Over the course of six months, 40 students completed this complete overhaul mod for Unreal Tournament III. The setting of the mod is a Victorian Era city with a steampunk twist.

I spent the first 3 months as a level designer making numerous blockouts for playtesting to nail down gameplay. I'd make a new blockout for our weekly playtests and then took the feedback everyone gave and either adjusted the current blockout or made one from scratch that implemented the suggestions.

For the last 3 months I was the environment art lead as well as the level artist. I was in charge of directing the asset creation of roughly 15 environment artists and making sure the game had a cohesive look and feel.

I was also in charge of taking all those assets and creating this large cityscape level in the span of roughly two months. Although I had a lot of technical headaches and allnighters, I managed to put together the level you see below with the art created by the Game Wizards team.

Lighting

Lighting this level was a particular challenge due to the vastness of the map and the large number of objects. Simply building the lighting would crash the editor. I had to learn how to create and use lightmaps in Unreal but that still didnt solve the problem completely. To get around the problem, I seperated the level into multiple levels and streamed them in using Kismet. This not only had performance gains but also made it much easier to light. Now I only had to deal with small chunks of the level at any given time and could bake light and shadows for them without the use of a supercomputer.

Level Design

The main goal behind the level flow for Boilerplate was to create multiple pathways of various sizes for players on foot, in light vehicles, and heavy vehicles. I balanced out the map by providing wide easy access pathways for tanks and vehicles in the middle. However I made these areas much more vulnerable to attack. The narrower pathways for light vehicles and running on foot had much more cover. The "gimmick" of the level is the drawbridge which desceds from the main tower in the middle of the map. Whenever a player captures the opposing team's flag the drawbridge will descend, alerting everyone that a flag has been taken. This gives the flag carrier a short, clear path back to base. The danger is, however, that the drawbridge has very little cover and anybody running along it will be easily visible to everyone on the map.