THE HEADLIGHTS
ABOUT
The Headlights is a Hunters VS Hunted Arma III custom scenario. Hunters have a limited selection of unarmed vehicles to choose from and using their night vision and team work must hunt down and run over the hunted in the pitch black dark of a military airbase. The Hunted, armed only with a flashlight to begin with must carefully navigate the base on foot, scavenging for the randomly spwaning mines, RPGs and smoke grenades to bring the fight to the Hunters by laying traps, ambushes and tricking the Hunters into falling prey to Arma's funky physics.
THE DESIGN
KEY SKILLS
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Competative Level Design
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SQF Scripting
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UX Design
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Balancing
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Professional Tools
INITIAL IDEA
The idea came when I was playing an Arma III scenario with my mates that had a spawn area that you couldn't be killed in. This meant that if you were run over your body got sent flying, which was incredibly funny, it soon became a game of sorts for people to be chased by people in vehicles. So I did what designers do and I took this fun and fleshed it out to make it a proper game, gave both sides goals and gave both sides win conditions from meeting those goals.
GAMEPLAY
The goal and win conditions for hunters was easy, run over and kill all of the other team. To give the hunted team a goal and win conditions was harder but I ended up settling on making their goal to destory the hunter vehicles, but how? I decided that I would have randomly spawning crates of mainly mines and a few RPGs that the hunted would have to scavenge. Making the hunted scavenge to get the tools of their victory forces them to go out and explore the map, rather than hunker down in a building, they are forced to risk being found.
Additionally, everyone in the map is auto-healed intermittently which means that if hunters dont ensure that their prey is dead then all their work may be for nothing. I chose to add this so that the hunted don't get accidently runover and killed rather than being spotted and hunted down, so if they're hit without the hunter actually seeing them and knowing they were there then they're going to get back up. Also it means that once a hunter hits one person they're likely to stay in the area to see the job finished which gives other hunted the oppertunity to come and take out the hunter.
MAP DESIGN
I designed the map to try and strike the balance between giving the hunted enough cover while also giving the hunters enough room to move and hunt. Some changes I had to make to the map as I tested included reducing the amount of enterable buildings and reducing the number of entrances to the buildings left over and I also had to add an area with two planes and barricades between spawn B and the rest of the map as the area previously was too open for the hunted to cross with any confidence. This wasn't an issue with spawn C and the rest of the map as the runway is so dark and fuzzy, even in night vision that the hunted can pass right next to the hunted vehicles and potentially not be seen.
PRODUCTION
The greatest challenge in creating this scenario was having to employ Arma III's SQF (Status Quo Function) scripting language in order to do everything I wanted to do like having hunter vehicles repairable, having set loadouts on spawn, an area restrictor and much more. It was a challenge I enjoyed however and I also enjoyed getting to grips with the editor itself and using the tools used by the game developers themselves.