with the buildings, and I used a broadly applicable texture to color it without need a ton of material groups. 

We wanted to plan for more than 2 players, so with our time constraint, we decided to just mirror both buildings again. That, and a few adjustments to the indoor areas to create more routes got us to our next iteration.


Here's an example of one of the neatest little balancing things we did. We wanted players to use the wall-running, but this railing made it feel less intentional than we wanted, so we cut the railing and made the billboard platter, to make it easier to wall-run on. I think it's a simple change, but it really came across in the gameplay. Here's the before-and-after!



Later on, we decided we needed more dedicated spawn areas and a central point to fight over for the future implementation of King-of-the-Hill, so we added a weird little structure in the middle and some spawn areas that would hopefully combat spawn-camping. This here's the most recent iteration:



Working on this level in the GDC hotel room ended up being one of my favorite parts of the trip, funnily enough. I haven't gotten a chance to play the level myself yet, sadly! I'm looking forward to the opportunity though. It seems fun as HECK!!! :)


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