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CHAOUEN - MAP UT3
student work
2018 - First Person Shooter
Level Designer / Level Artist
Chaouen is a 3v3 CTF map created for Unreal Tournament 3, with UDK.
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In my level design course at Bellecour École, I had to learn how to use UDK, and create a map in 3 months. My personal goals with this map were to create something vertical, with a stong focus on architecture.
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Chaouen was inspired by Islamic architecture, specially about riads with central circulation, and the city of Chefchaouen in Morroco because of its vertically.
WORK HIGHLIGHTS
Architecture inspired map
To create this map, I studied Islamic Architecture. Architecture is a passion for me, and I found Islamic Architecture in particular especially inspiring in the context of this project. I created Chaouen based on riads and their central circulation. The idea was to have this intense circulation to be vertical too.
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Then, the secondary path helped me create a game of cat and mouse, which was particularly appreciated by players.
Map pre-production
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The first month of the creation was about pre-production. After spending some time learning the engine, I started referencing the map, with a lot of architecture and mood examples.
Then I actually started design the blueprints, first on paper then on Photoshop, based on the references
Playtests
We organized playtest sessions with the school, so we could test the maps together. It was very exciting to see players directly playing the map, but most of all it let us iterate many times on the map.
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At the end there were 8 versions of the map, from the first blockout to the final map, with hundreds of little changes. One of the big changes was the modification of the flag point, which was too small and not open enough .
Iterations
The second big changement was the basement area of the map. It was too open with too many lines of sight, which made the area too dangerous.
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The decision was to cut it by half and centralize the circulation, so the map feels smaller and more intense.
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