Timeframe: January 1st, 2025- March 17th 2025
Team Size: 4
Position: Level Design
- Greyboxing
- Outlining
- Finding Assets
- Nav Mesh Incorporation
- Level Design and Player Flow Control
- Greyboxing
- Outlining
- Finding Assets
- Nav Mesh Incorporation
- Level Design and Player Flow Control
Description: Warfront is a Single and Multiplayer shooter. There is a free for all multiplayer mode and a Co-Op zombie survival mode.
Biggest Inspiration: Call of Duty Zombies
Engine: Unreal Engine
Level Version History
The Initial Map drawing of the lab
Greybox of the outside area, Added more space outside for contrast within the level
Unlit Version of the Level
Lit Version of the Level
Added more light sources and particle effects to the level
Player Flow and Level Design Ideas
Player Spawn
The player spawns in an open area. They are given time to understand their surroundings and get used to the dark. There are 3 possible routes that the player can take to explore the map. This is to give the map replayability and make the level feel more open and explorable.
Player Flow
Every room has more than one entrance. This is to prevent the player from feeling trapped in rooms and getting quickly run up on by the zombies. It also allows for different routing and replayability. I took a lot of inspiration from Call of Duty Zombies here because they follow this same structure when creating their "areas". As you can see from the colored arrows you can follow the path drawn by them. The Middle Floor specifically has a lot of variables for how the player could make their way to it because of how it is so central
Every room has more than one entrance. This is to prevent the player from feeling trapped in rooms and getting quickly run up on by the zombies. It also allows for different routing and replayability. I took a lot of inspiration from Call of Duty Zombies here because they follow this same structure when creating their "areas". As you can see from the colored arrows you can follow the path drawn by them. The Middle Floor specifically has a lot of variables for how the player could make their way to it because of how it is so central
Backyard
Side Room
Middle Floor
Lab
Challenges and Solutions
Dealing with Darkness
The game takes place at night to put more emphasis on being scary. It can be hard to orient yourself through the darkness and know just how far you can walk. I used this opportunity to create cool looking fireflies out of a simple Niagara system. These fireflies are on the level to show how much space the player has in front of them and where they are capable of walking to.
I use particle effects for special interactables. Their light blue color contrasts with the overall darkness of the level very strongly. They are very easy to see and make players walk to them. Particles help a lot with depth perception as well.
Red Lights are put over every door and also the power switch. The player will see these very bright red lights and be automatically drawn to them.
Nav Mesh
The nav mesh was easy to generate for the most part, except when stairs started to get involved. Originally, the project had rounded stairs to transition from floor to floor. However, the way Unreal Engine generated the mesh would not function. To circumvent this, I replaced the rounded stairs with more "boxy" and "ramp"-based stairs to make it easier on the engine to generate.
Another problem with this nav mesh is that there are blueprint doors. If you are unaware, blueprints can interfere with generating Nav Meshes. So I had to make my Nav Mesh generation Dynamic in the project settings, so the mesh would generate when the doors disappear.
Link to Steam Page
