GamersCrib
01-14-2009, 11:25 PM
Today we found a new developer blog over on the Battlefield Heroes (http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/) site from James Salt. Lets check out what he had to say:
James Salt here again, Senior Producer on Heroes.
I thought I could use this development blog to show you a little about how we make our maps, or levels if you prefer to call them that. I’ll start with how we begin the process, through to playtesting and then describe some of the work the art team does to make the new map come to life.
Ok, so, we want to make a new map for Heroes. Where do we start? Firstly we decide if we want the map to be focused around vehicles, just soldiers, or a blend of the two. Vehicle focused maps tend to be quite a lot larger than the ones focused around soldiers. This is to give the vehicles space to let their various gameplay abilities shine. For instance, a small soldier focused map with Planes on wouldn’t be much fun, as the pilot would be constantly turning to stay within the map boundaries. So maps with Planes on tend to be the largest ones.
In the screen shots and videos we have released you can see an example of both of these. Seaside Skirmish is focused around being a playground for all our current vehicles; Jeeps, Tanks and Planes. Victory Village is focused on the soldier versus soldier fight.
All the maps in Battlefield Heroes are designed for 16 players. We chose this number for quite a few reasons, although the main one is to allow people with older computers to play. If we were to create a 64 player map, we would need a larger landscape and more vehicles for those players to use. This would increase the system specifications needed to play quite significantly.
So, once we’ve decided what we would like to focus this new map’s gameplay on, we start to sketch out some designs. Basically we are looking to create a balance: where it’s quite easy to find a bunch of enemies to fight with, without there being one place where everyone just hangs out shooting each other. We call places like this a ‘meat-grinder‘. Being in a ‘meat-grinder’ isn’t fun.
To get that balance we adjust a few important things on the map: the number and position of the flags, soldier and vehicle spawn points, as well as the pathways between each of the flags. We do occasionally design in something called a ‘choke point’. These are points where it is almost guaranteed that players from both teams will meet each other very often.
http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/files/editor_screenshot_small.jpg (http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/files/editor_screenshot.jpg)
Finally we look to add in opportunities for unexpected things to happen. For instance setting up a bridge so that it’s possible to use the Soldier’s Stomp ability to throw a jeep over the edge, and into the water.
Now we have our new map. It's time to see if the arrangement of all those parts actually feels good to play. It’s playtest time. We playtest every day, usually on the same map for a week or two. We collect feedback from the playtest and then make changes to the map for the following day’s playtest. Those changes could be as small as adding a tree to block the view from a sniping position or as big as totally re-arranging an entire town.
At this point the map doesn’t look too good. Actually… it looks really bad. Time to let the art team loose on it and make it part of the Heroes world.
http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/files/editor_screenshot2_small.jpg (http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/files/editor_screenshot2.jpg)
There is alot more with this blog so be sure to head over to here (http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/dev-blog/makin-maps) and check it out!
James Salt here again, Senior Producer on Heroes.
I thought I could use this development blog to show you a little about how we make our maps, or levels if you prefer to call them that. I’ll start with how we begin the process, through to playtesting and then describe some of the work the art team does to make the new map come to life.
Ok, so, we want to make a new map for Heroes. Where do we start? Firstly we decide if we want the map to be focused around vehicles, just soldiers, or a blend of the two. Vehicle focused maps tend to be quite a lot larger than the ones focused around soldiers. This is to give the vehicles space to let their various gameplay abilities shine. For instance, a small soldier focused map with Planes on wouldn’t be much fun, as the pilot would be constantly turning to stay within the map boundaries. So maps with Planes on tend to be the largest ones.
In the screen shots and videos we have released you can see an example of both of these. Seaside Skirmish is focused around being a playground for all our current vehicles; Jeeps, Tanks and Planes. Victory Village is focused on the soldier versus soldier fight.
All the maps in Battlefield Heroes are designed for 16 players. We chose this number for quite a few reasons, although the main one is to allow people with older computers to play. If we were to create a 64 player map, we would need a larger landscape and more vehicles for those players to use. This would increase the system specifications needed to play quite significantly.
So, once we’ve decided what we would like to focus this new map’s gameplay on, we start to sketch out some designs. Basically we are looking to create a balance: where it’s quite easy to find a bunch of enemies to fight with, without there being one place where everyone just hangs out shooting each other. We call places like this a ‘meat-grinder‘. Being in a ‘meat-grinder’ isn’t fun.
To get that balance we adjust a few important things on the map: the number and position of the flags, soldier and vehicle spawn points, as well as the pathways between each of the flags. We do occasionally design in something called a ‘choke point’. These are points where it is almost guaranteed that players from both teams will meet each other very often.
http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/files/editor_screenshot_small.jpg (http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/files/editor_screenshot.jpg)
Finally we look to add in opportunities for unexpected things to happen. For instance setting up a bridge so that it’s possible to use the Soldier’s Stomp ability to throw a jeep over the edge, and into the water.
Now we have our new map. It's time to see if the arrangement of all those parts actually feels good to play. It’s playtest time. We playtest every day, usually on the same map for a week or two. We collect feedback from the playtest and then make changes to the map for the following day’s playtest. Those changes could be as small as adding a tree to block the view from a sniping position or as big as totally re-arranging an entire town.
At this point the map doesn’t look too good. Actually… it looks really bad. Time to let the art team loose on it and make it part of the Heroes world.
http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/files/editor_screenshot2_small.jpg (http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/files/editor_screenshot2.jpg)
There is alot more with this blog so be sure to head over to here (http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/dev-blog/makin-maps) and check it out!