INTRODUCTION

This was my submission to the 2020 Mapping Contest hosted by the developers, New World Interactive.

Contest had two stages: Community voting and judgement by a panel of judges comprised of NWI developers and industry leading level designer partners.

Oasis finished the public voting stage as 1st place out of 32 contestants and went on to receive 3rd prize overall.

Gameplay was featured by prominent streamers of the community and the level received very positive feedback from both the community and the developer studio.

CHALLENGES

This was my first ever video game level and I had zero prior experience in game engines or 3D software. I had to learn how to use Unreal Engine 4 while I was also learning best level design practices by doing extensive research.

While working on the level itself to make it in time for the deadline, I also needed to learn technical details like optimization and how AI functioned (for coop mode). I organized play-test sessions and made feedback forms.

Having no knowledge about game development, I had to organize my self-education routine and balance it with the actual development time.

Wanting to get into habit with industry standard practices, I forced my self to learn how to use project management tools. I first tried Jira, then settled on Trello, where I documented my workflow and managed the project.

Everything was to be accomplished during the 20 weeks leading up to the deadline. This was not just a level design challenge for me, but also a period of rapid learning and growth.

Needless to say, I’m quite proud of the outcome, especially considering 1st and 2nd prizes were won by experienced level designers with multiple contest winnings under their belts and 5th prize went to a senior level design student.

PLAN FOR CONTEST

Considering how the contest was structured, my goal was first to be able to pass the public voting stage.

First and foremost, I wanted to provide a solid PVP experience, since that is what I’m mostly passionate about.

Keeping this in mind, after having studied the audience, I concluded that most of the player base interested in custom content would be the cooperative PVE community.

I knew I had to appeal to a wider audience than just the PVP community, so time allowing, I definitely wanted to add a cooperative game mode.

Also I wanted the level to be downloaded quite fast so it would be more accessible to players, so I set myself a 500 MB file size limit. (Final size was only 370 MB)

RESEARCH

Having a decade of Game Master experience in the Tabletop RPG genre, I was really comfortable with pen and paper at hand. I started by sketching out what I call a layout diagram, basically these were schematics detailing relationships between different objective points on the level without yet having concrete spaces in place.

Since this was also my educational process, I was trying to explore different types of room connections and overall space management as well.

Here I made use of architectural techniques called “bubble diagrams” and “parti diagrams”, these are basic shapes and geometries that are essentially fast doodles but can be quite useful in imagining spaces and relations between them.