BOILING POINT

The initial challenge was deciding how to incorporate the wind tunnel into the map in a way that would require players to be constantly flowing back into the chamber containing it. The solution to this? The wind tunnel would become a nexus of pathing options taking you to all the rooms on the map. I spent a week whiteboxing my first prototype.

The wind tunnel became a cylindrical chamber at the centre of the map, occupying a three floor space (ground, 1st and 2nd floors). The ground floor of this chamber hosts a colossal vent that expels steam from the geothermal power process. The intention was for players to use the vent for transitioning between floors in a free-flowing manner that didn't require stairs or conventional gravity lifts, instead players would glide between floors as they saw fit.

Surrounding the chamber were four rooms, each a quarter segment of a greater cylinder and each room had one connection to the middle chamber with another to an adjacent room. In order to stop players from rotating around the edge of the map and never entering the middle, I made sure that there was no way to do a full circuit of the outer rooms.

I tested the map for 3 weeks, altering it as feedback arose, but three major criticisms arose that made it clear that I needed to drastically redesign the map.

The surrounding rooms were too similar and it was confusing.

Players often felt trapped in one room.

Players were being "railroaded" into specific path choices.

I deleted the original whitebox and started again (I wouldn't repeat that, probably).

Whitebox 2.0 was the early stages of what would become Boiling Point.

I removed an outer room and replaced it with a huge exterior section which while playing the role of a fourth room, offered unique atmosphere and geometry from other sections of the map which helped players differentiate it from other sections. Windows through the centre of the map keep it from being too segmented.

The outer wall of the segment directly opposing it was cut away and in its stead I created a cave system complete with water ripple light reflections on the ceiling. This chamber went on to be textured with concrete as opposed to the wood in other sections. A living space was added with windows that look out over the lake, which became the third room. The final section generates electricity with steam powered pistons and contains narrow platforms above a death pit, my intention for the final version is for these to move up and down during gameplay.

These changes were tested over a week to massively improved response. Player's knew how to navigate the map and they appreciated the structural variety of the rooms. From here I started applying visuals.

Thematically, the setting and architecture seen on Boiling Point are wholly original designs, a visualization of my own ideas for a game environment. The steel and wood materials are borrowed from World War 2 era weaponry while the cylindrical shaping was inspired by the chamber with the enormous tentacle from Half Life. The site is a geothermally powered farming residence located within a hot spring valley.

I had to temporarily stop working on Boiling Point while in the process of relocating to Windsor but I hope to recommence development soon.

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