Building Battlefronts: a battle royale in the sands of Rajasthan

Every studio has one project that taught it the most. For us, that's Battlefronts.

The idea started on a road trip

The Great Fort of Rajasthan — the real ones, like Amber and Kumbhalgarh — do something strange to your sense of scale. Walls that stretch past the horizon. Ramps built for elephants. Battlements positioned so that defenders always have the higher ground. The first time we stood on one and looked out at the desert, someone said: "This is a battle royale map that already has meta-game design baked into it."

That sentence became the whole game.

The fort is the prize

Battle royale maps live or die on their points of interest. We designed the Great Fort as the visual and tactical center of the arena:

• High ground with a cost. The fort walls grant sightlines across the entire map, but the ramp approaches are long, exposed chokepoints. Holding the fort is powerful; getting to it is the risk.
• Verticality without flight. Battlements, siege ramps, and inner courtyards create three tiers of combat without giving players unrestricted vertical mobility.
• Landmarks for callouts. Every siege engine, gateway, and tower is distinct enough that players can call positions naturally — "north ramp", "drum gate" — without a map ping.

The desert is not empty

An arena can't be one landmark and flat sand. Around the fort we built biomes that force rotation decisions: the oasis valley with its river crossing (the only reliable water route), rocky outcrops that break line of sight for smaller skirmishes, and open dune stretches where long-range loadouts dominate. When the zone shrinks, the geometry funnels fights toward the fort exactly the way the real fortresses were designed to channel attackers.

What we'd do differently

Our first pass at the dune terrain used noise-based dunes because they were fast to generate. They looked beautiful in screenshots and played terribly — rolling terrain hides movement at distance and makes gunfights feel random. We rebuilt the open desert with hand-placed dune ridges so that every sightline is a decision someone made.

That was the lesson we keep re-learning: in a shooter, terrain is game design. Beauty is the byproduct, not the goal.

Battlefronts is in active development. The Great Fort of Rajasthan and the Desert Oasis Valley are both viewable as real-time 3D environments in our showcase — orbit them, zoom in, inspect the brushwork.