UT Deathmatch (DUEL MAP) - Medium, 2-4 players. Ancient Medieval Arena. Released (Blito3 300k contest 2006 map pack) December 23, 2006.
Map #2 for Blito3's 300K Mapping contest, held at Unreal Playground Nov-Dec 2006. After playing the original Dante's Arena for a while I got the idea the layout might be good for a duel map, but as it was, it was bit too big. So I decided to do a quick conversion using MapScale 2.0 to downsize the map by 50%, and see how it played.
After about 2 hours of making the necessary adjustments, I had a nice little 1 vs 1 map. This smaller version is actually more fun than the original, IMO, and good for up to 4 players. The look and feel of the map is pretty much the same as the larger version, but the gameplay is more frantic and the flow is better.
Thanks to TarnationSauce for suggesting the texture change on the wall-light borders.
The map looks a better for that :) Special thanks to Blito3 for having the 300K challenge and to all the other mappers making maps for the comp!! And to Epic for creating UT in the first place! This one took about 6 hours to make altogether. You wouldn't think it could take that long because it's a pretty simple layout and there's not much in the way of deco in there. Having said that, it is actually a lot of work to control the size of everything.
Luckily, for this competition the mappers were allowed to delete the brushes as long as the final submission was 300k or less. In a really small map that is a significant amount of K. So, not surprisingly, many of the maps by skilled mappers are quite good looking while still low poly enough to run on your cell-phone.
The music is the same, UnWorld2 from the game Unreal Tournament.