I really feel that my UT2k4 map Snowed In provided a great opportunity for me to demonstrate some of my personal design best practices. I was very careful to go through all of the steps from an initial paper concept to final play testing. The following sections detail both the development of the map and the design decisions that governed the map’s creation.

The paper design is one of the most important parts of the map creation process. Starting with a drawing instead of with actual level geometry allowed me to iterate through my initial design ideas quickly. Yes just starting out building BSP in the editor would have been more fun but it would have been slower and harder to see the big picture. With Snowed In I went through a few different designs before I settled on this layout and the CTF game type. As you can see the initial paper design was simple, but just having it and using it to think about how gameplay and pathing would occur in the map was a big help.

Speaking of pathing, here you can see an image with pathing predictions so that I could further evaluate how player circulation would most likely occur. As you can also see some new passages were added up on the outside as a result of thinking through the expected gameplay.

After the initial layout plans were done the next step was to explore a visual style. I came up with a little background to fuel my visual research. Simply put the level was to be a military training facility. With that in mind I started to look at forts and army bases. This image of a bunker really caught my eye.

Now that I had a layout down on paper and I had a visual style gathered and in mind I started to flesh out the map’s shape and scale. This image shows a very rough version of the front of the base.

As soon as I had my first room built I was in there running around. I’d place a bot in the map that couldn’t move and I’d use him to get a sense of scale. I’d even do timed runs from one flag position to the other to figure out how long different paths were going to take. I knew this step was the most important so I was careful not to get ahead of myself by jumping to visuals and detailing before I was confident in the general layout.

Having confidence in the scale of the map from previous playtests and tweaks I was ready to do a detail test. For this I decided to use the front of the base. Here you can see metal bars in the windows and rain guards over them. As you’ll see later this look just didn’t stick and ended up being nothing more than a stepping stone towards the final visual.

I’ll be honest here, this is something I should have had in my paper map. I had an idea in my head of where certain weapons should be but I never got it down in that initial phase. I was lucky that this didn’t hurt me as bad as it could have. I was able to take the flow of the map and set up some nice gun and item locations.

I totally could have also gotten the bot pathing initial pass done earlier as well but because I had friends at work to play around with I didn’t need it so early. Eventually I realized that this was very important for when I was testing and tweaking at home. Definitely get these guys into your map as soon as possible.

It should probably go without saying that throughout the development of a map you need to be playtesting constantly. This may be with bots or it may be with friends but with each step of the way this has to be the sub step.

This is an image of one of the side paths that was added in the second paper map up above. This was the first playable room that I did a detail pass on. This was used to establish a visual density for the playable areas. By this time I’d decided to have the map during a cold night.

After detailing the playable side path I started to work on detailing out one of the non playable rooms on the inside of the base. Having these areas would make the actually small internals of the base feel more spacious. This also allowed for density without it adversely affecting gameplay.

Once I had the plans for the inside style pretty much nailed down I needed to look at the outside. I still wasn’t happy with the bars and rain guards I had previously. I ended up getting some feedback from fellow designers that said the base didn’t feel heavy. It didn’t feel imposing and protective. I ended up going back to the bunker concepts and using them to reshape the top of the base along with other portions of the outside.

Though polish was the last step it was by far the longest part of the whole process. It literally took hundreds of hours to finish this map. I had to finalize terrain layout, lighting, texturing, item placement, sounds, scripting, zone protaling for performance, blocking for gameplay, etc. It’s by far too much to go over in this break down but I will hit on some of the specific design challenges I faced during the finishing process and how I worked to fix them below.

One issue with any FPS multiplayer is spawn camping. My level was no stranger to this problem. A couple solutions to this are spreading out the spawn points so that they are harder to camp or providing some advantage to the person spawning. For Snowed In I chose option B. I created a safe area for each team to spawn in. I then provided multiple access points for the players to jump down and enter different portions of the playable areas. I also provided them with visibility below and with powerful weapons to collect on spawn. In order to keep the other team out of these areas I created visual shields and a new object called TeamKillPlayerVolume that only killed a specific team.

If one team completely dominates another in a game of Capture the Flag then only one team has fun. You want your games to go back and forth so that each team feels like they have a chance. In an attempt to facilitate this kind of back and forth I created a simple version of the UTJumpPad called TeamUTJumpPad that is team specific. This allowed me to place jump pads at each base that only worked for the team that belonged to that base. This way if you died defending your flag you’d still have a chance to hit a jump pad and catch up to the flag carrier.