Level Design By Tub

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Village

Info

Game: Quake3 Urban Terror
Game Type: Bomb
Players: 8-14
Description: Remote Greek mountain village set around a central cathedral.


Major Releases:

  • 2000-08-05
  • 2001-06-01 (Urban Terror Beta 2.0)
  • 2003-08-09 (Urban Terror Beta 3.0)

Images

Village Image 1 Village Image 2 Village Image 3

Background

Original

Being quite enamoured with counterstrike but disliking the worldcraft editor a great deal, I went out in search of a realistic quake3 mod to ply my trade. Finding nothing released at time time (Urban Warfare didn't count) though a few mods were in production, I started working on a village map with no real mod in mind.

After ditching the first version and nearing the completion of the second, I was leaning towards Urban Terror for a release. They seemed to know what they were doing, with textures, prefabs and an editor def all available for 3rd party mappers. I also contacted Botkiller at that time about including the map in the release, and while he did seem interested nothing came of it.

The Urban Terror release date rolled around and there I was with village all ready to go. And so out it went. First Day. Coincidentally enough my birthday as well.

Urban Terror Beta 2.0

As I was busy working on austria and finishing abbey for beta2 at the time I let legomanser handle the upgrade. In the end it wasn't exactly what I was expecting but the roof access got evened up for both teams, textures got a small facelift, and overall was an improvement.

Urban Terror Beta 3.0

Pre-Beta 3.0 I had spent some time doing a major redesign, but lost it all in a hard drive crash. Looking back on it now that was probably a good thing though as it was even less like the original than the new version turned out.

When Beta 3.0 development came around with the new fangled bomb mode. Village was first on my list to be updated. I had some new ideas on how to update it since my last attempt and was ready to try something quite of the wall.

The first change was improving the visual design and improving the detail. In the end 95%+ of the original was either removed or replaced. The second change was adding the two new bomb areas and a new spawn point. The map was completely designed around bomb mode leaving ts support languishing by the wayside, which given bomb modes current popularity turned out to be bit of a mistake.

The biggest lessons I've learnt from both the beta 3.0 village and abbey updates is that if your going to update a popular map don't change it very much from the original in design. You can never please everyone but you'll only piss off more people if you stray too far from what they already enjoy.

The other lesson I learnt from village2 was that, yes, a map can be to open. There were some really tight sections around the Interpol bomb courtyard but the rest of the map was really too open without enough interesting game play options.

Level Image