mozidesign.com Unorganized Thoughts of a Game Designer

Team Fortress 2 Map in the Works.

Ever since I got into level design way back in my high school days I have always used Unreal Tech, from the original Unreal Engine all the way up to Unreal Engine 3. Now it’s time for a change. I enjoy playing Team Fortress 2 and figured that I should start making maps for this game. I think that personally, I have a solid understanding of common level design principles, but believe that there is always room to learn new principles. The only hurdle I see with TF2 mapping are the tools, but that is just figuring out how to do common things with different buttons. Every editor has means to build geometry, apply textures, add in details and setup a lighting scheme. It’s just a matter of reading up on some documentation on how do all that with the prior knowledge of level design I already have from modding and work experience.  So long story short, I manged to get the hang of using the Hammer Editor within Source SDK to build my first Team Fortress 2 map!

My first level is going to be an Arena map as the game rules are simple and little additional scripting is required. Once I get the hang of the tools a bit more I will delve in to CTF and perhaps into more complicated modes like Control Points or Payload.  Without further delay here are the work in progress screens for my map ARENA_Warhead.

Not much but definitely gives a sense of how the map will look and feel as work towards a an Alpha build that I will share with the Team Fortress 2 community. For more information and updates feel free to check out the following thread at the site TF2  Maps.

Cheers!

Design of Frustration

Recently I have been playing Wolverine and thus far I am having a blast. The game pretty much has captured the essence of the character, he is a dude with claws and can pretty much beat the living shit out of anyone. The movie was horrendous but I won’t talk about that, however I will say it is interesting how developers at Raven tied in various movie moments to their own time line of events in the game. Which is better than just retelling the movie scene for scene in a game which some movie games do.

Anyways, the game is filled with many badass moments, crazy combo finishers, and various environment executions that make you cringe! In the mix off all that awesomeness there are some low points in the game that can be a little frustrating.  Without giving away any spoilers for the game I will talk about two moments thus far that really pissed me off.

Frustration moment number 1: This one occurs early on in the game, Wolverine is on the run from the folks that gave him his adamantium claws. Pretty straight forward objective, kill anyone in your way to escape, sounds fun. However, at one point in your escape you are ‘drugged’ for a lack of better term and can no longer heal until you meet someone that will remove the drug for you.  So I have lost one of Wolverine’s core abilities to heal, seems kind of odd but I can keep playing until I ran into the gun turrets of death.  I despise these things, given the fact I can’t heal and have been forced to have a low amount of health having laser sight turrets that can track me and kill me in one shot sucks ass!

The first encounter with these things was ok, as I was taught the dodge mechanic (which worked but still frustrating). The second encounter is where I practically lost it. Here is the setup, there is absolutely no permanent cover to hide from the laser sights of death unlike previous encounters. The only way survive is to use a switch to move one piece of cover toward your location. Once it is in place you got get behind it and follow this moving cover piece as it moves on a track alongside the catwalk you are on. Sounds simple, but if you fall behind and the cover piece moves slightly ahead of you, laser sights will spot you and kill you in one or two shots. If you use the dodge mechanic that you were just taught, you end up few steps ahead of the cover piece. The result, death from laser sight turrets once again.

Now if by chance you do follow the cover piece to the end of the line, you are not safe just yet. If you don’t run around the corner fast enough, guess what? One of the turrets can still see you and bang you are dead! After multiple attempts and cursing at the game I finally got past this point and resumed the hack and slash gameplay that I was enjoying before this stupid puzzle gameplay moment.

Frustration moment number 2: The traversal in Wolverine is pretty straight forward aside from a few places where you need to grab a ledge and jump to some other location or use a rope to climb to higher ground. Some of the cooler traversal moments are when Wolverine uses his claws to climb up some vines on a wall or up frozen sheets of ice. However, one thing Wolverine sucks at in game is jumping, to be precise double jumping.  Not sure if is me or if the jump mechanic and or timing of it sucks, causing me to fail traversal puzzles over and over.

My first traversal failure was not bad, but is was frustrating due to the fact that I could not make Wolverine jump across a stupid gap. If I fell, no problem I could climb back up and try again. Eventually I got it, manged to time the double jump and run just right to make it across the gap.

Now later on in the same level there is another double jump traversal puzzle. This one really pissed me off to the point I was cursing the level designer who built the environment. (If by some crazy chance any of the Raven folks or the actual level designer reads this I apologize for being harsh but was seriously disappointed in the design of this section of the Alkali Lake mission)

So here is deal, at some points in the game the camera changes it’s perspective for cool sequences, in this case I got a ’side scroller view’ as I am running along a path under a bridge. As I am following this path there is an attack chopper shooting at me in the background, very cool stuff, now here is where things go down hill. In this side scroller view I come to a point where I need to jump onto a concrete stump in the middle of a flowing river and from this stump jump to rest of the bridge supports. Sounds simple enough that I need to jump from A to B to C and move on. No that can’t be simple at all, it has to be frustrating! Here is what made it frustrating, first off as I am trying do do this double jump I am being shot at by a helicopter and some random dude on the other side. Second off all Wolverine can’t do the stupid double jump!

Countless times I would run to the edge of the platform to jump to the concrete block, and more often than not as I hit the jump button, Wolverine ran straight into the river and “dies”….restart checkpoint. I try again, this time I get Wolverine to jump but guess what he falls short and dies in the river! At some point I finally managed to make it to the concrete block, now the challenge was to jump to the next platform. Same shit as before, kept missing the damn jump or ran right into the water, brilliant!  Other times I did manage to get the double jump right and I overshot the damn block and landed in the river, WTF! At this point I am really getting annoyed, but eventually I made it across only to find a few feet further was the same exact shitty jump puzzle and this one was worse. Aside from the same mistakes as the first concrete block puzzle the second one pulls a total dick move on the player. If by some miracle you land on the second concrete block, guess what? The bloody helicopter shoots at it and it sinks into the river! So if you don’t time your jump just right you die right where you stand. And if you do manage to jump in time chances are you will fall into the river anyways cause you’ll miss the next platform!

Seriously WTF was up the design of that level, did no one see how frustrating that was in testing or play sessions? Sure it pissed me off to no end but as I was dying and trying I had a few good ideas of how all of this could have been resolved with less frustration. The best idea would have been to make the damn concrete blocks a little wider so the first attempt at double jump Wolverine would land on the bloody thing and move on.  Having the second block be shot out from under your feet was a dick move, why harm the player when they are already standing in tricky spot to begin with.

Anyways, I needed to rant about that, however other than those two moments Wolverine kicks ass and I recommend you guys play it if you get a chance. I just hope the next few missions don’t have any more shitty traversal puzzles or double jump puzzles. Really takes away from the fun of going berserk with Wolverine.

CBP3 Volume 3 Released

Well, while I was away at E3 I noticed the third installment of the Community Bonus Pack was released!

Stop on by the CBP 3 website for level images and download links!

Level Portfolio Trailer

Somewhat inspired by the CBP 3 v3 trailer and being suggested by some friends I made a trailer of all of my Unreal Engine 3 maps. I think it turned out all right, however due to youtube showing an already compressed video it turned out a bit darker than normal. Anyways check it out, feel free to leave any comments. Recommend watching in High Quality, looks a little better:

If you would like to see the original video you can download it from here:

http://mozidesign.com/files/Mozi_Level_Portfolio.avi

DIVX codec is required for the avi file.

Other than that I am off to E3 in a few hours, quite excited to go and check out all the new games such as: Batman:Arkham Asylum, Brutal Legend, Assassin’s Creed 2, Borderlands, Modern Warfare 2, and anything and everything else on the expo floor.

I’ll do my best to do daily posts from E3 if I can get to computer as I don’t own a laptop. Otherwise I’ll post all of my notes when I return.

CBP 3 Volume 3…Almost Here!

Been really busy the last couple of months at work and with CBP 3. But now things are almost done and to get the hype machine moving check out this video one of our team members Drummer.unr made of all the maps and mods we will feature in volume 3! Be sure to check it out in HD and full screen looks much better.

My addition to CBP 3 volume 3 is CTF-Full Throttle. More screens of the map can be found on the level design page. So keep stopping by as very soon the final release build of CBP 3 volume 3 will be availble.

SP_Forrestal Village Released!

Alright folks, here it is, Forrestal Village! A project seven months in the making and now ready for your enjoyment. This is probably the most time I have spent on a single level, but totally worth it, as I took my time to make the level as detailed as possible. Along with the detail work, I did my best to provide a fun gameplay experience for you guys. In the end after several iterations on the lighting and gameplay flow I finally feel that this map is now done!

One thing that I know will make people happy is checkpoints. That’s right, I got checkpoints in this map, unlike my other map Industrial, and given the size of the map it was pretty much mandatory to figure out how to get level streaming and checkpoints to work.  I give my thanks to some folks on the forums for their knowledge and tutorials on level streaming for Gears of War.

As always the mandatory teaser screen:

More screens can be found on the level design page along with the download link. So give it a spin when you got time and feel free to drop any comments and or feedback to either:

http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=184894

or

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=671755

So have fun and go kick some locust ass!

SP_Industrial Re-released!

After a long delay it’s finally here, a new version of SP_Industrial! I am sure many of you may have noticed the teaser pic on the level design page (which is now a bit out dated) of the updated look. In terms of gameplay the level is virtually the same. However a lot of changes were done in terms of cover placement and combat scenarios( and I give credit to those individuals who shall remain nameless but I owe them my thanks for providing feedback on areas of improvement for the map)

So without further delay here is a new screen:

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More screens and the download link can be found on the level design page. The readme file has install instructions if you need them.

Enjoy!

Making of WAR-CBP3-Meditation: A Study of Simplicity

So today the winners of the second phase of the Make Something Unreal Contest were announced and this time around I was lucky enough to snag 3rd place in the Best Warfare Category.  For more details and listing of the other winners follow the link, and before I begin with my discussion, I would like send my congrats out to all the winners, finalists and honorable mentions that were announced during phase 2.  Some really good competition this time around.

Without further delay let’s begin this discussion of simplicity, and what better way to start it off than a quote.  “Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.  ” Einstein, Albert. I first heard of this quote from my days of working on Spider-Man 3 DS as our lead designer had this quote printed and posted at his desk.  After knowing about this I have always thought about simplicity in my designs both at work and my mod projects. However, one thing to keep in mind, is that simplicity should not sacrifice the presentation or overall quality of whatever it is one may be doing.  When that happens, it’s not simplicity, its half assing everything.

But how does this relate to level design you ask? Well this is just my opinion and feel free to disagree, but in terms of level design I think simplicity can deliver effective results in the flow of the map. If the flow is simple and effective it promotes an easy to learn layout. If the layout is easy to learn it becomes memorable. If it becomes memorable it can be mastered to level of predictability to help you have that sixth sense of what your teammates or opponents may do in game.  Simplicity can also be adapted to visuals (i.e. Team Fortress 2) or even systems (don’t have a good example right now, but I am sure there is one) Now that I have established my thoughts on ’simplicity’ it’s time to move on to how this was applied to my level.  I’ll do my best not to bog you down with a lot of reading and let the pictures do all the talking! The level began with a very basic shell:

In the screens above I mapped out my initial flow with the terrain editor to create an ‘S’ shaped layout. Once I was happy with layout of the terrain I setup some really bare bone BSP blocks to add as structures to get an overall feel of how the arena plays. I did many iterations on the terrain until it felt right before moving on to the next steps of making the level look pretty.

One key thing to note here is that simplicity lies in the layout as I mentioned above, I choose a common shape that most people are already familiar with and works well for symmetrical gameplay.  Even in a bare bones state the map felt fun from the get go, and was easy to remember all the paths and key landmark locations that would be vital during a frantic game of Warfare. After deciding that the layout was locked down and simple enough for a good game of Warfare I moved on to visual polish. (I wish I had more screens handy from the dev time of the map but these show case how the layout came to life)

As I mentioned above simplicity can also be applied to visuals and I did just that in this map. It’s obvious to see that things are not over complicated as seen other UT 3 maps rather, they feel natural, as if they belong in the environment.  This simplicity in visuals also supports the gameplay in the fact that they don’t distract the player from what’s important… the game! With this in mind I built key land marks such as the arched bridge in the screen above is near the base exits. The construction of this landmark is rather simple but what does to support gameplay is that at this landmark players know that they near their own base or the enemy base (red or blue respectively) There are many more examples of this in the map that I could go on about, but hopefully when you play it you will keep this discussion in the back of your mind.

Next up was more visual polish which finally lead to completed design seen on my level design page and in the screen below:

So to put everything into a retrospective I would like to share some in editor screens to drive home the concept of simplicity I used when creating the map. Though I would like to point out that I made clever use of a total of 2506 meshes and a few BSP cubes!

Unlit/No Meshes:

From the screen below you can see that the initial BSP cubes I had in the first screens are exactly the same but textured ( again I used a generic base stone texture, simplicity!) This is the core layout and what I think makes the map fun to play. The meshes and lighting are there as necessary polish items to make the map cool but even without those the simplicity and refinement of the layout on it’s own could do quite well.

Unlit w/Mesh Work

Oh look pretty visuals! All I did here was use the static mesh library in game to morph those BSP cubes into believeable structures without compromising my intial gameplay designs

Lit w/Mesh Work

So here it is the final product in the editor!

Hopefully, this post was informative and helpful to you especially those of you that do mod work out there in the community. However, I would like to state one thing before I close this discussion. In no way I am docking down mind bending visuals and crazy (but awesome) map layouts, what some of you level designers out there achieve is spectacular and I applaud your work.  Just take this post as alternative way of thinking if you get stuck or get designer’s block… think of the simplest answer to your problem it may just work.

Thanks for reading, if you got a copy of UT 3 please check out WAR-Meditation (available on level design page) hopefully you will have fun!

New Map in the Works

Yes I am still here, and apologize for no updates since November 2008! Been really busy last few months between a few projects at work and side projects at home. If was not putting late hours at the office I was at home staying up late working on my new Gears PC map. The level is nearly done, and for your entertainment some preview screens of Forrestal Village! (single player map, note–lighting is temp for now.)

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I should be done with the level soon and will post new screen shots when that day comes along with the all essential download link. If time permits I’ll do write up on this map like I did for MP_Pipeline a while back.

That’s it for now, though on an unrealated note I am off to see Metallica tomorrow down in Philly. As usual with most concerts I attend I’ll do wrtie up about the event so look out for that as well.

Cheers,