Titanfall 2 Modding

With thousands of hours of time played at the highest level of Titanfall I learned the ins and outs of what players are looking for in a map in a game like Titanfall; both for fun, and for competition. Balancing these two design philosophies is something that developers struggle with on any title, but with the nature of Titanfall’s unique movement system and with the presence of massive pilotable robots called Titans; Titanfall presents a very difficult array of design constraints to follow when walking the line between competitive and casual play.
With that in mind when the modding community found a way to slightly alter maps I immediately began making changes to maps that I’ve always wanted to explore. It’s important to note that this boot-leg “forge” mode has extremely harsh restrictions such as a very limited set of spawnable props that differs between maps, the inability to alter any existing map geometry, and a hard limit on how many props can be spawned before the game becomes unstable and crashes.
Learning to navigate these creative restraints while still putting out maps that players enjoy was an incredibly helpful learning experience that taught me key lessons in game design that I’ve carried forward into my current projects.

Flipside Map Mod

In the Titanfall 2 campaign there is a famous map called “Effect And Cause” in this map you can switch between two points in time at the press of a button. The developers of this mission accomplished this by having two versions of the map; one in the past, one in the present which are both loaded at all times while traversing the level. If you press the time travel button it will change your current position to the relative position within the other timeline. This gives a fantastic and smooth illusion of time travel.

Flipside is a modded mode that takes advantage of the fact that the Titanfall map “Glitch” is completely symmetrical to achieve a very similar feat within titanfall’s multiplayer by teleporting players between the two sides around the center point of the map. I collaborated with the modder who coded the game mode itself and made significant changes to the map to really sell the illusion of time travel.

The smoke in the center of the map is to sell the illusion that there are two full versions of the map by automatically teleporting the player as they pass through. I came up with this concept and worked with the modder that made the mode to implement this feature alongside my map changes.

Linked below is a short overview by “Iniquity Games”, a full match played by “Macro”, and a non modified match of Glitch played by “JerDude” to showcase how the map looks and plays normally without my alterations. For context when you hear them referring to “Zia” that’s the name I go by in games, this was first played and streamed live on twitch and they were asking a handful of questions about how things were made during the stream.

Overview by Iniquity

Gameplay Of The Map Without Mods

Gameplay By Prominent Youtuber MacroLive!

How I Did It

A custom Titanfall Modding tool called “Icepick”
A custom level converter tool which ports from Icepick to titanfall’s modded server’s called “Northstar”.