ISAAC CALON
Project Leadership | Game Design | Narrative/Documentation
Ozymandias - A Capture-the-Flag Map Built in UDK
The Plan
My partner and I wanted to build a smallish, balanced map that provided clear lines of sight and accommodated multiple play styles. The map would encourage a fast pace, and success would rely equally on individual skill and teamwork to strategically control the Kismet switches that raise and lower floating islands to provide quicker travel across the map.
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With limited assets we created an asset staging area before we each settled on an architectural/cultural theme. Then we divided the workload roughly in half, with each of us building one culture's sky castle. Finally, we budgeted a total number of hours we intended to work on the project, and set a work schedule for each of us to own the "master" map file around our other projects and each other's needs.
Execution and Lessons
We nailed our objectives with only minor deviations from our original paper plan. Ozymandias provides exactly the playstyle we were seeking, and the map is genuinely fun and balanced for snipers, run-and-gunners, and everything in between. Ozymandias was nominated by our peers for the Best Level Design award.

If we rebuilt Ozymandias, I would take more care in placing foliage—we ran into serious framerate issues late in production that we addressed by replacing all of the foliage across the map and by tinkering with the foliage draw distance.
