Enterprise Station 🛸
What do you do if you’re adrift in the void of space and you’re bored of completing monotonous tasks over and over again? Commit murder, of course!
This level features my take on a level designed for Murder Mystery. It is inspired by the Skeld map from Among Us and tries to solve the biggest issue with Murder Mystery through clever level design.
What is that issue?
If a player is an ‘innocent’ in Murder Mystery they don’t really have anything they can do except for hiding to the best of their capability. This is incredibly boring in practice and leads to a much lower player count than the game could actually have.
This map tries to change that by adding tasks that the player completes in order to achieve a common goal. Namely, once the players have completed enough tasks, the murderer’s identity is revealed to all. Furthermore, they reward the player with some gold that they can spend on interactable objects throughout the map.
There are a few other twists to the map to further add to the gameplay.
Interactable objects that the player can spend gold on to block off sections of the map temporarily, kill people in a certain area, or apply a status effect for a short period of time.
Vents that can be used by the murderer (on cooldown) at the cost of gold in order to quickly place yourself in a strategic position. Be wary of corners, innocents!
One-way doors add a sense of direction and aid in giving flow to the map.
Speed pads are placed on the map to help the player get around slightly quicker in the hallways.
View the map!
I added an embed to a Sketchfab page of the map, feel free to roam around the map and explore.
Tip: Go into full-screen mode, the controls are: Right-click to move, left-click to rotate, scroll to zoom.
The map layout with a legend to explain the level design further.
Central room.
Engine room.
An example of a one way door.
Fuel tank room.
Video showcase
This is a video tour of the layout of the map.
Improving the map.
Due to the fact that Murder Mystery is such a complex game mode I wasn’t able to host games myself, instead, I opted to use community and HPC feedback to improve my map. I found things that were lacking and redesigned the layout in order to improve the level design.
Things I improved include:
Moving the engine room to the middle, make players have to walk through it to give them an incentive to enter the room.
Adding Speed Pads. The map was quite big and it took 26 seconds to get from one corner of the map to the other, adding speed pads brought that down to 19 seconds.
Adding more objects. Some rooms and hallways were far too open, allowing you to very easily see what would happen on the other side of the hallway.
Moving tasks around in order to help the flow of the game.
Initial sketch of the layout on paper.
Greymap of the first design.