I am designing levels/locations for ‘Off The Grid‘ – an online third person game that mixes elements of both Extraction shooter and Battle Royale genres. The game is being developed using Unreal Engine 5 and is released on PC, Playstation 5 and XBOX Series X/S.
Typical for the Battle Royale genre, the game is taking place on a large map made up several key locations (and the ‘skin issue’ in-between). One of these locations is an abandoned desalination plant named ‘Saltie’.
‘SALTIE’
Design ownership of this location was transferred to me during early whitebox stage. I worked on it on and off until its release with a number of different LDs who contributed to its development so shout-out to them (and all the other departments who worked on this): Timo Bron, Barbod Nili, Laszlo Domjan, Jaume Sanz Sempere, Vitaliy Avdyeyev (and Eugen Ionica as Lead Level Designer).
Saltie is an abandoned desalination plant on the coast of the island. It is made up of cylindrical clarifying pools, silos, industrial buildings, worker accomodations and giant salt piles.
Biggest Design Challenges & Learnings:
- Cover is not as crucial in BRs – and especially in Off The Grid – as I expected. Industrial themes lend themselves quite well to fill them with pipes, silos, machinery etc. that provide cover and break sight lines. But firing at other players across large distances doesn’t automatically mean that you achieve to hit them. In any case, you will be making a lot of noise and exposing your location to other players. The extremely agile traversal mechanics of the game also mean that Sniper Rifles are not as powerful as in other shooters. All these factors meant that I eventually stopped worrying about sightlines and removed a lot of the objects blocking fast player movement and perception.
- Loosely connected to the previous point: less cover doesn’t mean ‘no cover at all’. This gave us some interesting challenges during the design of the giant salt piles that this location was going to have. Due to the nature of salt any type of foliage was out of the question. Reference images didn’t show many objects on such piles, in general. We arrived at a mix of trenches between the piles, big conveyor belt towers and vehicles scattered across the piles to fix this problem.
- We had to let go of the idea that players could get inside some of the pipes running through the area. It appeared like a promising, novel idea, but even with a lot of exit points it isn’t fun to be bumping your camera in a 3rd person game against the inner shell of a pipe and having your fast movement mechanics be so constrained while inside.
Screenshots:
