Saturday, February 20, 2010

a look at catchment



My last seven months or so have been spent developing content for Orion, an ambitious total conversion for HL2's Orange Box Engine. The mod itself is a fast-paced multiplayer game set on the fictional world of Orion, which is a fertile world that is reminiscent of an infant-earth. The multiple maps in the soon-to-be-released 1.2 patch will feature a number of locations across the planet; all of them a scene of the great conflict between the humans looking to Orion as a chance to escape their used-up, wasted planet earth, and the alien Altair who are similarly trying to escape a ruined home world.

The map I spent my time working on is called Catchment, and it takes place inside a water purification plant for one of the larger colonies on Orion. The Altair know that if they can disrupt or destroy this facility, they can effectively make refugees of dozens of thousands of humans and offset the human military's strategy in a major way.



The team spawns and flags are located at 3 and 9 o clock, and 12 and 6 o clock respectively. Each team has two routes out of their spawn: one main exit and one shortcut to their own flag which can be shut down via a clever keypad hack. Each flag room is accessible through two side entrances, or a shorter entrance that is only available to the assault class. A few pipes are placed higher up to let the assault class get a height advantage. There are choke points for support class defenders and more defensible positions for snipers to do their thing.

I hope you guys like it!


































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