Photon Zone - 2v2 Elimination Map

Third Person Shooter map (UE5 Lyra project)                         January 2023-March 2023

Lead Designer / Developer                                                                  Team Size: 1 (solo)

Overview / Design Reel

Photon Zone is a 2v2 Elimination Map designed from the ground up and themed around laser tag in Unreal Engine 5! Using assets given to me from the Lyra starter project, and my own modeling / Unreal Engine skills, I created this entire map by myself with little extra help only provided to me through feedback. This was my first ever project using Unreal Engine 5! 

Map Gallery

Design Philosophy – Creating a laser tag arena 

While creating Photon Zone I asked myself “What would 12 year old me find visually appealing?”. In order to achieve this feel of childlike wonder and general laser tag, I created and modified several glowing textures in UE5 and threw them on almost every obstacle, and place of interest in the map. I used this light to also guide the player places. I also wanted to focus on verticality, so I created 4 floors to the level, and focused on making them accessible and interesting. I used games like Quake and Doom as a reference for this.
 
Using Lighting to guide the player – Danger and Safety 
 In order to subconsciously guide the player throughout the map, I lead them using colors. Any blue glowing material on the map I used to indicate “safety” and “cover” so the player would run towards things with that color whenever in danger. I put red on all the doorways to indicate “danger!” to the player because red usually means bad. All the doors are choke points on the map and anyone could come around the corner at any time, so it helps if the player is cautious with them

Postmortem

Learning Experiences – Unreal Engine, Player Testing, Iterating

Throughout this project I had to learn a lot. I taught myself roughly how the built in Unreal engine modeling tool worked, and how to iterate on player feedback. The map went through several variations over an 8 week period, and I took a lot of great suggestions and feedback from people in order to make my map better! Unreal Engine was rough to get the hang of, but was very rewarding in the end.

Takeaways – Engine Proficiency, learning to let go and experiment

I initially had a lot of problems with Unreal, but managed to push through and learn many things like the modeling tool. An impediment early in my level development was deciding on what work could be scrapped, reused, or kept. I found that QA results and reworking areas of the map helped me see what worked and what didn’t. Holding an unbiased development approach helped me iterate and collect feedback to create a map that worked great for the players. Overall I had a lot of fun with this project, and it sparked a lot more interest in specializing in level design!