Rude Awakening

Wide overhead view of the complete Rude Awakening graybox with a circular central arena, long corridors, side rooms, and an elevator shaft — The current traversable blockout. Doors, encounter logic, and final environmental detail are still in development.

01 / Overview

A combat level built around changing pressure

Rude Awakening begins as an escape from a sealed barracks and expands into a sequence of distinct encounter spaces. The design alternates between combat pressure, movement challenges, backtracking, and environmental interaction so each area changes what the player is paying attention to.

The current milestone establishes the complete route, room scale, sightlines, and major spatial transitions while moving the central arena into its first Blueprint logic pass. The set-piece graph is active work, not a finished implementation.

Escalate

Open with constrained discovery, then widen into a sustained central encounter with resources, pressure, and more than one way forward.

Reset

Use the laser hall as a deliberate breath between action peaks, shifting the challenge from target priority to patience and movement timing.

Recontextualize

Return the player through familiar space after collecting a keycard, changing previously safe rooms through enemy spawns and new access.

02 / Level Flow

One route, four shifting verbs

The plan uses a mostly readable critical path while varying the player's immediate goal at each stage.

Discover. Read the opening room, reveal the concealed exit, and cross into the first threat.
Survive or investigate. Hold the central arena until the encounter resolves, or locate the hidden control route that shuts the spawning down early.
Traverse. Move through a laser-grid corridor that rewards crouching, sliding, observation, and timing.
Retrieve and escape. Secure the keycard, fight back through a changed space, disable the firewall, and reach the elevator reveal.

Top-down Rude Awakening level-flow diagram showing the start below a circular arena, branching rooms to the left, a narrow route upward, and the end at the top — Early route diagram used to establish the start-to-end path, arena relationship, backtrack, checkpoints, and final transition.

03 / Blockout

Testing scale before scripting

The first pass prioritized a playable route over visual finish. Open thresholds stand in for doors, ceilings are intentionally absent, and large simple forms make circulation easy to evaluate in-editor and in Play In Editor.

The circular arena became the primary scale check: its outer ring needs to support sustained movement around the central core while still connecting clearly to the opening room, side routes, and later corridor network.

Early Unreal Engine graybox focused on the circular central arena and the first adjoining rooms — **Early pass.** The central arena and starting connections establish the level's core proportions.

Later Unreal Engine graybox showing the central arena connected to the broader level route and elevator shaft — **Route pass.** The full path connects the arena, traversal spaces, backtrack, firewall approach, and elevator.

04 / Set Piece

A substantial area with its own orchestration

Blueprint: Set Piece is my label for a substantial level area that owns significant logic and has many smaller moving parts to coordinate. For the main-core arena, that means treating the space as more than geometry: entry recognition, gates, timing, damage, and encounter progression all need to operate as one authored sequence.

The graph below is the initial BP_MainCore pass. It establishes the first orchestration paths, but both the Blueprint and the set piece are still incomplete and will continue changing through implementation and playtesting.

Wide Unreal Engine BP MainCore Blueprint graph with several connected logic groups for the main-core arena set piece — The whole graph represents one **Blueprint: Set Piece**. Its separate clusters coordinate the smaller responsibilities that make the arena behave as a substantial gameplay area. Open full resolution ↗

First-person Unreal Engine playtest view across the circular main-core arena and its central opening — Play In Editor view across the main-core arena. Shooting, movement, hands, weapon, and controls come from the Bodycam FPS template; the arena and its content design do not.

Geometry / Modeling Mode

One authored mesh, not four stacked pieces

The circular arena surface is a single mesh built to the shape required by the encounter.

Shape the working geometry into the intended arena profile.
Use Boolean operations to cut the required openings.
Use Unreal's modeling tools to consolidate four working pieces into one mesh.

Backup geometry existed during the process, then was removed once the consolidated asset became the working version. Perforce changelist #103 preserves that cleanup point.

Perforce submitted changelist history from 93 through 109 for Rude Awakening development, with changelist 103 highlighted — Perforce / Submitted Work

Versioned iteration, including the cleanup

Changelists 93–109 capture the initial set-piece work as it moved through environmental damage, security-gate sequencing, player-entry recognition, survival timing, `BP_MainCore` logic, cleanup, and polish.

The highlighted changelist **#103** records the cleanup after the backup geometry was deleted. Open full resolution ↗

05 / Process

Design walkthrough and blockout session

These videos document the current design pass and the level's initial construction. They are process records, not a finished gameplay showcase.

Audio note: Turn your volume down before playing. The microphone captured more quiet-room gain than expected, causing a few specific words to peak noticeably.

The current design plan explained section by section, including encounter intent, progression logic, and implementation questions.

A real-time look at the first graybox pass. Audio is muted by default because the construction process is the focus.

Current Work

From first-pass logic to a complete set piece

The blockout and BP_MainCore graph are both in active development. The current Blueprint is an initial pass proving the first arena responsibilities; it is not the final graph or a finished encounter.

Complete and simplify the main-core set-piece logic
Validate player-entry, gate sequencing, survival timing, and environmental damage
Connect encounter completion and alternate shutdown states to level progression
Laser timing, movement checks, hazards, and damage feedback
Firewall and elevator state transitions
Playtesting for scale, navigation, encounter duration, and resource placement