In this blog post, I will describe how I was able to implement my map design into my game.
In the assignment, I was asked to use UE4's FPS template to use as a guide to build my own game. The template's scene include a floor, outer walls and some placeholder blocks scattered, with working box colliders.
I kept the floor and the outer walls, to give me an 'arena' to add my map design to. I also removed the inner placeholder blocks, as they would not be relevant for my map. I started off by enlarging the arena size to help me fit my design, as I felt the existing arena was too small to build an interesting, large scale level.
To build the walls, I used the existing 'box' shape from the Geometry classes as a starting object, and then adjust the scale to fit the needs for each specific wall.
Unreal contains a tab which contains a series of predefined shape classes. These are essentially 3D shapes. In comparison to Unity, Unreal has more pre-built shapes to use, such as the stairs and curved shapes.
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| Image showing a series of geometry classes, in the 'Modes' tab of Unreal. |
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| Image highlighting the Scale section of the transform component, for one of my wall instances in the game. |
I spent around 2 hours laying out the map design, and trialing different sizes of the walls. I would go into 'play mode' to get an idea of the space for the player to move around in. This would help me determine the space to place walls and doors, whilst giving the player enough room to walk around in a slightly open environment.
Conclusion:
To conclude, I feel that I have been able to recreate my 2D map design in the 3D environment in Unreal.
To improve this process, I feel like I could have produced a scale of the map during my original design. This would have made it easier for me to work out the area for the player to move around it. In a future game project, I would look into making a map design on a scale (in relation to the final game environment).
