DM - ICE DRAGON RIDER

Ice Dragon Rider is to the Unreal engine what Beggar’s Canyon is to the Jedi Knight engine. I pushed the limits as far as they could go, creating an extremely beautiful and complex death-match design, rivaling in size many of the singe-player maps designed by Human Head for their game.

This map took over two months of tireless work until its finished stage. Ice Dragon Rider was a personal challenge. I wanted to make the most amazing map for the original Unreal engine to date, and I believe that I succeeded in doing so. Unfortunately, it used some of the Rune resources included in the expansion “Halls of Valhalla”, and thus its audience was very limited compared to the original Rune, and even more so compared to the original Unreal. Still, this work is a source of pride—truly a must see design.

The game-flow is carefully prepared to handle several players at the same time; otherwise the sheer size of the map can be overwhelming. Despite this, even small loads can quickly find each other thanks to the many open view and scenic locations. The vertical game-play design I strived to convey in my work reaches its pinnacle in this level. It is possible to move up and down as quickly as one can move horizontally: a very demanding and dangerous map for unskilled players.

Even with the amount of detail and complexity, I again managed to keep an excellent performance thanks to clever use of brushes, limiting of the poly-count in scenic views and other tricks of the trade. By far, it is my favorite level-design work to date.