I’m creating a game that’s heavily inspired by the Battlefield series and I want to create maps with triangle terrain but I don’t want to copy maps from the Battlefield directly. How do you guys come up with level designs or white boxing concepts for medium to large scale fps maps that allows vehicles, sniping, CQC and still have a unique map with different obstacles and features?
I’ve had a look at some environment concept art but I need to know what you guys do when coming up with ideas.
Have you ever asked yourself what common places from growing up would feel as a COD or BF map?
It sounds edgy but I always thought of my school as a cool fps map.
I know animators straight rip scenes out of reality. Maybe start by creating a map from your home town.
Planning and play testing. Many combat game maps are tested in their greybox form and tweaked for balance loooooong before any artist actually touches the map itself. It’s significantly easier (and makes sense for the time investment) to make large changes in terrain, buildings, and general player flow before an artist starts designing out an area of a map.
Get your general layout of terrain, use plain blocks for buildings, rocks, and whatever other scenic object you’ll be using, and play a few rounds of the game to get a good feel for how it flows and make tweaks of any areas that you don’t want. Say for example you find that players are getting caught in a choke point close to their spawn zone, resulting in the other team camping that point - you can (and should) fix that now before any of your level artists touch it.
Here is a floorplan for Star Wars Battlefront 2’s Mos Eisley map (likely made after the game’s release but you get the idea).
I don’t want to make a school map yet as me and my dev partner will get lots of controversy for implementing that but yeah I know a few good locations that’ll be cool. I know games like Arma 3 took inspiration for Limnos and El Stratios near Greece and that’s how they made Stratis and Altis.
I just want to have a unique map for everything I construct though so it’s not a cheesy copy or remake but 100% natural in it’s own form.
Nice! I am looking at random towns in Africa, America, Poland, Germany and military bases and other unique locations across the globe but I want to heavily edit them so they look unique in it’s own way.
But the only obstacle I’m having is trying to create a map that was similar to BF4 shanghai as we want to have the same map mechanics as that (Buildings falling and vehicle game play) but in a different city and style, etc. Also our game is going to be mid detail so we’re not going to lag out the map and some of the sky rise buildings will have explorable areas and some just for show.
I’ll have to make a GDD (Game Development Document) for our game first then maybe do research on places before putting them through white box and grey box phases before moving to art stages, etc.
I just have to say this is cool to see, a game like battlefield 4 would be great as I currently can’t play the game and PF is getting a bit boring. Large scale maps with vehicles etc, I have to say I been thinking the last few months of one day making a fps like BF 4 or something, but I can’t script. I’m in the PF community map thing and I’m currently working on a Seige of Shanghai inspired map.
I’m not good at mapping simply because I’m a creative person, so I put details and get distracted. However what I do is look at images, watch gameplay videos. I then build in sections, trying to figure out things. In total I scraped at least 5 maps over 2 years. But I’m taking it more seriously.
Edit: didn’t know this was a year old, wish it had the full date
Yeah, our dev team has been busy, and with this virus, it may give us more time to work on the game we are working on.
We will get somewhere, but our main coder needs to learn more mathematics in school before he can apply it to our game. For myself, I’m doing a VFX degree at university, and I’ve been getting better at particles and simulations.
Don’t worry if it’s a year old; I’m still listening to feedback. I got a DJI Mavic Pro recently, so I’m planning on scanning real-world locations to Autodesk recap than to Maya to create a low poly model of a town that we can use as a template to create new and exciting maps—using real-world technology to help with game development.
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