⚠️ Servers Down Since 2020 | STEAM Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/746070/The_Survivors/.
GENRE: FP SHOOTER - BATTLE ROYALE
DEVELOPER: NHTV BREDA
CLIENT: AUTOTELIC DESIGN
ROLE: TECHNICAL WORLD DESIGNER
"The Survivors" is a 100 players battle to be the last man standing in a 3 km by 3 km Arctic Western open world with various sub-biomes. A unique elimination system sets the pace and flow for the players, while AI encampments can be fought for additional loot. Through Twitch, viewers can impact the course of the game!
Technical World Designer
• Created and sketched the final map layout. (with co-level designer/Jacopo Voce)
• Designing, developing and maintaining 1/6 of the world.
• Creating playable locations with modular assets.
• Using World Machine to create the base terrain + Creating and maintaining landscape material
• Bringing new knowledge and innovative, faster work-flow methods to the level design team.
▶️ The Survivors is a student project, created by 50+ developers. Released on Steam and had an average player count of 1000+ players.
▶️ While we were working on the project, other battle royale type games apart from PUBG got released. Like Fortnite and Apex Legends. It was great as it allowed us to do thorough research on what makes this genre interesting.
▶️ What I found interesting was how the zone controls the flow of the game, players would eventually find each other and be forced into combat. The final location of a match is never the same, making every match feel fresh and a new experience.
The amount of loot spread over locations, the sizes and the simplicity of them unconsciously tells the players to continue moving forward. It is always a nice balance, not enough loot is annoying. Too much loot and the player might not see the incentive to travel towards other locations.
▶️ For the project I developed a method of creating terrain with use of heightmaps. Using the heightmaps as an "alpha stamp" to add/subtract terrain geometry. This method was shown to the other level designers, we used this method to save time on sculpting everything by hand.
We had the possibility to create our own heightmaps in WorldMachine or from Satellite data. Any small imperfections could be fixed afterwards by using the UE4 terrain tools to manually sculpt back important details.
