Apex Skyline (Unreal 2003 Level Design)

We were assigned a project in my Level and Environment Design class to create a multiplayer map, and as usual, I decided to shoot for the stars. Most students were building things like forest paths, grimy city streets, Japanese dojos, etc. I decided I was going to create an environment with the top couple floors of 4 huge futuristic buildings, where the players leapt between them while fighting.

Four skyscraper size buildings breach a smoggy grey sky with bright colored neon lighting on each.

I had to figure out a way to load all those polygons into a single environment within Unreal, so I ended up splitting the buildings up as symmetrically as possible and instancing it. This made the game run smoothly, but the bot pathing was still a nightmare. We didn’t learn how to fix that in that class, so I had to spend several sleepless nights figuring that out before the due date. Yet another instance of me pushing myself a little too far. At least I got a good grade.

Multiple angles shown for the purple skyscraper. It has a hollow gear-shaped pinnacle at the top and strongly vertical repeated brutalist architecture highlighted by purple neon lights.

In this dystopian future, the large-scale images of their charismatic and handsome dictator are visible even on the top of skyscrapers. The billboards you see are photos of me, manipulated to look like sci-fi 1984-style dictator propaganda.

The teal building has an enormous gargoyle statue peering off each corner of it and bridges connecting them over an open rooftop courtyard beneath.

Originally, I was going to include a helicopter that would carry power-ups around the map and drop them off at marked helipads on top of the buildings. I ended up wisely canceling that because the scene was already so complex and heavy on the Unreal 2003 Engine.

The red skyscraper is an office building housing endless rows of cubicles. Atop it is a fictional nationalistic propaganda billboard encouraging viewers to Do it for the motherland.

Technical Info

I created this map for the Unreal 2003 engine. Modeled in 3D Studio MAX, textured with PhotoShop. Instanced geometry as much as possible to keep gameplay smooth. Textures for everything, occasionally including Light and Reflection maps. The scene is over 20,000 tri.