Decommissioned
What is the Map:
Decommissioned is a Halo Infinite Big Team Battle Map (24 players) designed for 1-flag CTF the map is set within an old abandoned Cold War Soviet bunker, being repurposed for rocket launches in an upcoming war.
What was your role on the project:
On this project I was the Overall Project Lead, with this I dabbled in multiple fields, with my largest contributions being to the Level Design and Art of the map. I worked alongside multiple people of which I will now list with their roles (These are their gamertags):
Level Design: George Bandy
Art: Geroge Bandy, Jo Valiant, Kat Rat A Tat
Lighting: GLX, George Bandy
Scripting: Haydn est1999, A Squid Loaf, V Atlantis
Link to Map: Decommissioned - UGC - Halo Infinite
Map Trailer
Gameplay
Design Philosophy and Goals:
Decommissioned's Core design philosophy for me was a hard thing to pinpoint into words, initially it was just the feeling of a fun map I was going for, but overtime it evolved into the interactable elements of the map (shown above) of a rocket launching, long but contained sightlines that players can intertwine between fluidly, and seperating vehicles from main player paths, without making them feel disconnected.
Interactable Elements:
Yes! Interactable Elements! A core design principle of Decommissioned was to throw some lively interactive elements into the conventional player sandbox of Halo Infinite. The map's main interactive element/hazard is the rocket in the center of the map, which will launch and kill any players within the rocket's exhaust shaft after roughly 2 minutes of in-game time. The way the rocket gets to continue to do this after launching is a new saber will rechamber from a hatch in the floor, hinting at a more expansive base and allowing the map to continue to have it's main attraction.
Line of Sight Control:
Decommissioned plays with long lines of sight a lot, with this being a focal point, something I wanted to focus on as well was making sure a player was never in a "Can't-Do-Anything" scenario, to do this there are some complexities on the map I implemented, while watching both vertical and intricate areas of the map to make sure they don't stray into an area of unreadability or frustration for newer players.
Art Direction:
As a level designer we have to work very closely with the artists on our team, I took up the art director roll while allowing Jo Valiant to be the Art Lead to allow for proper collaboration on the project. The goals set up for this map were simple, meeting a Metro (game series) and Halo Hybrid art style that invested players into the space, while properly guiding them around the map. This inherently created a dark and moody atmosphere for players to navigate so lighting was pivotal to nail on this project.
We played through and watched gameplay of both Metro and Bunker areas featured in prior Halo games to see what worked and what didn't to also pull off the art as well as we could.
Lighting:
Lighting was extremely important on this map, with the Lighting GLX was tasked with a very difficult task, making the map dark but readable, with this I worked with him directly to make sure map brightness was solid enough to fit with both the art/theme of the map and to pull players in the proper directions with color theory and brightness of certain lights
Original Top Down
The map changed quite a bit from the original top down, the most notable being spacing between areas and the general flow of the outside area. The outside area, marked with the green coloring, became a lot more direct and flowed faster than the original design. This iteration came while I was blocking out the original space, as I wanted the path to feel efficient.
Other Notable changes were paths around the rocket room were moved and redesigned to promote positive player movement through the space and allow better readability of the space through the provided map landmarks
