For our Winter Holiday '14 events, we wanted to try something more interactive than the passive environment spawns we had done in the past. Our lead designer and world events veteran, Luke, wanted to create an alert (timed, zone-based competition where the winner captures the continent) based on collecting pickups and returning them to your drop-off point. Bigger hauls had multipliers attached to them, encouraging players to risk it all for a potential payoff.
My part in the event was creating a playspace for the game that would hook into the alert. I threw around a few 'stampable' construction site ideas before the "biolab repurposed into a snowglobe" idea came about. The intention was to let these domes stay dormant until the alert started, where the spawns would activate and the point score of all domes would be tallied up per empire as the alert progressed.
The scale, flow and gameplay inside the dome was different than the typical game, playing more like a big arena shooter due to the lack of static capture points. The number of these expected to be placed on our snow continent, Esamir, made radial symmetry a necessity for quick implementation and balance. The dome's interior structures included the central four-story building and LOS-breaking 'spoke' buildings that separated the spawn rooms. Flow was intended to either push most players into the central building and loop around the first two floors, or press your luck to the 3rd and bail out of the 4th floor cupola, down to the drop-off point. The amount of chaos and point denial the jumpjet-equipped Light Assault class could cause here was anticipated, so a constant struggle to control the high ground on the roof was expected.
Due to time constraints and the subsequent scaling back of the Winter event, the Thunderglobe never made it past prototype & internal testing for the 2014 events.