Madagascar City

Madagascar City was the second level I developed on Uncharted 4 and probably had the most development time out of all the other maps. When I started my early sketch work of the level, the powers that be informed me that Madagascar City would be part of the multiplayer reveal and was going be one of the maps that would be part of the public beta. What this meant was that Mad-City was going to be the testbed for all our new gameplay ideas and the performance benchmark on whether or not we could hit our 60FPS bar (single player is at 30FPS). To make things even more challenging for everyone, the level had to be done six months before the full game shipped for the public beta, months before the game’s code would be locked.

I got to explore a lot of ideas on this maps. It was the first level where I started playing with how the slides would work, and if slides could combine with rope swings for multiple routes. I also got the chance to script some unique gameplay ideas like exploding cars and statues that could topple over from explosions and become low-cover.

A very special thanks to Waylon Brinck and Andrew Maximov who were the champions who helped figure out how to get this level to run in performance. Believe me; it wasn’t easy.