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.