The Resurgence of Turnpike

I joined Frozen Sand quite recently, and I have been dedicating a lot of time to level design. Working with the other team members has been great and making progress on our levels has been really rewarding. I have been involved in working on several maps so far, the most recent of which is Turnpike. The whole process of porting a map involves working from a base export of the original map, and then methodically taking that apart, and making each asset piece by piece until we have enough to move each model into UE4. The original process I worked on with JohnnyEnglish started with porting Tohunga, and since then we have iterated and improved on our process.Turnpike is one of the most played maps in Urban Terror, and as such, recreating and revamping the map for Resurgence is an important task. The team has been hard at work with Turnpike as we don’t just want a straight port from 4.x. We want to improve upon the map and increase the level of detail to meet modern standards. With the increased capabilities at hand using UE4 over the idTech3 engine, we can really go all in and add as much detail as needed. While JohnnyEnglish has taken to work on the Red Spawn area, I have spent my time working on the Blue Spawn area of Turnpike.This is quite a large task as it not only involves the playable area, but also the non-playable areas. Some of the assets I have been working on include inner city houses and various buildings, trains, billboards and other assets needed to bring Turnpike into the modern era.In my view, part of improving each map is giving them a unique character and making them feel individual. By spending time modelling individual and unique buildings for use only in Turnpike, this gives the map a special feeling. This also ensures that maps don’t look like they have been using the same prefab buildings over and over. Being able to keep the original feeling of the map while improving upon already existing parts, and adding new parts, is something that I believe to be important. Giving maps unique characteristics and areas gives players landmarks and easily identifiable parts of the map to help them navigate and make the maps stand out.My process of making these buildings has been improving, however the general core principles are rooted in referencing both the original map and referencing real life buildings with similar attributes and inspiration to the original. This may not mean remaking every single building exactly as they were in the original map. Some buildings may instead be improved and made with real life inspiration. The main idea is to keep the character of Turnpike, maintain its originality and improve upon the design where needed.I plan to keep working on improvements for my work on Turnpike and getting it closer to completion. Everything so far is a work in progress, so some parts may change, but maintaining a high level of detail will always be a priority. The first pass on making Turnpike's Blue Spawn was to replace the original exported mesh with new models. Now that strong progress has been made, the next stage for these models is to unwrap, texture and make some materials to really bring them to life.