This is the dock, a level I made with the Unreal Editor for shooter Unreal Tournament. The level takes place on an island with 2 towers and a boat alongside it; the level is designed to encourage long range combat from the towers and fast paced close combat on the ground, with plenty of cover to hide from the towers. The water is the biggest obstacle because it will slow you down by going into it, this creates high risk high reward shortcuts around the map, including a series of boats the players can jump across to get to the ship.

Alongside the main play areas, there are plenty of hidden paths and secret weapons hidden around the map. The level went through lots of top down plans and many iterations to refine it to what it is now. I took lots of playtesting feedback and recorded lots of footage of people playing my level which helped justify my design decisions. For example, the level was initially a square piece of land with a boat docked alongside it, it worked but I didn't like how the land was sectioned off by invisible walls, so I turned the land into a circular island, that way the maps edges where covered by large bodies of water so that no one would have a reason to swim to the edges. This gave the map more of an organic feel as everything you could see you could go to.

A programmer friend and I created this level for a university project. We were told the level has to be set in a bunker but we had full creative control aside from that. I had an ambitious idea to create a puzzle game using both 2D and 3D dimensions to traverse the level. Although at the time I had little 3D experience, I created and textured the entire level alongside assets from the Unity store. This was an excellent opportunity to grow my 3ds Max and Substance Painter skills.

This was a really fun opportunity to design some unique puzzles. My favourite puzzle is when the player must press the right combinations of buttons to build a 2D level correctly and create a path to the key.