Quartz Ridge Camp
Xander Clauss
MMOFPS & Open World Level Design

POIs

During my time working on Reaper Actual, I implemented nearly all of the supporting POIs outside of the game's two major areas, KAM Airport and the city of Alaria. For KAM, this was five large supporting warehouse areas, and for Alaria it meant the city's industrial district.These interstitial POIs included player home bases, nine different villages, several smaller housing developments, parks, rural farmsteads, parking lots, and more. While these areas lacked unique hero or centerpiece props, they were crucial in quickly adding a significant amount of playspace, loot locations, mission seeding areas, and playerbase anchoring at a fraction of the development and framerate cost.

Blockouts
Outside of the major handcrafted POIs such as the airport and city, we leaned more on reusable multi-purpose buildings to both fill out the map, provide buffer areas for player bases, and save development time. I was responsible for creating the majority of these blockouts ranging from small houses, to gas stations, to large Amazon-style fulfillment centers. I also got to create some more handcrafted "centerpiece" blockouts for POIs along critical paths, such as the cargo ship's five-story bridge, the marina's boathouse, the hotel's exterior pool + cabana area, as well as a custom strip mall/public parking lot.
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Smaller buildings were intended to be used in conjunction with each other sitting atop a lot or concrete pad, while larger buildings were used typically once or twice in the POI to be a central destination for missions created by the game's AI brain.
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Small buildings were generally one or two rooms, existing mostly to provide shelter from exterior forces as well as some interior cover for close quarters combat. They also acted as loot nucleation sites to give players a reason to explore regardless of their threat level.
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Medium and large buildings had additional interior rooms for additional complexity that missions required, such as kill/object quest targets, thematic locations for different loot types (bathrooms, kitchens, etc for example), and act as a focus point for a POI.
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Massive buildings such as the Cargo Ship Bridge or the Fulfillment Center were intended more as 'dungeons' that required approach planning from the player- hardened exteriors that may require keys or codes to get into, difficult interior routes that force the player through multiple combat situations, and high value loot/quest target rooms that made the challenge worth the trouble.



























