Utilized to build or maintain momentum, fake out defenders, quickly rotate between lanes, and gather the attackers together to push. Holding and pushing past these thresholds should feel like a big power shift between attackers and defenders. The first of these is where defenders are comfortably able to get to within the door unlock time. They are relatively tight, contrast in spacing with the bowls they are connected to and function as funnels for attackers. Opportunity to thematically stage the level, affords freedom to do some set dressing since there is no combat happening. Since players are protected in their spawn rooms we need to be careful not to place the doors in direct line of sight of key areas i. Make an effort to give attackers good visibility into the area immediately surrounding the spawn door. Minimum of 2 exits or 1 exit in the case of split rooms. Exits need to establish good flow into defender base and provide options to combat potential spawn griefers. Only defending team can shoot through exit barriers.
Provides the ability to heal and stock up on ammo.
Staging area and safe space for the defenders. They are a good example of sharing all the same basic elements while at the same time trading length for complexity. The following is a simple structural breakdown of the main components of our maps that so far have been successful. We feel these maps best represent the components we distilled down to be crucial to the Blitz experience. The first 3 maps we are moving forward with are Fort, Loh, and Meltdown. The defender spawns were sitting in between the entrance to the defender base and the delivery point and had only one exit for the majority of its development which lead to a lot of spawn camping and frustrating cut-offs. Choke points were very even in size, and especially deeper into the map were too easily controlled from one position. The attacker lead up into the first combat bowl was too long, repeated spawning even with rally often felt tedious and a bit mazey. With the introduction of rally points came the need to purposefully design spaces for them that allowed for enough space around them - which proved to be a challenge with the limited space and still requires more work to make them work effectively. Lift jumps are still a valuable option but should be looked at as supplemental. We eventually made a conscious choice to only rely on jump pads for critical path gameplay to allow teams to move together. One of the core concepts born out of this map is the proximity and traversal between the options players get at the first choke point. It is currently on hold but we may return to this and give a few areas a once over now that we know more.īlackstone had a great overall narrative in its structural design and premise that was immediately more easily understood battlements are a natural first perimeter, breaching a castle, etc.
We learned a ton more with this one and came up with a lot of core components and mechanics of the game mode thanks to this map. Dropped flags often ended matches or provided the defending team a huge time advantage because they were so easily locked down this eventually led to the backtracking mechanic of the dropped flag, which allowed for fun dynamic shifts and decision making around the flag instead.īlackstone was the first shell that was purpose built for Blitz, and incorporated a lot of the lessons learned from testing Bigrock. There were three main routes into the defender base, two of which connected back together before hitting the capture point. We knew that asymmetry was going to play a huge part in the gameplay and feel of Blitz, so those types of maps were a logical place to start to get something up and running quickly.ĬTF-Bigrock ended up being the shell we iterated on the most because a lot of its inherent design lent itself well to Blitz as a starting point. Our first testing grounds for Blitz were a few of our old asymmetrical CTF shells.