"Preramble"

What's my handle name all about, then?

Well, i was introduced to Hive and in the moment what could i have given myself as a handle? What did i think i would be sharing initially? Well, maps. Not IRL ones, nor the correct name for them, but custom made levels for an existing videogame. Easily called: maps, or custom maps.

It's something i've been doing since 2015. Since i'm not that much of a blogger, i thought i'd share the things i do instead, so, here goes.

Intro

Dying Light came out in 2015, and looking around the interwebs for a new game to play i found a melee zombie game. "Could be fun", i thought. I immediately fell in love with it; the first person hack and slash, the atmosphere and music sucked me right in!

Taking a break one day, i went around the internet, finding things to read about this, my new favorite game. And what a pleasant surprise it was to find that the game had a map editor! Sweet! I like making maps! I had made maps for Sim City 4000, and i remember how much fun that was!

So, fast forward to today, from 2015 and i've dedicated a little over 5 thousand hours with this game's level editor. I say editor, but it's more appropriately called developer tools, which allows anyone to develop a customized, fully playable game with custom quests. Seeing that it's based on a pre-existing game, you have to make use of the game's base mechanics. But it's still a lot of fun! The terrain editor is not bad, allowing some level of customization (custom ground textures, custom elevation brushes), there are brushes to paint assets onto the terrain (you can paint trees, rocks - anything really, as the brushes are customizable to any model you want to paint onto the terrain), we have access to all the assets that exist in the base game (plus, we can import our own textured assets), we can import audio (to make customized character dialogue or add customized soundtracks for any part of the game; during a quest, ambience, etc), we can make cutscenes (using a built-in movie tool), and we can write our own quests (via pre-existing commands or, "phases", using the game's built-in language, based on Python).

WIP Screenshots

So, what's point of this post?

Well, i thought i would share some images from one of the maps i'm working on. I've been working on this map since 2017, on and off (published a couple other maps in-between), and when finished it will be published on the Steam workshop, free-to-play for people that own Dying Light on Steam.

Just to clear the amount of work that has gone here; each wall is a separate mesh. Every window is separate. Each door. It's like a giant box of small lego pieces you put together.

There's still quite a lot of building to be done. General building, detailing, adding some more lights, smoke effects and enemies. The quest for the game is done and working. Most that's left is grunt work, building the world in which the game takes place.

Architecture

Obviously it's inspired on middle-eastern architecture (or Islamic, i don't know how you'd call it). It's middle eastern to me. If you have any saying on anything architecture related, please feel free to drop in a line! I do like to make it as based in reality as possible!

And i do love this type of architecture.

Final Thoughts

If you play Dying Light and enjoyed it, and haven't played any custom maps, i advise you to head over to the workshop for the game. There's many good custom maps on there, with fully formed storylines and amazing level designs.

I hope you enjoyed and if you make levels and are on here, reply with a comment if you've posted on here images of your work. I'd love to see and offer some criticism!

Post-Mortem Thoughts

Is this what death is like?