Being a class-based combat game, PHIGHTING!'s gameplay is centered around a wide variety of different characters with different mechanics and play-styles. To make every class feel viable, designing maps was a lesson in detail and versatility. Good levels required that every character has potential, but no play style is supremely advantageous.

The Iron Cafe is one of PHIGHTING!'s longest-standing maps. It's based on a 2008 Roblox game of the same title, and depicts a rooftop cafe at night. Players spawn in the building corners of the rooftop apparatus and make their way to the center building, where the control point lies centered around a performance stage complete with a microphone.

As seen in gameplay.

In a similar fashion to Marvel Rivals, PHIGHTING!'s cast primarily consists of melee attackers who can't perform well outside of close range. For all characters, staying in close range is not only optimal, but is encouraged by the game's objective: stay on the point in the center of the map for as long as possible with as many people on your team as possible.

Iron Cafe is unanimously considered the best map in PHIGHTING! by the community because it exemplifies this core design philosophy. It encourages players to stay in short range of each other, and guides player activity towards the center of the map, all without making longer range characters feel claustrophobic.

Raven Rock is the second map entry designed by me, and takes a radical departure from the themes of Iron Cafe. This time inspired by the 2014 Roblox place of the same name, Raven Rock is a sleepy castle town hanging off of a cliff. 

As of writing, it is one of the only two PHIGHTING! maps with the Escort objective. 

As seen in gameplay.

In an Escort map, players fight to push a cart towards their opponents' spawn. It behaves very similarly to the Push game mode from Overwatch 2. This is a far cry from other game modes in PHIGHTING!, and presents unique challenges; How do I create a payload route that doesn't make the map feel too large? How do I design choke points to prevent one-sided games?

Many of the inherent design challenges that came with designing Raven Rock are a byproduct of the already-established game mode. In order to combat the challenges that come with a larger map, I designed the payload path to zig-zag in an M shape across the map, minimizing distance from the players' spawns at any given point. The map is also heavily segmented, having large walls separate significant portions of the map so as to mitigate advantages for ranged classes.

Keeping Raven Rock an engaging and rewarding map while maintaining it's identity and unique mechanics was a challenge and required a careful balance. In order to perfect the map's feel, I hosted multiple playtesting sessions with various members of the PHIGHTING! community to get a feel for what players want. 

Raven Rock went through multiple iterations in an attempt to optimize the usage of space in the level. Many versions were either too big, too small, had too many sight lines, or had too many corridors.