United 1944

For the revision of the French Countryside maps, I had to revision the bases and iterate the layout. The revision of the bases was done in order to improve them and fix some possible bugs or issues. This task involved not only the game's Logic aspects, such as resources and Player spawn points distribution, but also balancing between bases; see what bases offered more advantages to the players and what could be done to avoid it.

The layout iteration task consisted of navigating through the bases, detecting what can be improved and how to do it, and fixing it, in order to achieve a more consistent experience. We had to deal with some issues we had detected through playtests: There were navigation routes that were not clear enough, sometimes the layout was too complex, there were unbalanced bases, etc. So the idea was to detect what were the causes on each base that generated these issues.

Here I can show you a small example of some iterations that were made in the Chapel Base:

As you can see, Chapel has a second floor, and there are two groups of boxes that allow the player to climb through it from the inside. Before this iteration, there was only one way up, and was covered by one of the sides, so it was difficult for the player to detect how to get to the second floor. There were also other obstacles on the floor that made the layout more complex without really adding anything substantial.

So my job here consisted of adding a second route to the second floor, simplifying the first one by removing one of the lateral walls, and removing some obstacles and covers that were not really necessary in order to make the layout more simple and readable. I also suggested to the art department to add these fabrics to the wooden boxes, as a visual code to make it more understandable where to climb.

In addition, and as said before, I was the main person in charge of creating the game's collisions and navigation. This is not limited to how the player collides with the different assets of the game, but also how bullets, grenades, projectiles, etc. interact with the world. However, the most handcrafted collisions were the so-called simple collisions, the ones that interact with the player.

These collisions must be as simple as possible, in order to achieve fluent and smooth navigation. As you can see in the image, the tank's complex and detailed shape is transformed into a much more simple and functional geometry. That way, the player doesn't get stuck if he climbs that tank, as well as game's performance is improved. Most of the game's assets have collisions made this way, and they must be made manually.