Mapcore Unreal 4 September Challenge Part 1

Starting my journey into Level Design has been fun challenging, it would however have been much more challenging without the help of the fine folks at www.mapcore.org.

As such I decided to take part in the current challenge hosted on the website which is to build a Unreal Engine 4 white box level.

I started by doing some "research". Research basically being an afternoon of playing Unreal Tournament (It's tough work you know? :P) and after that decided that the best thing I could do for this challenge would be to make a symmetrical capture the flag map. 

The map takes place over three floors as follows.

The basement floor that sits below the main area and is connected by two ramps leading to the flag rooms. The central area is a long narrowish hallway with ramps up either side and pillars blocking line of sight.

The ground floor, the ramps shown here actually lead up to the second floor. The bases and spawn points are separated from the flags slightly as I thought this could be interesting rather than having to storm right into the enemies main area. The middle of the room has a lower section that may be flooded to waist height with water slowing down anyone who takes this route. As it's the quickest and most direct route it makes sense to me that it should also be the most dangerous. As this doesn't leave much of an area between the two flag points however I might come back to this later and spread the map out a bit. The thin area at the back of each base leads up a short ramp to a vantage point that almost directly over looks the other teams ramp and base entrance area. Both of these areas also have line of sight on each other as well, so if one team is being pinned in their base they can use the same tactic to stop the other team.

Finally the top floor, each side contains a whole that players can use to drop down into the flag rooms which can be great for an ambush from either team as well as a good way of defending your flag at the last second. The bridge in the middle has line of sight down to either sides ramp area in the main room, and if the central area was full of water the player could easily jump down into it if needed. 

When all three floors are put together it should look like this...

And hey look... it does!

Here is one of the bases entrances, pretty empty at the moment will probably add some obstacles or something soon or maybe expand it backwards some to make it bigger.

Moving backwards from there you can see the ramp leading up to the second floor, currently it ramps up from the side as well although I might change this later by replacing it with a bit more wall to offer more protection straight out of the base. The doorway on the left leads to the flag area for this team. 

Pulled back even further now you can see the entire platform area of the red team from the blue teams identical platform as well as the two vantage points and the bridge running above. 

Inside one of the flag rooms, I was a little worried that someone could put their back to the wall here and defend it indefinitely but hopefully the ramp entrance from the left, main entrance from the right and the hole from the upper floor on the right should be enough to stop this being a problem?

This shot shows midway down the ramp mentioned above, going up the ramp from here would take you into the flag room, while going down to the left will take you into the basement level and the extended corridor.

In the far right of this shot you can see the ramp we just came down from in the screenshot above. This room is mirrored so that in order to make it up to the other teams side of the map you will have to cross right across the middle of this room at some point. 

Another view of this room.

Here is the bridge across the top room, I'm thinking about changing this to two bridges along the side of the walls though. Maybe in the next update?

 Overall I think it's going ok so far, my main concern is simply that maybe it's too small? Maybe it would work as a 4v4 map rather than anything much larger as it could just be chaotic. I'm also considering lowering the railings down slightly so players have more chance to shoot at each other or maybe removing some of them completely. I also think I will need to go through and add some general clutter like large boxes etc to break up the level a little bit. 

Far Cry 3 Level Part 2

Another afternoon of messing around with the Far Cry 3 level editor and I'm finished with this level. Overall I'm pretty happy with it but as always a first level in any editor is never going to be as good as it could be due to learning the restrictions and quirks of the tools.

 This map takes place on a small tropical island that has in recent years built a small helipad to have greater contact with the outside world. Now a large international company comes into conflict with a group of rebels from the islands only town as they attempt to take control of the natural resources of the island.

The Rebels are held up in what used to be the islands church, with pews and other furniture quickly pushed out of the way to make room for a new command centre for the rebels.

On the other side of the conflict the helipad and surrounding buildings make up the companies only safe ground, all flights off the island are cancelled, with the helicopter ready to go at any minute should reinforcements be required.

For either side to truly own the island they will need to control all  three major locations:

The Village:
A once small group of houses has become cramped over the years, forcing the wood and corrugated steel shacks to build closer together, and even on top of each other. Between the beach and the river it is only a matter of time before the local villagers will have to consider expanding into the jungle they cherish across the river.

The Jungle:

The natural heart of the island, known for it's rough terrain and dangerous wildlife. The focal point of the fighting here has been focused around a small camping area. 

The Coastal Battery:
A ruin from the second World War, it hides the islands dark history and has been left almost untouched since it was bombed over 60 years ago.

As I mentioned earlier, this level has been good experience for me. While it started out more to showcase the different styles capable within the toolset I feel I've managed to merge them well into a cohesive whole. The island is probably a little small all things considered, both teams have sniping towers available within their respective bases that could be problematic, especially to players fighting in the dense and tight village. However as both teams have this as a possibility and with both only really having site of half the town it almost draws a line down the sides of the town for players to fight on while still being fluid enough to change ownership on the fly.

The main change I would make to the map would be for the village to be in the centre, with the jungle and coastal battery on either side as they are likely to be less intense combat wise and could easily lead to players judging they have time to move away from the main village battle to quickly take another point without their team losing control of the village.

Also while I aimed to keep things an equal distance from either team for balance reasons I decided the jungle point could be closer to international companies HQ than the rebels by giving them a higher ground to take it from. So while it might benefit the company in the short term by having a quick capture, the rebels should end up with a good chance to counter from above.


As I mentioned above though, overall I'm happy with the map. Finally to finish off here are some bonus shots, including the almost mandatory hidden sunken submarine!

For players that find themselves swimming aimlessly in the ocean, a small surprise!

The rebels aren't always fighting, in their downtime they appear to enjoy relaxing on the beach. 

A small island away hides a weapon not found anywhere else on the map. 

Far Cry 3 Level Part 1

As well as my work in Unreal 4 I decided to take an afternoons break and play around with the Far Cry 3 level editor.

So far it's really impressed me, it's very intuitive and in just the three or so hours I played around with it I managed to make the following.

It's a simple map that will eventually have two control points on it, one near the old WW2 naval battery and another in a village on the other side of the map that I've not shown here. The two bases are going to be the airport and the church area.

I've focused more on visual set pieces more so than anything else with this map, still when it's finished I aim for it to be balanced enough to be enjoyable for small team based fights.

Unreal 4 Work Part 2.

After a few days of playing around with my first level I really thought I'd pushed it about as far as I can go, especially with my lower quality models and textures, you can only really make stuff like that look 'so' good after all.

For my second attempt I decided to use pre-existing assets that came with the Unreal 4 Sci-Fi Hallway demo and over the course of one day I created the following.

Again, worth mentioning that all the assets were taken from the Unreal 4 Sci-Fi hallway demo but the layout etc is mine.

I'm much happier with how this turned out than my previous level, is just shows what quality work you can put together with decent assets. I'm not sure if I should extend this small level into a full sized map or move on to something else.

Unreal 4 Work Part 1.

Over the previous few weeks I've been working in Unreal Engine 4, it's a really powerful and surprisingly easy to use engine (at least the basics) and I've been working on putting together some levels to improve my skills and hopefully eventually use towards a portfolio that might get me a job in Level Design.

I started off my first level and working from these two concept images

over a few days put together this...

This level was never going to be overly successful being my first in Unreal 4 but I did learn a lot, from some basic mistakes to avoid to some nice shortcuts that save a lot of time. It's also worth nothing that everything here was made by me, from the textures to the models and I'm not really much of a 3D artist. I think that probably also helped distract from the purpose of what I was doing after a basic block out stage.

Overall though I think this was successful but for my next level I decided upon something a little different...

Back In The Saddle

So I'm back from getting married!

I won't go into detail here as this isn't a personal blog but I will say the day went amazingly, everyone had a great time and the honeymoon was basically the best holiday of my life, and an experience I would be lucky to repeat in my lifetime.

Since I've been back I've finally officially started working on a project of my own. It's overly ambitious and will never be finished but if it helps me to focus my efforts while learning some new skills then so be it.

I've not got much to show for now but here are a few hand painted textures I've been working on.

This wood texture is actually the first hand painted texture I've ever worked on, so I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out. It should be apparent that I'm working with a very bright cartoony look for this project so while the wood doesn't look massively realistic it does tile rather nicely and I'm happy with it for now at least.

This second texture is a cobblestone texture, it took a little while to come together but I'm really happy with the look of it.

So not bad for my first hand painted textures, especially as I didn't use any tutorials whatsoever. It seems simply taking your time and thinking it through with references are all you really need to do, who knew!

I've also been hard at work in Unity getting a basic camera and movement system down. It's giving me a few teething problems but once I've got it working I'll probably start throwing in some basic models and get building a basic level! Exciting times!

Expect to see more in the coming weeks!