PVP Shooter Level
Overview
Suburbia is a 5v5 Valorant plant/defuse map that was developed over the course of 4 weeks as an individual assessment piece for QUT's Immersive Game Level Design subject.
For this project, I wanted to challenge myself to work within the predefined limits of an asset pack, as such I used the Assetsville Town pack to source all of my assets.
What I did
As a lifelong Counterstrike player, I had to start by downloading Valorant and playing a few games to familiarise myself with the maps and the key differences. The biggest change from CS, are the agent abilities - these present a lot of options for players, and a lot of challenges for me as a designer. In CS, you have to design around a toolset of guns and grenades, whereas in Valorant, you've got players that can fly, glide, launch walls of fire and even teleport. Trying to account for these abilities was a massive challenge, but it did give me a lot of insights as I was forced to deepen my design thinking.
It also pushed me to draw on any available design resources, for example, the first thing I did was look through the top-down diagrams of all existing Valorant maps on the Valorant website. Knowing I couldn't match the iterative design capability of a AAA team, I used these as a baseplate for designing my map, and borrowed a lot of repeating features for my own design - you can read a full breakdown of this process in my itch.io blog. I wanted to incorporate my experience with CS into the map design - particularly, I wanted to play around with a longer mid-lane, as I felt that mid had been far less impactful in my Valorant matches than it was in CS, with weapons like the Operator sniper seeing much less use than their CS counterparts.
The level gimmick I had in mind was a central room in between the two plant sites that had operable doors, so players could open or shut them (with a cooldown). In Valorant lore, two opposing Earths are fighting for control of a powerful resource called Radianite, so I figured this central room could be a secret Radianite-powered factory hidden within a warehouse complex, and the attacking team was attempting to seize it in order to siphon the Radianite.