Controlled Chaos of the Arena

Designing Gator Hucker's Environment

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When designing an arena for a fast-paced brawler like Gator Hucker, it’s not just about making things look cool-- it's also about making it work for the players. Every wall, ramp, ledge, and obstacle influences how the players navigate the environment and fight. Here's how we create an arena that's fun to play in with our fast-paced, chaotic gameplay!

Designing the Arena

When first designing potential maps for the game, we modeled block outs of concept arenas. Inspiration was taken from various sources, including Rome’s Colosseum, zoo exhibits, and playground parks. These concepts varied, but prioritized movement between levels and areas.

Early arena concept block out, which influenced future arena design work

The two images on the right are examples of this process.

We liked the alligator imagery of the first design and the vertical variety of the second. After reviewing what parts of the block outs we liked (potential for modularity and height variety), we used the second block out as our basis to move forward.

This early block out is a single model and would be difficult to modify, but it informed our development of a modular toolkit, a set of models that snap together to create larger pieces. This toolkit allows us to rearrange and modify pieces in the environment.

Early toolkit for arena design

With this we can easily introduce new or change existing pieces while ensuring they will connect to each other. These pieces are modeled in Maya, then imported into Unreal Engine.

Prototype & Playtesting

Early design of the arena in engine

After completing a rough version of the toolkit, we tested it out in engine and made changes. This is where having a modular toolkit helps. We model, test, analyze, revise, repeat.

We have to keep player behavior in mind when designing the arena as well. Some player behaviors were planned for initially while others were not. For instance, we anticipated that people would attempt to escape the map and prevented it with colliders. We also knew people would utilize the ramps and differeng vertical levels while playing. However, behaviors like climbing the central tower were more common than we expected, and players wanted more variation in verticality than we planned for. We are working on introducing changes to the environment that will address this.

Recent revised arena with greyboxed changes

Our environment is constantly changing and growing to help improve player experience. We're excited to show off more of what we've been working on in future blog posts (and in-game)!