Paladins

I've started my next Level Design and I wanted to share it. I'm designing and building a Paladins payload map in Unreal 4.

I haven't played that much Paladins, so I started by pulling up as many overhead pictures and blueprints of current payload maps as I could. I looked through them, counting tiers of elevation, corners, cutoffs, ect... until I got a sense of what the Paladins LDs considered viable for the game.

After this I sat down to brainstorm some locations and concepts that I didn't see in any Paladins map. I settled on Swamp pretty quickly. I wanted to do something interesting the map so I started to poke at what I could add (in terms of interactive environment). Swamps make me think of poisons and sinking into the muck so I thought I'd make some sort of poisonous environment piece.

Of course swamps aren't actually that toxic on their own. They could also be a bit monotonous. So I put a big sci-fi factory in the middle of the swamp, pumping out toxic sludge, and making for a nice visual contrast. After brewing up a few concepts and set piece ideas, I went to Draw.io to make a sketch. I have and love my whiteboard too, but I'm trying to be modern.

This was the first attempt:

The stuff on the right in a hill with ridges marked. The big curves are a river path. The payload itself is an oversized airboat that's big enough for multiple players. There is a very tiny little human shape on the boat for size.

I looked at this and thought "Meh, it's ok." I felt like the factory was too far out of the way, and would only be a visual not a playable space. I didn't like that. But the factory was BIG; how could I get it into the map? So I put it in the middle.

I liked it, a lot. It was still a simple Paladins map, but it took one simple rule and twisted it, it was no longer back and forth along a line. Instead, we're going back and forth through a circle we can cross.

I don't know how it's going to be different, but I have no doubt that this small shift is going to make for some very different game play. We'll see what it looks like in grey box.

New Frontiers

This is a short post simply to declare, I'm finally starting to seriously study C#. It's awesome.

It started a few weeks ago when I was cleaning up Flux Firefight, I top-down shooter I made with Lukas Nikola in grad school. There were a few bugs inhibiting me from getting a clean play through video, so I said, "I'll fix them."

And I did. It wasn't easy. Some simple tasks took hours, but I did it. It was really satisfying.

Now I'm programming a text-based RPG while following this tutorial: https://scottlilly.com/learn-c-by-building-a-simple-rpg-index/. It's been great. I've been changing things up too, both to experiment with what I'm learning, and to fit the story inspiring the game.

I'm going to finish the tutorial at least, we'll see about finishing the game. Rick Hall suggested that if I'm going to learn to program, I should do something ambitious. I'm thinking about programming a pass&play version of Settlers of Catan. I think that's attainable, and it's definitely more ambitious than a text-based rpg.