SP-Security

SP-Security is a single player demonstration level created with the April build of the Unreal Development Kit. The level was constructed over two and one half weeks. The first half week was dedicated to paper and pencil outlines for the intended level progression and then replicating that design through bsp. Once the layout was loosely designed, I spent the next week implementing the kismet events, making those events bug free, and starting to mesh the level. The last week was spent completing the meshing, adding blocking volumes, optimizing, and lighting.

The primary gameplay element of this demonstration level was the use of turrets. Early on I created a floor panel that would rise 64 units off of the ground, fire two grenades at the player, and then lower. The intended method to destroy the turret is to stand on top of its panel at which point it will fire a grenade up at the player, bouncing the grenade against its own panel, and returning into its inner workings at which point it explodes. When the turret takes damage, its material and light change briefly to red, and then return to white. After the turret has been damaged twice, it deactivates and the next room becomes accessible.

After I created a polished version of the turret, I toyed with variants of it. One variant, a turret that could be made friendly and fire at bots, I kept. This required the turret to differentiate between multiple enemies (which I did by comparing distances and finding the closest), determine if the target is destroyed, and allow access to the next room once all targets have been destroyed. The greatest challenge in this was confirming if the target was destroyed because the pawn death event is not functional for bots, so I used a combination of take damage events to the bots’ attached volumes, and a fail safe event to see if the bot has been immobile for more than 10 seconds. The latter was use if the player killed the bot when the bot was out of the turret’s range, thus disabling the possibility of the take damage event.

The final room of the level required the player to cross a chasm to reach the door on the other side. Originally the design had been to damage a pillar that would fall across the chasm and create a make-shift bridge, but this had two problems. First, the pillar would have to be enormous (destroying some suspension of disbelief) to cross the chasm, or the chasm would have to be narrow enough that a double jump would have sufficed. Second, other meshes and pillars had not been destroyable, and explaining that this one was would be impractical (and further destroy the suspension of disbelief). Instead, I created conveyor belts running perpendicular  to the player’s path. Through two toggle-able buttons in a room overlooking the conveyors the player could pause the conveyor for 10 seconds—just long enough to jump across the crates on the conveyor and safely reach the other side.

The aesthetics are based loosely upon those of DM-Deck, a map included with the Unreal Development Kit. This choice was made because of the limited assets in the UDK. Making use of an existing style saved time, which could then be used to add further detail and differentiate the level from its aesthetic parent. The visuals now have a unique and moody feel unlike Deck or any Unreal Tournament environment.

Credits: Sjosz, for helping me solve several bugs.

Download: Temporarily Unavailable!

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