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JAMIE MORRISON
GAME & LEVEL DESIGNER
EA SPORTS WRC
EA SPORTS WRC was created as the successor to Dirt Rally 2.0 and presented the challenge of not only working with the official WRC license product but a new game engine for the team in Unreal Engine 4. I worked on the project from its inception in January 2020 all the way through to its release in November 2023. Here I detail my work on the project and some insight into how level design fits into this exciting and unique racing genre.
Level Design and Rally
Level Design is an expertise that can adapt to many genres. Rally games present a unique challenge for a level designer to create compelling stages that players will race over and over again to shave milliseconds off their time. Several aspects need to be taken into account and iterated on throughout a stages creation.
When considering design choices for each of the rally stages you must not only consider the road choice itself but all the track aspects such as camber, undulation, width, track flow, roadside objects, foliage etc. These can vary widely from location to location and give each track its memorable characteristics that players will recognise as soon as they set off.
Stage Creation Pillars
Level Design Process
The Level Design process remains fairly similar to other genres as it begins with stage research, moves into the whitebox phase and gets iterated and reviewed throughout a high level pass where about 80% of the track work gets done followed by a finer low level pass where the remaining, and the most crucial 20%, of the finer detail gets added. The created stage is then split up into 12 routes (full stage forward/reverse then halved and quartered forward/reverse). Once this process is finished the track is then delivered to the art team.
Once art have completed the majority of their tasks, level design then return to the track and add in several gameplay relevant additions such as crowd, rally marshals and their cars, reset lines for cars leaving the track boundaries and time penalty lines to prevent corner cutting along with any feedback to the artists for changes.
Post Art Tasks
Locations
During the project I was tasked with creating several rally locations based on real world WRC stages. Details of the locations and design choices can be found below.
Project Retrospective
Being given the opportunity to work on a project of this scale from start to finish has taught me so much about game development as a whole and not just the place level design fits into it. Personally I developed both technically and socially throughout, and having the game be received well by fans was also extremely motivating.
Having the responsibility of final design choices on these full rally locations brought with it challenges but allowed me to work on my own decision making and how to translate my ideas clearly to the rest of the team. Communicating back and forth with the LD and wider team helped elevate these locations to be truly unique and learning from other departments also allowed for my technical vocabulary to expand too.
With the game moving into a service plan I am creating more tracks and continuing to learn as much as I can.