YoungBuck$ Combat Design - Devlog #9 - Map Design

📍Intro: The Task

This past couple of weeks have been so busy with my current project Echo Rift, which should be posted soon under my projects. That said, I spoke with my team and we decided that we were sick of the old arena for the prototype. I decided to get a new arena together that had bounds, as opposed to players being able to just fall off the map. Our prototype has infinite scaling anyways, so I knew that I needed to accomplish the following:

1) An enclosed, inescapable arena

2) Something low poly, since our shaders didn't work well with high poly meshes

🧭 Overview

I asked Ray what kind of map he might think is a good reference for our arena, and he sent me a clip of Naruto Storm.

The Reference

The Starting Point

I started with terrain painting with some textures that were as close to the reference as possible from the fab store. I forgot to take a picture without some of the assets I added in, but I painted using a grass and dirt texture after figuring out how to do landscape layers.

So it's spoiled now, I ended up using a fab pack that included some rocks! While finding these assets, I had to figure out how to stop our shaders from getting applied to the terrain, since it was getting applied in a weird way that made it impossible to see. I added the rocks and painted terrain, before adding the walls.

Then I added some decorations from the same pack I was using from the fab store to make the wall a bit more appealing, since it's 90% of what the players are looking at.

Last up was using the asset pack which had individual building blocks (this took awhile to assemble) to achieve the same building look of the reference image from before. I was in the flow of things so I didn't get a great chance to add in progress pictures but this is what it ended up looking like with the general shape:

Added details after to make bring everything together!

I tested a good amount to make sure that it was functional with the actual mechanic - so here it is!