Concept and floorplan: The origin of this map is Morbias, one of the official maps that came with the game. I liked the action, the pace, the crazy fights with rockets. I thought to myself "Can I expand this map?". The first idea was to add a second floor and two more lifts. It's basically cloning the original floorplan, making a second floor and rotating it 90 degrees to have lifts in all all four cardinal directions. I also had the idea of making two versions of the same map, one for day time and another for night time. From there I went even further and decided to have both maps in one, linking the two with portals.

Another idea for my map came from another default map: Fractal. It's a circular arena much like Morbias, but the middle of it has a trap door that opens when players fire at some activation panels on the floor. Over the trap there is a shield belt and if the player falls, they cross a portal that goes back to the top of the same area, where lightning kills the player that just fell through. That gave me the idea of making the middle of the arena a trap. Which type of trap? I didn't want a trap door. I opted for a more straight forward approach and decided to to go for a breakable glass floor. The glass breaks with any weapon fire and also allows the player to see what is under it: a pool of acid or boiling water.

Textures: Both arenas are symmetric. To avoid the confusion I made sure that the textures between each are different. Both are concrete and steel, but with different flavours. The night side has darker textures, whereas the day side has lighter textures. The lightsource textures are also different because the light colors are different.

The only custom textures are the signs. I searched for warning signs and used them. They are very high resolution, 2k x 2k compared to the standard that is 256 pixels for UT. With today's computer having many GBs of RAM I didn't think that a handful 2k x 2x textures would hurt the performance.

Lighting: I choose to not use the same light colors for both day and night. Each side has different light's colors to reflect that their atmosphere is also different from day to night and vice-versa. The dominant contrast is between blue and yellow. That choice was based on the lightsource textures themselves. I didn't want to create new textures and adapted to the already existing material. For the pipes under the floor I went for orange to give it contrast and highlight the pipes. The same orange is used on the chemical tanks in the side rooms for the same reason.

The saturation of all lights is low. Oversaturated lights create a disco party effect.

The light from the pool in the middle has a very large radius to simulate the light's refraction when we have liquids.

Architecture: To distinguish both arenas from each other I decided to use different themes for each. Night time has green acid, whereas daytime has boiling water. It was all but a random choice, no real reason behind acid for night and boiling water for day. There are multiple other ideas that could have worked just as well: electrified pits, deadly fans, lava, etc. It's all a matter of theme and taste here. Apart from that the pipes and tanks have the same textures.

The decision to place the pipes under the floor was to break up the flatness of large surfaces. I wanted to have some detail on the floor and the solution was to have pipes. Thick pipes to match the intended theme. I didn't want to clutter the walls with pipes and decided to leave them free of too much geometric detail.

I did use trim in the main arena, but decided to use a slanted step as trim for the holes where I placed the pipes. I can't say that it was a good decision. There is a grate over the pipes but there is no trim texture at the edges. For some weird reason I wanted to be original and using some steel trim there felt unoriginal. I remember thinking on a black and yellow stripped pattern to use as trim around the grates but it felt too strong, too detached from the rest of the textures. I went for a pure geometric solution with the same texture as the surrounding floor in an attempt to be original by using a pure geometric solution. I also made the mistake of making the "geometric trim" too deep, being more or less half the height of a UT player.

To add some more geometric detail I decided to place some sky lights on each floor in the main arena. It was also a way to reuse the light from the upper floor on the floor right under it and some nice touch. I think that I made a mistake with those sky lights however. Because they have an unbreakable glass, which contradicts the glass trap in the middle. I remember that I went for glass because I didn't want grates casting shadows below.

The reason for the "S-shaped" corridors that connect one arena with the other is rendering. UT cannot handle too many triangles and to avoid having portals that connect one arena to the other with a straight line of sight I decided to make them "S-shaped" to workaround it. There was also a risk of having the portal face itself, which would create an infinite loop and just blow up the game's rendering engine.

Trap: The glass floor in the middle is a trap. I placed valuable items there. Right over it there is a steel beam that is another trap. With heal vials to make sound when a player is going there for another valuable item.

Audio: For the pools I used some boiling water sound effect from a free sound resource. The other pool has some frying food sound effect from the same site. Those were the closest sound effects that I could think of. At the lower floor corridors I placed a fan right in the middle of the corridor with an appropriate sound effect from the game's own sound effect library. When the glass breaks there is also the appropriate sound effect from the game's own library.

All the lifts have the same sound effects. For this type of map I thought that in the middle of the action players wouldn't have much time to distinguish between different lift sound effects.

VFX: I did try to place some smoke effects when the glass breaks and the pieces fall in the pool. I had to remove due to some crashes related to the 3rd party script that I was using to emit smoke particles.

BSP: This map is extremely low poly. It didn't make any sense to aim for higher triangle count for such a simplistic arena. I can tell you that the BSP was a nightmare. A living hell with problematic collision and rendering caused by only God knows what is wrong with this game's engine.

Spawn points: I decided to place them all in the side rooms. There are no spawn points in the main arenas. I thought this would prevent spawn kill as much as possible, giving players a chance by not spawning in the middle of the action. I also wanted to make sure that every player spawned as far away as possible from the traps. Better say, from the valuable items on the traps.

Fractal and Morbias for reference