UT Deathmatch - Medium, 4-8 players. Ancient Medieval Arena. Released (Blito3 300k contest 2006 map pack) December 23, 2006.
Map #1 for Blito3's 300K Mapping contest, held at Unreal Playground Nov-Dec 2006. After spending so much time buried in SimpleX, then project re-starts for a TDC map development, the massive TempleOfDragons, CTF TrekWooT, FallenAngel and yet ANOTHER round of Orions Curse Assault, I think I snapped a bit! I really needed a break from these complex projects.
The 300k contest seemed like a good way to blow off some steam and accomplish something in the short term! Sounds like some kind of therapy, lol! Dante's Arena is a smallish but open arena set in a psuedo gothic marble temple of sorts, located somewhere in the UT universe. Sorry, but that's all I got :P It's a bit colorful and pristene, but looks rather nice IMO. Couldn't afford any arches, but there are a few pillars. Gameplay is okay, 8 players max, I like it with 4 inhumans. Just regular old run and gun.
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, but cryypz aalmighty it is freakin' hard to make a 300k map that doesn't look like a PoC! 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.
Music is UnWorld2 from the game Unreal Tournament.