TACHEON - Deathmatch map

Functional whiteboxed map prototype

Made in the Unreal Tournament 4 Editor

Designed and prototyped by me in 2018

I worked on this map as part of my advanced seminar in level design class over about three months. During the class, I was able to define a project for myself relating to an aspect of level design that I wanted to explore and practice. I chose to whitebox a deathmatch map in the Unreal Tournament 4 editor, as I absolutely love designing multiplayer maps and had taken the editor for a spin before. For this project, I wanted to take a deep dive into the process of designing a multiplayer map, and advance my skills at creating spaces for multiplayer shooter combat. I wanted to set goals for the player experience of the final layout and design with the intent of reaching those goals. This is the map whitebox I came up with, called Tachyon.

For this map, I had three main gameplay pillars that I sought to express in the design of every area. The first was verticality. I find that fast paced arena shooter gameplay limited to one plain gets stale quickly, and when designing a map, making it too flat is an easy trap to fall into. Verticality focused design not only keeps gameplay moving in three dimensions, but is much more pleasing to the eye. I challenged myself to add multiple vertical levels, both big and small, to every area, and create pathways for players to traverse up and down without breaking map flow. My second pillar was close quarters combat. I wanted to promote intense cover leaping an corner turning gunfights, and control the long ranged sightlines so that engagements at that range required more knowledge of the map and good positioning. Its easy to make maps too large scale and too open, leading to a frustrating dominance of sniping strategies and an inability to dodge attacks, and I sought to avoid these issues in my design. My last pillar was an emphasis on multiple paths. I wanted to make sure that every area had multiple ways in and out, and multiple paths through it. For players unfamiliar with the map, I wanted it to feel like a roller coaster, with a myriad of options spreading out as they explore, and for experienced players, to feel like the map always offers multiple strategic options.

During the development of the map I used an experimental planning process. I designed the map in little pieces, creating ‘action blocks,’ room sized fragments of map meant to be semi modular. I built each one with a specific purpose (hallway, central area, corner, vantage point, ect.) and to integrate with each other. Building the map in little pieces allowed my to really concentrate on making sure my three pillars were properly expressed in each one, and gave me room to iterate drastically without needing to rearrange the layout of the whole map. I started by sketching them out quickly on paper, allowing me to rapidly get ideas out of my head and documented, then knocked them out using the editors BSP geometry, after which I continued to iterate on them in engine. After I had built about 5 or so, I began arranging them into different layouts to lay the foundation of a flowing map. After finding a layout that satisfied me, I then added details to stitch the map together. Using the core action blocks as inspiration, I added walkways, lifts, cover, and rooms to escape too. That was definitely the most creatively engaging part of the process. Lastly, I added weapons, powerups and pickups, added materials for a little extra flair, and continually tested and modified the map. The result was a fully playable whitebox of a deathmatch map for unreal tournament 4.