Grand Falls
Grand Falls was a 4.5x7km modded map for Squad made using Unreal Engine 4. It was a collaboration between myself and “Gunslinger”.
For Grand Falls, I knew that I wanted to make a map situated in Canada, so I scoured Google Maps for an area that naturally lent itself to having a good dispersion of POIs in a way that was needed to facilitate good Squad gameplay.
We landed on Grand Falls, New Brunswick. We used publically sourced heightmap data to bring into the engine as a landscape, then created a decal made of a satellite image of the area which we projected onto the landscape to guide our efforts.
Our first step was to plan our where our POIs would go, and what they would be. We wanted to ensure there was a good distribution of POIs across the map for replayability, and ensure we could make them flow well into adjacent POIs.
One of our main goals was to bring the North American biome to life in Squad, to this day the North American biome doesn’t technically exist as any unique assets or textures were done by modders and brought into the base game.
Gunslinger helped by pulling Unreal Marketplace assets and creating our own unique buildings for the map such as hotels, restaurants, sports arena, train stations, etc.
In the end we absolutely nailed the feeling of North America - but the required diversity of assets meant that we struggled with performance, especially when they were tightly packed in the urban areas.
Ultimately I’m incredibly proud of the results we achieved and extremely grateful for Gunslinger’s help. We made a beautiful-looking map that would have played out well but the performance issues were too severe for us to feel like we could salvage the map and we quickly moved on to other efforts. The Steam workshop page remains up but I doubt we’ll ever revive it. It was a good learning opportunity though.
