The Bornless: Two Rivers

The Bornless is a F2P PvPvE Team-Based FPS Shooter set in the horror genre. I’ve worked with the team at Cathedral Studios over the past year, originally providing my knowledge, skills and best practices when it comes to designing FPS maps.

I would move on to designing and building a launch map for The Bornless: appropriately named ‘Two Rivers’ during development, due to the layout of the map being centred around a small town constructed where 2 mountain rivers meet, it would later be re-named to: Farmouth

Farmouth is a small, fictional USA town settled where two mountainous rivers collide. A location rich with history, Farmouth features some key locations that would be required for settlements to succeed in the early days of the Americas explorations.

Constructing Farmouth (aka Two Rivers):

Originally planned out in Photoshop (seen below), the map was designed to be balanced according to player spawn locations being equal distance the key points of gameplay/interest across the map. In a Team-Based game such as this, fairness and advantages must be prevented as much as possible to provide an enjoyable and balanced experience to all players.

Some locations have shifted or changed through development, but by starting with a strong top down layout for the location, developing into a playable map simply requires following through on the initial 2D plan.

The initial blocking of the map used Blueprints, each 100metres squared to force accurate and equal distance locations across the map. These Blueprints were then massaged one at a time to create the locations as planned above.

A view from above, in Editor – the initial blockout complete. Locations are spaced apart evenly to provide natural pathing for players.

Some additional shots from the initial blockout:

Shots of different locations across the map.
Green vertical lines represent Player spawn locations, red lines are objective locations.

With a radius of ~0.2 km, the map is roughly 0.15 kilometers². Elevation changes across the map, with the Northern regions being elevated, gradually decreasing South towards the water.

Changes in elevation can improve flow and experience, not just by adding variation to the feel of gameplay, but also by creating natural line-of-sight blockers. With large open maps, you need to reduce the ability for players to shoot someone from extreme distances or weird locations as much as possible to improve gameplay and enjoyment.

With the initial blockout complete, a Level Artist/3D Modeller was added to the team to start building out the locations with me and developing the map into a playable state. Working together, the LA provided art pieces while I hand-crafted areas, adding props, foliage, and constructing buildings from square blocks into detailed spaces, such as the Train Station, Lumber Yard, Radio Tower, and others – ensuring the flow and line of sights on the map were maintained while keeping the player leading, visual pathing and sense of flow intact. Additional help and inspiration was provided by Branton Lansdale(who had previously created The Bornless’ first map), Toby Saunders(CEO of Cathedral Studios) and other members of the Cathedral team.

After a few weeks of work, the map gradually transitioned piece by piece from Greyblock into something resembling more of a AAA look..

References

Finding real world references for a map is always key to envisioning locations before building them in the Editor. Below are some great reference shots I used when designing the map’s individual locations.