INFEST
PROJECT INTRODUCTION
Your first look at the official release of Infest! A Holdout community map designed for The Anacrusis 6.1 Steam Workshop Update. Created for and with the Community, Infest was a showcase project and map to motivate more creative minds to create their own custom Holdout Maps for The Anacrusis! Holdout was a new game mode introduced in The Anacrusis on Update 6, where players have to survive forever against endless hordes of aliens while trying to complete the map’s objective.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Designing the Level Layout
- Visual Scripting The Event / Encounter Triggers
- Lighting Art
- Set Dressing & Interior / Exterior Decoration with Existing Assets
- Creating and Marketing a Community Gameplay Trailer
- Crushing and Defeating the map creation deadline which was getting the map done before November 20th, 2022!
DETAILS
- Anacrusis’s Custom Unreal Editor
- Team Size: 1
- Role: Level Designer
- Engine: Unreal Engine 4
In-Engine Blockout & Planning:
- With an idea of a giant alien egg in mind, I wanted to go through some concepts of a scientific prison where the narrative was there was a ton of past research on a strange egg that was enormous. The blockout went through many iterations, and I wanted to mess around with directions like pipes pumping chemicals and fluids to the egg or to the final version, which is having the egg create an Infestation of New Alien Life in a room.
- I went straight to the Engine to create a loop and Highly Replayable experience for the community when they want to try out a new and fun level experience.
The Laser-Cannon & Holdout Game Mode Implementation:
- With the design of connecting Triggers to triggers for visual scripting, I created a laser cannon and implemented the holdout gamemode entities. The laser cannon can be Activated by the players by pressing on the control panel button that is behind the cannon itself, creating an awesome Visual effect that blasts a alien infected door to help the players progress.
- These Visual scripting tools and systems were created specifically to be similar to the Source Engine, since a lot of our community was coming over from the Source Playerbase, which hosted a lot of players playing Left 4 Dead, Half Life, and more! These triggers were bascially a easier way to communicate and were a short-term Blueprinting system, without going into blueprints!
Each Infested Area Needed To Be Unique, But How?
- Lighting! Having specific lighting to each Infested area within the map offered more guidance for players in terms of difficulty and playable space. Just a color difference offered players a lot of guidance into the space, and make for some really awesome visuals for each area that had it’s own Infestation.
- I wanted to use the lighting to setup and Guide Players into difficulty, with Green being the easiest to Holdout in, to Red being the most difficult chokepoint to Holdout in.
Animated Infestation & Goo... Yuck!
- I went through Unreal Engine’s Material Editor to create some of the disgusting oozing effects of each environment. I modified the Specular, Animation Graphs, and layers of each Infest Material & Texture to create a disgusting effect!
- My personal favorite is the Green Infested Zone, with adding Additional Details such as Alien / Space Crew arms that are being eaten by the Ooze and Slime around the area, similar to the Alien movies.