Russia completed! (I kid you not)

Some people might not believe it when I say this, but this time I really mean it, Russia is finally final! I never thought this level would take so long to finish, but there are reasons for it, and I will try and describe some of them in this post.

Walk-through of the entire level:

First of all, I’ll say this again one last time (since I still get questions about this). Russia was originally made for Nuclear Dawn at the time by Robert Briscoe and we all knew then as we still do today that his work on this was awesome as I’m sure most of us will remember the Nuclear Dawn media updates that revolved a lot around this level (I guess for the past year so have ours, but more on that later). Rob and myself worked side by side for close to a year on Mirror’s Edge at DICE, and of course from time to time our mod work came to the discussion. I was still hard at work on Off Limits during my employment at DICE, doing whatever mod work I could after hours. At that time Nuclear Dawn wasn’t going anywhere and no one seemed to be doing any real work on it anymore. It was around that time I asked Rob if he would be interested in donating it to Off Limits, this way it would still have potential of being released and not just end up as a nice set of screenshots on his portfolio. Not just Rob agreed to this, but also the people who made assets for this level. I didn’t want to start work on it before I had everyone’s consent. The agreement was made around the 20th of June 2008 and I started work on it later that week. Since then Nuclear Dawn has been picked up by InterWave Studios, who are making it a commercial release. This level isn’t part of Nuclear Dawn anymore as they are doing all their levels from scratch.

Alrighty then, what came next? We received Russia at a turning point for Off Limits, it was around that time we realized we had a lot of cool content, game play features and ideas, but in the end none of it came together as a whole, something didn’t feel right. So we ended up what most mods would do, die a silent death and change our hobby to something else… No? Ok, so what did we really do? We knew the part that was giving us the most headaches was our alien, the key feature in our mod, the thing we used from day one to build our mod around, having open levels where you as an alien could run on every surface and jump from building to building, floor to ceiling, scare the shit out of people trying to hunt you down and vice versa (a game play that could still work some day perhaps, I still think we had a good concept, and we came close to getting it the way we wanted to). Either way, we don’t quit, that would mean we failed and wasted 4 years of our work and why? because of some Source limitations..? and the sudden realization that because of this we wouldn’t be able to fully translate our ideas into reality? No thanks!

After ditching the alien we looked at the months of playtesting we had prior to it, dissecting them piece by piece until we ended up with a list of things we wanted to keep from it. Then we had to throw all of it in a blender and mix something new from it that we knew we could accomplish in a relatively short time span and without too much additional work (whats in a year right?). As with our alien game play, the new one came in its rough shape the same day if I recall correctly, we decided to keep the cool X-ray vision, replace the alien with a stronger “Juggernaut” player, ditch the 3rd team that was the alien, go for a 2 team game play, both having a Juggernaut in their team that had special abilities that were linked to the game play. We also wanted solid team play since the day we started, so we kept that in our minds as well as we were creating this new game play. What followed was months and months of playtesting, discussing and balancing out every feature to nail this new game play as close to perfection as possible. During that time the game has made huge leaps and has become far greater then what we initially had with our alien game play, so the changes we had to make paid off as far as I’m concerned, and I never had a single day of regret not seeing an alien in our game ever since.

This leads me to this post (yes! finally!). During these game play changes and endless iterations I decided to use the newly given Russia as the main level to craft our new game play around. We actually used the main design Russia had to come up with some new ideas that we could tie in with our current game play ideas. For instance, Russia had 5 main areas, which we ended up using as spawn points that teams can capture and control. We used spawn points because that’s what we already had from our alien game play (where I designed and created a spawn point that was sealed of by an electric forcefield to keep the alien out, giving the players time to spawn and assess the situation and not get spawnkilled instantly). We then came up with the idea to link the spawn points in with the Juggernaut’s health and power status during a match and behold, the new and improved Off Limits was born! The months that followed both our game play and Russia received a great deal of attention and we ended up going back to the drawing board multiple times as each playtest came and went (we didn’t even do this much playtesting on Mirror’s Edge!).

I wanted to show in this first post some of the layout and design changes done to Russia from how it was made by Rob for Nuclear Dawn, to what is it today for Off Limits. It was never my intent to modify the overall look of the level and it’s areas, if anything I wanted all of it being used to it’s fullest potential. As you’ll see in the follow shots the rooms all stayed in roughly the same position and look. All the areas however have been changed a lot to give the player a better path through them and making sure they are able to use the environment as an extension rather then an obstacle. One of our playtesters (Squeebo) has already shown us how this is now possible and he’s making it very hard to kill him at times.

Layout before and after:

Here you see how Russia’s layout was the day I received it, this is how it was designed for the Nuclear Dawn game play at the time.

This is the final layout made for the Off Limits game play. At first glance you might not see many differences, but as you dive in closer you’ll find out that this is far from the truth.

Initial rush and action spots:

After converting it to Off Limits and getting all the game play elements in it, we started playtesting it intensively. It wasn’t soon after I realized that with the current design both team rushed towards the center of the map as fast as possible creating an action packed moment for the center spawn. Teams were neglecting the 1st spawn all together and this wasn’t what we had in mind. This was partially because of game play issues and partially due to the current design of the level.

• The red line in the image below shows the rush path that was mainly used, making every match completely predictable.

• The green areas show where the teams encountered each outer most of the time. Most intense were the areas around the spawn points and the connections from area to area in a straight line from both base spawn.

The problem I had with this is that Russia was only being used for roughly 40%, every match was predictable and every encounter was fought even before it was played making match rounds very short and repetitive. There were a lot of cool areas that were never used and saw no action what so ever during a match. Rob explained me at the time that Nuclear Dawn had points of interest in those areas for their game play and that these areas all needed to be used for a team to be able and win a match, this however was not the case in Off Limits and I had to come up with some simple design changes in order to bring these areas back into play (which turned out was easier said then done).

Bringing the outer areas into play:

In order to fix this I sealed off the center connections removing the straight path all the way through the level. This in addition to new pathways created to compensate for them.

• The red crosses show the 3 main connections I sealed off, this preventing a straight rush from one area into the next without the use of the outer rooms.

• The green connections sketched on this layout show how I compensated for them. I basically ended up with a way in and out for each corner of a spawn point room, and in turn made each corner connection link up with one of the outer rooms. This made them part of the path to get from one spawn point area to the next.

This was a good start and after these changes the game play got more interesting (mind you that not only was the map progressing but also the game play code which made playtests every week go smoother and smoother).

The next image shows with these modifications how the player paths now worked and how they linked up more rooms (orange line).

The red areas in the next image show the areas that after the changes made still felt disconnected from the ideal player path.

In the course of the following months I reworked most of the BSP and set up the .vmt file to my way of working, this in time made me understand the full level better and made my work go faster and easier to maintain. The biggest changes I did to the level were the layout changes I discussed above, where I had to get the whole level back into play and get rid of the unused areas and flow issues I encountered during playtesting. In the image below you can see from left to right some of the bigger changes I did and why:

• 1. Rob made the submarine dock playable for only 50%, sealing off the top half with crates and a player clip. I designed previous levels for Off Limits with the “what you see is what you get” attitude, meaning: every area you see and feel you should be able to get to, you can. There are no invisible walls blocking a player, and no jumps where you think you can go but cant. This initially was meant for the alien game play (we needed those types of levels) but I still prefer to work this way, it’s my preference when making a level, so I got rid of all these areas within Russia. This added more playable areas in places that were there before but unused (and the submarine dock was one of them). I also had to open up the submarine dock 100% in order to add my new connection in the top right corner. These changes made it so when the team spawning in the submarine dock has 2 choices, go left of right for the initial rush and this way making use of the entire area.

  The water surrounding the submarine was also blocked by playerclips which I removed later on during playtesting. For this to work I had to create the full dock below the water, and while doing this I also added underground areas at the nose and rear end of the submarine, adding more ways to attack a base spawn point. I also modeled and textured a new submarine, since it was such a big part of this area and the way it was UV mapped and textured I thought the detail was a bit too low on the texturing, and I also modeled a different type of submarine that would fit the area better for game play reasons.

• 2. The tanklifts room I had to make larger because I needed to add a spawnpoint for our game play. At first I used a spawnpoint next to the existing tanklift, but it was soon made clear that every spawn point would need to be in the exact center of each spawn point area. So I had to make a 2nd tanklift model (one that wasn’t broken) and I moved them further apart giving me room in the middle to place my spawn point. When this was done, the time it took to rush from the base to the 1st spawn be it left or right was equal (explained a while back).

• 3. The spidertank room had both spidertanks side by side in the Nuclear Dawn version with a lower section to the right that was barer and darker. The lower section was the only place I had to add our spawn point, but if I were to add it there all the action would have been in that area, making the large open spidertank room unused in most of the battles around the spawn point. Since that room is the center piece of this level I wanted to make sure the battles were being played in between the spidertanks and not in an area where it didn’t bring the room justice. To get this done I did what I’ve done for most areas, redo the BSP and make the room bigger to compensate for our spawn points and our fast game play. I removed the lower section, made the entire spidertank room larger, placed our spawn point in the middle and reworked all the details in the room to fit with the new geometry. This added extra work in the surrounding rooms to make them connect nicely with the new geometry. For instance, the railroad tunnel on the bottom of the spidertank room had to be longer now, I had to move the storage room back to the center of the spidertank room to maintain the balance of the area and this in time made it easier for me to connect the storage room to the laundry room. After making the railroad tunnel the same length as the spidertank room I made a connection on each side into the spidertank room as well, this made it so the spidertank room area would be used to the fullest and also make it balanced for both teams when they rushed at the initial state of the match (both teams had to enter the center spawn point room at the same time, and not give one team a few seconds advantage).

• 4. Armory had 2 levels, the bottom section went into the medlabs and the upper part went into the missile silo and the railroad tunnel. Since the section going into the missile silo were very narrow twists and turns making it hard to navigate through, I removed that part and made the armory room larger. I also removed the 2 levels and made it into half a level, which made the transition from medlabs into the other sections smoother. For this I had to raise the armory room and redo most of the surrounding BSP as well.

• 5. This leads us into medlabs, where before it was placed vertical with the 3 connections in one side of the room, making the other half of the room never used because it was a dead end. I rotated the entire room, this felt the best and easiest solution to make the entire medlabs now used as you have to go through the entire room now. Also re-ordering some props to be easier used as cover and you got yourself a nice room for fire fights. By rotating it I was almost able to go directly into the generator room and get rid of the dark tunnel full of pipes (which had a lot of collision issues that blocked players a lot).

• 6. And finally, the generator room. This area is also completely redone as I removed the playerclips from the pits that were in the original version, and I made the pits accessible for players. I also rotated the generator room 90° and made it wider. This was done to give it more or less the same size as the enemie base spawn area. The submarinedock has the locks and multiple levels of game play which made it easier for that team to defend their base. By making the generator rooms pits accessible and expanding the overall size of the room it became more or less the same for both teams.

Final layout:

On the image below you can see the changes explained on top of the final layout. All these changes didn’t come overnight and took months of playtesting which was made harder to finalize do to the fact that we were still developing our core game play and all it’s features (and I also had tons of other things to do apart from this level).

Before and after shots:

Here are a few high resolution screenshots of it as well:

• Russia 01
• Russia 02
• Russia 03
• Russia 04
• Russia 05
• Russia 06
• Russia 07
• Russia 08
• Russia 09
• Russia 10

This is only a glimpse of whats been going on within Off Limits for the past 16 months, in between we added new characters (the Juggernauts), redid our menus, built the whole JN game play from scratch, designed and made the JN vision that matched our old alien X-ray vision, balanced our weapons, built a new website and lots lots more… I hope once we release people will appreciate the hard work that went into all of this and be given a well polished game that is both unique and fun to play.

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