Warsow
About this game
Warsow is a completely free first-person shooter with a strong focus on competitive play and esports.Set in a futuristic world and boasting a unique cartoonish look, the game avoids cliched gore and violence typically found in games of the genre.
Instead Warsow puts strong emphasis on what we think FPS games should be about: speed, movement, control, aim and competitive ethics.
Release date: July 2012 (for version 1.0)
Engine: QFusion
Warsow 1.0 Official Trailer
My role
I did mostly level design work in this amateur team, designing the first official deathmap level of the game, WDM1.I designed the original layout for this but someone else reworked the visuals before its first release, and other persons refined the level mostly for the competitive aspect. Different persons continued to make this evolve over the years after its first release.
I also helped on other levels for more minor things (detailling, texturing, optimization), and even for other content like weapon models back in the days.
Although this game was developed by a team doing this as a hobby and I worked on this before starting my level design career, this was my first experience collaborating on a bigger project, with an engine continuing to evolve for this project, a team full of specialists, whether it was programmers, level artists, sound designers, system designers, etc...
More info about my work
I joined the team a little bit before starting my level designer professional career when they were trying to put together an early beta version of this competitive multiplayer quake-like game.Although I was not particularly a fan of Quake-like multiplayer games, I love games focused on movement and I knew a couple of persons working in this team, so I started working on a level to see if I could put something together for them.
After I designed the layout for this first deathmatch level, WDM1 later named "flew over", someone more experienced in competitive first person games did some changes mostly to item pickups placements and small tweaks to the geometry for sightlines, while another person reworked the visuals of the level (textures, details, lighting) as we were trying to find the art direction for this game.
This level continued to be updated over time by different persons, either to continue adapting the visuals or to tweak the gameplay experience, and the game continued evolving quite a lot over the years with the team also changing.
The level design had to support as much as possible the quite powerful movement and trickjumps possibilities of this game, with a wall jump, a dash/dodge and all the classic quake movements like bunny hopping or rocket jumping for example.
I also helped here and there on other levels or on other models and textures and started another level which never got finished, but as I started working in the video games industry, I didn't have much time to continue this work.
I had to learn how to use GtkRadiant level editor to work on this, and this was my first experience working in a complete team made of programmers, system designers, artists, audio designers, etc...
Here is a match of 2v2 on WDM1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwTmww4N-2k
Screenshots
