Hurtworld - Town Events
Here’s a collection of levels I made for Hurtworld’s town event mechanic. Town Events involved a randomly selected “town” anywhere within the open-world map running either a king of the hill style event or an event where loot boxes would spawn at different locations within that level for a period of time and players would fight over them.
It was such a wild time during development that unfortunately I didn’t document a lot of these and I don’t remember every minute detail about them so I figured I would just lump the ones I liked together and point out some things I liked about them here and there.
I really tried to focus on all of them having very different playstyles and mixing playstyles on some of them to let players play to their strengths, whether that be moving tactically, bunny hopping your way to victory, sniping, close-quarters combat, good use of map knowledge, etc. there should be something in there for everyone and if you felt you did best at one specific town you could set your base up near it and have a home turf advantage every time it got selected.
“Hurtworld is an indie multiplayer survival FPS that was developed in Melbourne, Australia by a small team and has now sold over a million copies on Steam alone”
Warehouse
This was the biggest Town I made during development. It consisted of 3 playable stories and a secret sewer entrance and tunnel system. It was made with the Loot Hunt game mode in mind which is why it’s so big. I wanted solo players to be able to sneak in, grab a good amount of loot and escape if they were smart enough. The roof also has a lot of holes in it as we introduced Helicopters into the game and having a couple of your friends land on the roof and provide sniper cover was a cool strategy if you had the resources. As big as it was, the majority of this town still had very fair level design, no spots gave overpowered vision without being an equal amount of vulnerable relative to the advantage they gave.
I also made some modular crates during this level that were set at specific cover heights to help with quick design.
Loading Zone
This one was one of the last towns I made for Hurtworld. At this point I think I had been playing a lot of CSGO and after making a bunch of movement skill style maps I really wanted a pure FPS map. This is a simple design that requires good map knowledge, good team tactics and solid shooting. It has accessible rooves again as I just really like maps that allow me to get on the roof.
I remember it had multiple entrances with different pros and cons. The most accessible and quickest entry points would leave you open with barely any cover but the safe entrances would involve slowly crawling through vents or climbing down a ladder as a trade-off for your safety.
It also had a functional loading dock as we introduced a mechanic that involved loading up a truck with items. You could back your truck up to the loading zone and you’d have to defend it while teammates carried items back to the truck.
Some initial scribbles
Outpost
This was the first town I ever made. When capture the point was the only event mode. From memory, I pulled from old Quake and Halo-style designs where the best routes were the most vulnerable. It’s been designed almost entirely for trying to scurry as best you can to the top of that tower and once you’re up there you have to be extremely vigilant to stay up there. This map was a lot of fun during testing.
At some point during the creation of this map, I think at around 3 am, I decided to use these red lines to test the line of site from different spots versus their vulnerability. Looking back I can barely see what’s coming from where but this did become a standard procedure on all other maps, it was just done more with my eyes than actual geometry.
Servo Wars
This was the second town I made. I wanted it to be a lot bigger with more options for playstyles. I’m a huge fan of Paintball and Training Grounds style maps, so I designed this with a lot of those in mind.
I specifically remember designing this with no thought to any sort of believability, I wanted to design it to just be as fun as possible and I would figure out how I could justify certain things later. I also wanted it to blend into the open world more, so instead of just sticking walls or a fence around it, I used full buildings as the bounds.
This map worked really well for both gun and bow/spear wielders. It had a lot of areas where you could close the gap between you and your enemy by moving through cover. If anyone was holding a point with a long-range weapon, there were always options to close the distance or flank them so even players with guns had to be on their toes.
Bandit Wars
This town was designed to be almost entirely close quarters. In the early game, spears and melee weapons were king, in the later biomes it was all shotguns and SMGs.
It consisted of multiple interiors that all lead into one another. Creating a labyrinth of rooms and paths. Players were heavily punished for missing the jumps between buildings. I really wanted players to visit this map while the events weren’t active and practice the jumps and explore the level so they could find new routes no one had thought of.
At this point it’s probably pretty obvious I like roof top levels.
