Core: Arenas of Combat Contest - Day 3

Today I did a few small changes to one of the interior rooms and a few new cover objects outside. The major change between this version and the last one is lighting changes, skybox and lighting were changed to be night. 

I also managed to fix a huge issue with the weapon pickup system, tomorrow I'm going to finish implementing it and seeing if I can find a way to add health and ammo pickups.

Here are a few screenshots of the current version.

The only major layout changes I can really think of atm is more development of the interiors. I also think that maybe adding a way for player's to climb up to the windows in the back area would be pretty cool. Though I'll have to try and figure out a way to do it without doing annoying prop climbing.

I'm thinking that I'll begin really artpassing here in the next couple of days. If I keep my current pace of updates I'll probably be finished well before the deadline. 

Core: Arenas of Combat Contest - Day 2

Day 2 I widened the entire level and focused mostly on developing mid and the lower areas of the level. I also spent some time adding terrain and doing a bit of minor artpassing. Tomorrow I'm going to have to focus on developing the interiors more, they're starting to feel a bit lacking compared to the new mid. 

Here area couple of screenshots of the changed areas.

Here are my current thought's on it based on a bit of play testing I did.

1. The terrain isn't developed yet but I feel it adds a whole lot to the layout. The layout today felt alot better today than it did yesterday.

2. I changed the way the spawns work in that they now spawn the player as far a possible from other players. They still need work though, during play testing I spawned in the same place twice.

3. I raised the middle platform and I'm glad to see that it alleviated some of the issues I've had with sightlines. It feels a lot better to play in the outside areas.

Core: Arenas of Combat Contest - Day 1

 This is my day one progress on the Arenas of Combat Level Design Contest. I'll try and post one of these daily until the contest is over. 

Today I designed a layout using Dungeon Scrawl, (great LD tool btw). After a bit of iteration I managed came up with this layout.

From here I blocked out the level in Core editor. Here are a few screenshots of the level so far.

Here are my current thought's on it based on a bit of play testing I did.

1. Currently the level feels a bit too small. I am aiming for it to comfortable fit 6 players at once. In it's current state it feels more suitable for 2. May be slightly under scaled right now.

2. The outside areas and middle are death traps right now. I'm thinking that adding some variable height for the ground and some objects for cover will alleviate this issue a bit.

3. Indoor fighting isn't bad but I think the rooms may need more pillars. Tip: Pillars are very fun to fight around a very easy to incorporate into a level. 

4. Looking at it now I think adding an underground section to mid may be a cool way to increase the playspace with minimal without making everything too large.

If you want to check out my level in it's current state you can find it here.

Dungeon Scrawl

Here's a tool I found that's pretty useful for laying out levels. It takes a bit to learn the controls and get a good flow going but once you do it's probably the best online alternative to graph paper.

Here's a random Red Alert 1v1 layout I quickly made using it. 

Check out Dungeon Scrawl here. It's GOOD.

Railway

 New map! Been working on this for the past week, a little bit every day. Working on it was fun. There's still a bit of stuff I'd like to do with it but that would probably be done when I do a Garry's Mod version. Current version can be downloaded here.

Anyway here's a few screenshots.