Den senaste nyheten om BFH
-På engelska-
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.
The view from the Editor of Seaside Skirmish showing off its spawn points, flags and other widgets that make the map work.
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.
An early view of Victory Village in the Editor. Lots to do!
A lot of work goes into making each map look good:
- Shaping and painting the landscape to make it feel more natural.
- Painting a new sky. (For this they use some really tall ladders).
- Adding in small doodads, like a plank of wood resting against a wall or small tufts of grass at the base of a building.
- Building the special landscape we create to allow older computers to join in the fun. (The standard landscape is just too demanding on older computers).
- Generating the ‘lightmaps’. These make the world look more real, by putting shadows and highlights where you’d expect to see them.
An example of feedback from the creation of Victory Village: “A little too bright, go into the occlusion channel in the lightmap and darken it down a little.”
Each map also has a ‘hero object’ on it. This is something that we add to make the map memorable. If you look at Seaside Skirmish it's got its Lighthouse, Victory Village has its big old Church. Other maps we have in playtesting at the moment are also getting their ‘hero objects’.
Here is Seaside Skirmish, before and after the Art team have done their work.
| Before: |
After: |
 |
 |
We’ll be watching the forums to see which kind of maps are most popular and taking that into account when deciding what kind of new maps to make.
We hope you will enjoy playing!
http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/dev-blog/makin-maps
Homepage
