And finally the calamity

Well I have done what needs to be done on the unreal level, it took ages. But despite all this effort I can't place GUNS! I have tried everything under the sun to fix it and apparently I'm not the only one who cant do it either, plus I've heard a lot of people's stories of glitches and invisible walls. This is very annoying because I need to game test it soon and its going to be hard with no weapons or items, I can place player starts however. But anyway this left my with no choice but to use what I had I took a few people around my level and i watched dhow they moved around and explored or got lost, it was all very helpful in making last minute alteration, in fact one of the main game testers Terrance Nabbs wrote four sides about the level on all of our opinions about it and what needed to be changed. (Click to enlarge)



This helped make some last changed despite the opinions based against it not having weapons, me Jack Boyles, Tez, Richard Norman, Ollie, Graham and Ashley Nabbs all tried to imagine how things would play out in certain situation, the discussion where pretty in deep sometimes, all in all I'm happy with it but I'm not finished with it by far if i had the time i would make it bigger, maybe less compact but that would alter the feel of the level. The textures are my number one hate, defiantly going to do differently next time.

Using time like a one night stand

Now there isn't much time left so I have been doing all the things to finish my level off, the floor and ceiling have been given there final touches and the tedious texturing of stairs is over. also I have now placed a few large crate to jump around on in the decks, also I have placed a lighting scheme, one serious problem though is how horrible Unreal ed really is, I have been wasting hours of my time fixing glitches in the game and when i finally do other appear, in fact I seem to be making it worse sometime and if i want something big like a pillar or a support I cant because it causes problem with then level, you can see through walls and everything sometimes, other time i wont be allowed in certain areas of the level like an invisible wall is blocking my way.

I did the texture for the crates in flash, I gave each part a different layer then put that in Photoshop and gave it shadows, this gave off a nice Team fortress 2 like "3dness" to it despite its bold red colour.

Cant get enough

I cant get enough of just putting random things into this level, but I'm afraid I will run out of time so now I have been doing textures mostly, I created this wires texture from a photo that I am going to use to show a bit of power flow through the ship to hopefully make it more believable. Also i am going to make a view into outside space.


The level is really starting to take shape by this point, my aim is to make each area of the ship differently themed so there is a distinction between all areas of the game so its harder to get lost I have found that leaving engineering can be hard but that's if you forget where the exit is.


By this point i have decided to scrap the whole space station idea as i feel i should concentrate all my efforts into making them ship really good because it works well as a 8-10 player game with enough areas for weapons to go.

To help with my texturing dilemma I used the classical yellow and black caution strips this helped me frame a lot of the levels features which somehow gave them a very interesting look. in this environment.

A while in the works

This is after a few weeks of design, I have taken the opportunity to add lots of little things t0o frame the rooms and i have a lighting scheme in mind, I already placed a great one in engineering, a really great red light that travels far. I'm not even finished modelling but already I can squeeze in so many paths to different rooms. The level does look a little blocky at this point and it had low ceilings and I still don't really know what my texture and colour theme will be.

getting textures to work has been annoying but it has been solved recently thanks to getting Adobe Cs4 and a few patches for Unreal, hopefully now textures should work without problem, and I can believe it took me this long to finally get it, that you have to put mylevel in the package name. So a problem pretty much solved there

Design in

My unreal level is taking shape nicely I have been focousing on the bridge and building down from their, i dont evenneed to try very hard to give this level more feel than its Timesplitters version, so as I am going along them level is just taking form. One thing I have noticed is that I need to keep reminding myself that this is unreal so try to avoid those long narrow corridors.

A new way?

So i had a hard time actually piecing together my level in design until i remembered what i used to do. i used the level editor from Timesplitters, this is because it is the only level editor that has an easy drag and drop software, this mean I can make a very-very basic layout of corridors and rooms, once I'm happy i can build from that.

Now this might seem a little bizarre but it really did work, I could make mistakes change corridors and try out so many ideas at once that would take me weeks on another piece of software. Through this I could really picture what i wanted and keeping in mind I'm designing a PC game and I can change anything I see here. On the top picture I got to try all different kinds of lighting scheme in a few mins, that one i went for multi colour instead of red, it didn't work very well.

The two pictures above are the two main maps the top one is the space station and the bottom one is the spaceship. how they link together will have to be designed on elsewhere because there isn't enough memory on a PS2 memory card to fit them both on one map. Shame

I settled with these two main ideas and took them away from the PS2 after hours of tweaking. To transfer them to PC I simply placed my T.V next to my screen and copied them by eye, making sure it scaled correctly to the game.

Unreal Unreal

So when I heard that we where going to be doing unreal as a project I immediatly started trying to remember my faveourite maps fromFPS over the time the one I settled on the most was this one above, the map for Bunker in Goldeneye, a great map for such a basic shooter. I used it a lot for my inspireation and looking over these maps I began to shape my own idea, I wanted it to be out in space on a mysterious alien ship, on of those where you dont know what anything does, I also wanted it to include a small space station next to it a low gravity so you can jump to it. The design below show my two supporting and main ideas for the project, the docking area on the engineering deck of the ship.

Despite it being inside a spaceship i wanted player to have a lot of alternative routes and lots of highground and escape routes but keeping it to a reasonable level. i had a picture in my head of the level and a few designs but I needed so basis to get my level going and get a solid idea down.

Designs on Steam

So recently I have found out that on Half Life 2: Deathmatch there aren't that many good custom maps going around so I decided to make a multiplayer map to hopefully get around some players to get some feed back. But the news gets better, I wanted to use the same map but modified slightly for 1 or 2 single player modes for me and my friends because we where always saying what we would do in a zombie situation, so this map is based on where we live. So those maps will all be good for uni too, but it gets even better because I have found out that they haven released a Left for Dead developer kit yet which means when I use the same map for the L4D game I will hopefully get it out in time to be one of the first so I can get a large amount of downloads and feedback... hopefully.



My plans for this map is to make a multiplayer version, a survivor mission, a single player mission and a Left for Dead version I've already got a line of people ready to try it, all I need now is some friends over steam to send it to and to put it on a server when finished.

Exploring Multiplayer games

So I have been exploring more multiplayer games over this term, I'm not a huge multiplayer person over the net but I have had a deal of experience, I began playing halo at the beginning of this year and in contrast to that started playing Half Life 2: deathamatch and Unreal Tournament 2 online.

There are some key differences to PC and platform games, for start PC online first persons are a lot more aggressive and the use of the mouse makes everyone very accurate. Where as on the console you get movement over aim. This last half term was my first real bout on online multiplayers and with my cousen Jason in Japan at the moment I can play with him. From this I have learnt a lot in realation to level design and how to make adjustments to appeal to PC games compared to anything else.

Recent Work 2

So over the past few week as well as continuing with the projects I have on at the moment I have been trying to learn more and more design skills as well as trying to find a good way to get some feedback from people on my maps. So because I am doing the Unreal project at the moment I have been learning how to use Source SDK also, because this will help me learn more about mapping and understand a good level design.



So after getting to grips with the main tools and features I made a test map to try out all I had learned and later on to see how many enemies my new computer could handle.

I learnt a lot from just this second go on it, and it made me realise where I could take this. But not forgeting just how much a slower compter might handle this I thought of a great level to create on this.