New Level Concept, MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction

I've been wanting to make a TC (Total Conversion) level for a while now, since I am more familiar with Unreal. I will probably be unable to contribute custom characters or guns, due to time restraints. I really want to focus on art AND gameplay in this new level, to show that I am competent in both modeling and level design. I am indeed an artist, though, and enjoy more of the lighting, modeling, texturing, and asset placement as opposed to scripting and white boxing levels (although I feel proficient in these, too). I am focusing my new level on a single-player style level for Unreal 3 and already have some simple AI systems that I've been working on to contribute. My major predicted obstacle is changing the core game mechanics: player ground speed, jump height, and ability to dodge. I have been researching mutators and have tried created a simple one to control these parameters, but to no avail. If all else fails, I will cater the level so that it works with both Unreal mechanics or any other.

Here is my concept:
-Based off the first Metal Gear Solid and ambiance of the Bourne Trilogy movies
-Player has to infiltrate a nuclear warhead/biological weaponry facility (not the most original, but I am planning on creating a fresh spin to the atmosphere and gameplay)
-There will probably be only a couple of guns -- stealth being the primary objective -- so a pistol with a silencer should suffice (again, this may have to change do to skill restrictions at the moment)

I am anticipating this level to take roughly 7 weeks to finish and will update any progress once I start production.

Level Finished

I officially finished the level on 9/16 and have uploaded it to my website and FileFront.com under the name DM-FeatureCreep. I also heard back from Gamespot and my first level, Ebb, is now on the site (Feature Creep Download).

Note to Self

I've noticed that map sizes significantly decrease in size if lightmapping was occupying a large portion of that size. My first try was a level that went from 68.9MB (uncooked) to 45.5MB(cooked). In the newest revision I decided to be more liberal with the lightmap sizes, and got a map that was originally 77.5MB(uncooked) to get down to 47.9MB(cooked). If you were wondering about the math behind that, it's:

45.5MB / 68.9MB = .66

47.9MB / 77.5MB = .62

.62 + .66 / 2 = .64

This means that the lightmap size after cooking decreases by roughly 34%. Pretty nifty, indeed. I will definitely be using this formula for my next map to calculate file size :).

I went ahead and cooked my level at my school (thankfully they have Unreal 3). I had decreased the lightmap resolutions all around so that my map was around 70MB... a reasonable number. Whenever I cooked it, the number dropped to a very pleasurable 45MB :)! This got me to go back and scrutinize areas that had discrepancies with lighting (in the form of whitish bands in between 2 side-by-side meshes). Right now I have increased the lightmap resolution of the most important areas, and it seem that a lightmap of 64 and above is recommending for lightmapping -- anything below isn't worth lightmapping, as it makes the mesh look even more screwy than before. I will be recooking the map later today and hopefully it will be released today.

I've finished the version of my rain/city map. I call it DM-FeatureCreep. I've had one friend play test the level near completion and just had another friend play test the final version. He gave me a couple of small things to change and I've gone ahead and changed those. I've been having problems cook the map so I had to use one of those friends' computer to cook it. The only problem is that he is running the game without the version 1.3 patch, and, when I try to play on my computer, the game shuts down for some reason. This may relate to the previous problem of not being able to cook the map, though.

I've also been thinking of a concept of light up shoes. I know there are already shoes such as the pair of L.A. lights that I had when I was a kid, that flashed red when the wearer steps down, but I am thinking of a more adult and futuristic version. When the user steps down, white light turns on in a line until the whole bottom of the shoe is lit. If the wearer stands in one place for a duration of time -- say, 15 seconds -- the light would, to conserve energy, blink in a pre-programmed pattern and then fade out. I was thinking that this would be a cool dynamic to a survival/horror game where everything is usually under lit. Light could be use to harm or scare away monsters, such as vampires, and so that enemies couldn't get too close to the player (unless they stand still too long :) ).
To execute this, I would plan on connecting a dynamic white light to each foot bone and running a test so that the light would only turn on if the foot was flatly colliding with another collision box (this way, if a player where to kick something or jump next to a wall (and there foot happened to brush against it), the shoe would NOT light up. It would light, though, if the player managed to do a running back flip off a wall or while jumping platforms, etc. I will be coming up with a few concept sketches in a later post.