Unreal Tournament DM - Nali Arena

Audio: I placed heal vials on the middle bridge to alert players that someone is grabbing the Redeemer weapon. But I also placed water to alert when somebody is grabbing a weapon. In here I made a mistake. There is water both on the lowest level as well as on the highest level. With the water splash sound being the same and with this game not having real 3D audio propagation you can't know where the other player is just by hearing the water splash sound. The same mistake happens with the four lifts. They all have the same sounds, except for the duration because two of them take the player straight to to uppermost floor.

Solution? I think that with modern engines it'd be using different materials for the upper levels so that the player makes a different footstep sound. And to replace the water channels from the upper levels with some solid surface.


Item placement: the four med boxes were placed at the corners of the fire bowls. Not the best position because the player have to run to a spot where they are trapped in a corner for a split second, which means death in this type of game. Maybe I should have placed the med boxes in front of the bowls, not at the corners where the player is forced to bump against the walls. The ammo on the lower water pools was placed off the water with the weapon in the middle, maybe this wasn't the best idea.


Geometry and architecture: It was all about feeling with no numbers to guide any decision. I created cylinders with a certain radius and walked in game to check whether the radius was too wide or too narrow without really having a number to compare against. I didn't have any feedback to make the arena larger or narrower, the pillars thicker or thinner. The only thing that I felt was that an octagon felt about right. More than 8 sides and it'd be too curvy and too hard to texture face by face. Is this structure physically feasible? I believe so, the floor isn't too thick or too thin and the pillars are strong enough to support the structure.


Floorplan: My idea was to make a circular arena with two floors and more than one ring. I decided to use three rings. I don't remember where the idea came from. Maybe from the olympic game's flag. I was trying to make something quick and easy to build. The shape itself is easy, but it wasn't that quick to build.


Sky: With the lights being torches I felt that nighttime was a better choice. The sky is dark with an orange haze effect, two layers of a cloud texture, one static and one scrolling and a full moon. The night sky has stars and with the exception of the orange gradient used to create the haze effect, everything else is the default's game content.


Texture alignment: With BSP we have to align on a face by face basis, which is a lot of tedious work. I did attempt to align the textures on each pillar and on all walls. But for the ceiling and floor I didn't care about matching the texture's dimensions with the brushes length and width. You can easily spot where the texture is misaligned. One technique that I used was to keep all walls of the same floor consistent, with 3 floors and one different wall texture for each.