Altitude - (formerly named Turbulence) (Prodeus)

I've been working on a level called Turbulence for the contest. The concept is you have to navigating between plateaus while powering down anti air defenses in order to gain access to a heavily defended robotics plant.

This is my second map for Prodeus, I was happy with my first but felt it lacked standout moments, it was a steady ramp up of combat and then it was over. I'm trying to address that here by having memorable moments involved in how the player moves between areas.

Here's some editor shots of what I've got so far:

Spent Sunday morning Toying with taking the exterior in a moodier direction.

And having a lot of fun discovering the particle effects that have been added since the game left beta!

Focus for the last week has been:

• Making outdoor lighting more dramatic
• Optimising a lot of geometry and then optimising it again, I'm approaching the recommended 15k max so every face is precious
• Polishing particles and scripting on all 4 plane interactions
• Removing several soft locks (checkpoints not resetting level state has required a lot of mover re-scripting on player re-spawn)
• Fixing a number of other bugs that came back from testing
• Adding 3 more secrets
• Starting to add in distance detailing

Adding geometry in the distance has been an interesting experience. When I started Turbulence I wanted to try making a super open level as I'd heard Prodeus largely renders all the geometry all the time so optimisation comes from aspects like total face count, dynamic lighting and the number of nearby particles. Coming from a hl2 background not worrying about vvis seemed liberating. What I hadn't accounted for was a max draw distance (including the faces which draw the sky), after adding in a bunch of far off cliffs and huge sky I had to re-make everything more compact and redo the geometry for the sky to be an octagon rather than a square to ensure no playable area was greater than the max draw distance to any part of it.

The focus for next week will be making the finale pop.

I've got feedback from a few people on the Prodeus discord already but it would be great to get some Mapcore feedback. There's currently a build accessible with the p link: m-ht1EjFQZov

I'm using the new year as an excuse to look at how Turbulence has changed over its month of development. This is the first playable version (when the plane would go through a canyon with scrolling textures and platforms hovered via giant fans) to the much more refined experience there is now. Still a long way to go but sometimes it's nice to look back and realise how far you've already gone.

[Blocked Image: https://media2.giphy.com/media/TTg4q45ZZqey55XHYu/giphy.gif]

After being fortunate enough to receive a bunch of play through videos I've been doing a lot of tweaking with spacing and enemy positions and nearing the point where I'm happy. The end is beginning to come into site, the next step is more polish with the visuals (one of the areas I don't think I'm that strong in yet). I've started to add color back in as it was looking a bit too grey.

If you've got Prodeus and haven't given it a play yet I'd love a video of your first play through. It's publicly viewable now or you can get it with the p-link: m-ht1EjFQZov

Altitude has now been published, overall I think it's a large improvement from my last map Transit, especially when it comes to texturing and set pieces. I've learned a crazy amount along the way though and there are so many things I'd do differently if i was starting again.

If you fancy giving it a play the p link is: m-ht1EjFQZov

I've put together a short making of video to show how Altitude evolved and some of the design decisions that were taken along the way: