Chris Foster
- Level Designer
Project Details:
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LOCATION: Real Life Battlefield in Hobart, IN
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DURATION: 5 days
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TEAM SIZE: 2 people
Goal:
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Create a new playable map that surrounds on fast paced shooting and 7 different game modes to make the ultimate guest experience
Assets Used:
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Pre-Made Walls
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Windows
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Towers
Level Design Process
For the design of the new map for Team Combat, it was important to bring back what made Team Combat so special: exciting sightlines and fast pace shooting with cover. I wanted to analyze close and far gun encounters, drawing inspiration from the 6 years I been working here at Team Combat.
To see a specific topic of the design process, click on one of the topics below:
1. Pre - Production
2. Paper Design
3. Blockout and Development
4. Iterations
5. Conclusion
Pre-Production
I began my process by gathering reference images and videos to gain a better understanding of what I wanted the level to look like. Since I have been working here for a long time, I used previous map layouts and my experience playing on these battlefields to understand what made these maps enjoyable and what can be improved for each one. One thing that needed a major change was for our sniper towers to be at its full potential again.
This is a video for one of our game modes: Control Point. It's similar to Hardpoint in COD and yes that is me that is mostly shown in the video!
Paper Design
These are paper designs that were sketched and cleaned up in Photoshop to determine the full layout of the map. It served as an initial idea to start building our new map for Team Combat.
In this sketch, I focused on aligning the side towers so they can have clear angles to shoot enemies directly down the middle and inside some of the rooms in the middle path.
In this sketch, I tried to space out the rooms a little more to give different sightlines across multiple different ways but what I discovered is that the room's placements break up the encounters too much.
In this sketch, I decided to turn the middle towers straight against each other to have a dominating presence for enemies to be mindful of before flanking on the enemy side. The rooms have better spacing and overall a better sense of sightlines.
Blockout and Development
During the blockout phase, I had a very short and quick deadline to change the battlefield before the start of our busy season. I handed my sketches over to my boss and we decided to clean up my third sketch since it was the most polished. What was most important to the layout was making sure it can work with all the game modes we have because they require a lot of spacing for certain modes while others are tight and contained to one area. That's what makes a map very special in shooter games like COD when they can be converted into multiple game modes.
Three key components to enhance the guest experience were:
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Side Towers: Before I remade the battlefield, two out of the four sniper towers were useless and guests complained a lot about it including myself. My goal was to bring back the joy of how good it felt when both towers had equal power.
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Big Middle Area: With most shooter maps, there is a middle area that designers encourage the player to move and get active in that space but it could be high risk if you have a really good defensive team. I wanted to create a middle area that could be a great way to flank the enemy team but if you're not strategic then you can be taken out by the enemy from towers or other rooms.
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Sightlines: Sightlines are super important for any shooter map and it's something that we take pride in. Not every player is going to want to take high ground or to flank the enemy on their side of the map. Having sightlines allows the player to stay on their side of the map but still get a lot of eliminations towards their scores. Players can get creative when they find sightlines where they're hardly getting eliminated while getting a ton of eliminations.
Each of these components were integrated into the blockout phase, serving as the fundamental elements to create a fun and fast paced shooter map.
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Final Layout of the Map
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Example of sightlines from rooms
This is after we moved all of the walls to match up with the sketch
Iterations
Since I only had 1 week to make this happen, this challenge me to practice quick sketching to get the best map I possibly can make.
When making this map, we have one shot to do it right because once it's set up, we don't have the bandwidth to change it before our busy season begins. It took us about 2 days to get the sketch right before using the rest of the days to move all of the rooms on the battlefield.
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To enhance the experience for players, I moved some barrels and props around to provide cover opportunities for different scenarios. These provide ways to stay hidden while trying to get more eliminations.
Conclusion
This was a dream come true to finally design a map for Team Combat. It gave me an opportunity to design a level in real life instead of in engine.
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The coolest thing about creating a level in real life is using different level design practices on actual players. Since I've been playing tactical laser tag for 6 years, it showed me how all types of players think when they're playing on our field. This made it much easier for me to design accordingly to cater from kids all the way to adults.
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This experience helps me think even more closely about shooter maps and what makes them well made and what can be improved with them.