Abandoned Warehouse
Solo Developer
May 2021 - August 2021 (3 months)
Quake Live Team Deathmatch map modeled after dilapidated and abandoned warehouses.
Early Inspiration
At the start of development, I took major inspiration from real-life warehouses and their design princibles. This early research layed the groundwork for many of the future set pieces, and gave me an idea of the gameplay expericnce I want the player to have.
Lots of set pieces, such as the hanging catwalks, had to be altered to make the arena more enjoyable to fight in, while also making sure to keep the theming consistant. Because of this, I decided to forgo many safety-related aspects in a typical warehouse (such as guard rails), to give the area a consistantly smooth gameplay feel, without comprimising on the design of a typical warehouse.
Design Philosphy
I wanted to take the unique design opporunities that a warehouse presented to create an interesting way to modivate the player to move. While designing, I took many cues from how "King of the Hill" gameplay modes drive players towards a certain destination, and intigrated them into the map layout.
Since the main storage area is where most of the fighting takes place, I designed the large shelving areas and basement to provide a risk/reward style of engagement. Due to the better pickups (Including the Quad-Damage) near the top of the shelves, the player is driven to travel farther upwards, while also leaving them wide open to player attacks the closer they are to the top.
Challenges
One of the major challenges I faced while designing the main playspace was making IIII. Like the layered shelves, the map can be divided into the basement, main floor, and upper rafters. I needed to make players want to
I did this by giving each floor a special reason for them to go there that made them want to explore and not remain in one area. The basement priorities quick travel to other areas with protection from the sides, the main floor is where the player gets most of their ammo and supplies, and the rafters prioritize the clearest view of the map but offer the least protection. Each section has its strengths and weaknesses, making players want to experiment to find their favorite.
Postmortem
As I'm still fairly new to the GTK Radient Editor, there's still many parts of my workflow and tool use I could improve on. One of the first improvments I could make in the future is to think about lighting while i'm building instead of leaving it until later. This gave me a lot of issues early on, since I didn't know how to light the main area. I eventually solved this problem with the addition of skylights to let in more natural light, but before that I really struggled to find a solution. Additionally, though it can't be seen in the final game that well, the exterior of the warehouse is just the skybox, without anything interesting to look at. In the future, I'd like to teach myself how to add more natural geomatry to help fill in many of these gaps in the outside environment.