Brave the storm and compete for victory in the harsh desert landscape of 1920's Saudi Arabia. The in-game locations are based on areas found in Semaphore’s 2016 title Badiya: Desert Survival.
Project Status
Shipped: iOS, Android
Role
Level & Game Designer, Technical Artist, Gameplay Programmer
Software
Unreal Engine 4, Maya, Substance Painter
Badiya Battle Royale
Contribution
There are 13 total areas in the map and each zone had multiple levels streams (based on the size of the area). I sculpted the landscape, painted the foliage, constructed all the buildings and areas the player can visit and placed set dressing assets to bring the map to life. I also worked with the gameplay and balancing of the player settings such as weapon spawn locations, weapon damage values, player mobility traits and game mode rules
This map was set up using level streaming in Unreal Engine 4. Level streaming enabled us to segment the map both for development and performance purposes. By setting up level streaming, I was able to construct parts of the map while other team members worked in other areas without interruption. Level streaming also helped us with performance by allowing us to load/unload areas of the map that were not visible to the player.
Badiya Battle Royale is a Battle Royale game created for mobile devices. I worked on this project while I was employed at Semaphore, Saudi Arabia and operated in a small team with 3 other multi disciplinarily developers and artists. My role on this project was also multi disciplinary in nature. There are numerous technical and design challenges when working on a project like this. In order for the whole team to work on the map simultaneously level streaming was a necessity.
Enabling other team members to check out one or more maps on version control and iterating on them in layers made this process efficient for us. I set up the sub-levels so they were categorized by zone and workflow. For example, the village is a zone that contains sub-zones such as lower village and market. This way, while I am working on other parts of the map other teammates could decorate the village without affecting my work. I also added sub-levels as layers to each overarching zone so we can bake HLODs, add actors and various other components in a manner that would not disrupt the work of others.