Day 9-12: Unreal 3 11-Day Mapping Challenge

DAY 9-12

SOUND, FX, LIGHTING & FINAL TOUCHES

I've spent the last 3 days working on sound fx, adding music, navigation paths for bots and tweaking the hell out of the lighting and testing for errors.

One of the most important steps in releasing a map is getting everything ready to go. Bringing every aspect of the map up to a point where you can let go of it.

Along the way I ran into a few problems, where I had to back track to 2 other previous versions. My worldinfo property wouldn’t work and I wasn’t able to add that to my map. That set me back a few hours.

The importance of saving cannot be underestimated. I currently ran up to 25 different saves for this small map. So that’s about 2 versions per day. Which I could have saved more often and take my own advice.

Below are some of the screenshots I took along the way, which weren't many. During the final stages, there is more tweaking and fixing then any visual differences.

Releasing a beta is very important. It lets others see your map and you get to step away from your creation and let go of the ownership. Important step to stop judging your own work and let the community decide.

I am excited to release this finally. I wasn’t sure if it was going to come out like it did, but it exceeded my own expectations. I am just happy that I finished a map in 11 days.

Now having 2 maps under my belt for Unreal 3, will allow me to make the next one even better.

Things I learned:

Importing custom content
Matinee
Beginner and Advanced Texture Creation
Normal Maps
Setting Up Sound Cues
Terrain Generation

After I get some feedback from the community I will take notes and release a final version along with PS3 version if I am able to use custom content for PS3, which I don’t know yet.

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