Overview
Setting: The survivors find themselves in an abandoned mall. Finding remnants of the army, they decide to try their luck and attempt to contact the army.
Platform: Windows PC
Engine: Source Engine
Tools Used: Valve Hammer Editor, VTFEdit, Photoshop
Completion: 4/8/2018
Team Size: 1
Role: Concept, Greyboxing, Prop and Texture Placement, Lighting, Pathing/Navmesh placement, Pacing
Download Options:
Level Layout
Ideas and Thought Process
This map was loosely inspired by the Bamboo Plaza in Chinatown in Los Angeles, California.
I first created this map around the idea of close quarter combat, players constantly on the move, and having rotational routes. Rotational routes mean having paths where the players will go around the map and eventually going back to the start of the route. In this map, the players would start at the first floor of the mall, venture up to the second floor shops, climb to the third floor, exit out to the third floor parking lot, go back down to the first floor parking lot, and end up back at the first floor of the mall. The ideal gameplay I had in mind would have the players constantly moving along this route to keep the zombies at bay; surviving as long as possible without the zombies catching up to them.
As I continued to build out the map, I started to see that only having CQC would limit gameplay and would hinder my level design of the mall. Malls usually contained wide spaces and long corridors that showoff and lead to the shops. So, I decided that to remove the CQC limitation and that allowed for a better time making the mall.
After a few initial playtests, I realized that there were issues preventing the constant movement and rotational route gameplay.
The issues were:
- The shops on the second floor promoted the idea of bunkering in the shops by funneling the zombies through the entrances of the shops.
- Zombies did not have enough routes to attack the players within the shops.
- There is only 1 route to the third floor which was the escalator from the third floor. This meant that zombies only had one way to come down to the second floor from the third floor. This also meant that the players were better off staying in one place instead of risking their lives to reach the third floor.
To solve these issues, I created a zombie only side room that connected the two shops (the grocery store and the restaurant). This room can only be entered by zombies and acted as an additional route to both stores.
(The pictures on the left are the grocery store and the grocery store’s entrance of the connector room. The pictures on the right are the restaurant and the restaurant’s entrance of the connector room.)
I also created a hole on the ceiling of the restaurant so zombies can spawn and drop down the hole to easily attack the players.
To stop the easy shots at the zombies from the entrance of the shops, I added obstacles in front of the entrances that covered the player’s line of sight from inside. This allowed the zombies more time to approach the survivors without immediately being killed off from a few meters away.
Another problem that I found was that there was only one way to reach the third floor via escalator. This would result in survivors having to either abandon the idea of going to the third floor or to circle around the second floor to reach the escalators. The problem with circling around the second floor is that it could potentially trap the survivors on one side of the floor and be overwhelmed. To combat this, I created another path to the third floor. This path would be a staff room in the back of the grocery store with a ladder that leads up to a third-floor storage room.
Afterthoughts
This project was difficult to complete due to some issues. One of the issues is that I can’t control the spawning of the zombies at all. The director decides where and when to spawn them. This meant that the rotational gameplay didn’t always work out. To try and get some control, I created rooms that survivors can’t access and had the conditions of spawning zombies there. These rooms are placed in specific spots so that it would encourage the rotational gameplay I had in mind.
These rooms also helped with the “bunkering down in one spot” issue. In most of the survival maps I’ve played, they all encouraged bunkering down and trying to hold out against the wave of zombies. In the ideal gameplay of my level, it would encourage players to keep running around to survive. As I mentioned in the “Ideas and Thought Process” section, my rooms encouraged bunkering down because the zombies were being funneled into the rooms by their inherent two chokepoints, entrance and back entrance. By adding specific zombie spawning rooms and opening new zombie routes, this made bunkering down more difficult and encouraged players to pick up supplies while running away from the zombies.
Jimmy Lu 