DM-LaserTag was my first map for Unreal Tournament, where I tried to capture the style of all the low-budget laser tag arenas I went to as a kid. It’s packed with glowing surfaces, weird, misplaced cover, and entirely too much neon.
Unreal Tournament is one of the few games still carrying the arena shooter torch, so it was a perfect fit for this idea. This was my first time creating a complete 3D shooter, instead of a tech demo, so I got to practice some of my favorite design ideas.
The core design concept was an easily readable map that dishes out its complexity slowly over time instead of all at once. The map is structured around a large, rectangular room with a hexagonal pit in the center that leads to the second floor, making it easy for the player to understand the basic layout and figure out where they are quickly, which is necessary for a game moving at UT’s speed. Adding teleporters to the mix further necessitates the player to be able to quickly get a sense of where they are. The bottom floor put this philosophy to the test, as I tried to recreate the mazes that many laser tag arenas contain. Doing this while sticking to the easy readability philosophy was difficult, so I split the map into four sections, and color-coded all the assets in each area accordingly. This means that, even when the player is jumping across the map at crazy speeds, they can quickly see the dominant color in a scene and figure out where they are.
With that navigation established, I could proceed to add more complexity and discoveries for the player to find. Hidden secrets are one of my favorite parts of older shooters like Doom and Quake, and I’ve scattered a few throughout my map to keep it from feeling too samey, and to keep the player constantly wondering at what’s there.