Overview

Construction Site is a blockout for skateboarding game Session, using modding tools and Unreal Engine 4. It was designed in 8-10 days during a 1-month level design jam.

Goals

The theme for the design jam was verticality, so I wanted tricks from great height to feel both dangerous and rewarding. The idea was to make lower floors safe and welcoming, while upper floors invite the player to perform tricks that are more challenging but more spectacular. All while retaining the open playground feel of a Session level.

Research and planning

I collected images of building sites and skyscrapers under construction into a PureRef mood board and made some basic notes and sketches of recurring visual elements like cranes, scaffolding, support struts, rebar, pellets, planks, and so on.

Metrics

Session is a very accurate skating simulation (see above). Its physics mean that each gap and step must be carefully measured. To avoid problems down the line, I took a day to build test environments and establish things like max step height, ollie height, ollie distance, and other useful measurements. In the process I built a set of metrics rulers.

For example, I made rulers that measured “easy”, “medium” and “hard” jumps. These would help me accurately build trick spots that increase in challenge as the player moved higher in the level.

Blockout

I used the level editor Trenchbroom to create basic three-tiered structures, varying the height and “state of completion” for each structure. I had built some basic prefabs during testing for objects like grind rails and manual pads. So I introduced these while tweaking the overbearing structures and tested often to get a feel of the scale and flow of the environment. The cranes came quite late in the blockout stage, but became useful orienting landmarks.

Iterating

Lines – During testing, I realized that getting from one building’s floor to another should be a core and recurring challenge. Since much of the fun in Session is to create “lines” (a series of tricks in succession) I started implementing grind rails, planks, ladders and ramps that would follow from one another. If the player successfully pulls off the whole line, they will have crossed wide gaps of multiple buildings, which gels with the risk-reward verticality theme.

Space to skate – One weakness of the map became apparent: on some semi-built structures there was not a lot of room to push and gain the speed required for the next leap. The solution was to simply combine two of these structures into one, so the floors contained more space to maneuver.

On buildings where this couldn’t be done, some gaps had to be reduced to allow a player at lower speeds to clear those jumps.

Final design

The deadline for the jam was approaching, so I finalized the design and exported it as a custom map for the modded game. You can download it here if you like. But if you’d rather not break all your bones, you can just watch a longer video of highlights below.