Saturday, June 28, 2014

Köln is coming (WIP)

Winter is Kölning? Whatever. I'm not paid to write jokes.



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So how did we get here? The story so far, Inspired by a true, um, story:

So this is based on a real location in Köln (Cologne), Germany. Why? Because when I was looking around for inspiration and photos and videos, I came across this video of a tank duel and figured it was a good start, plus several of the buildings are still standing and can be visited in Google street view. So I made a little, um, sketch...

There are the starts for SD offense (bottom) and defense (top) and one objective (X) and where piles of rubble would be. The plan was to have the two teams start on either side of that middle road connecting them, so if either team wanted to cross over, they would be able to take shots at each other, ala de_dust2. In fact, Counterstrike (or even old-school CoD) informed much of the design, so it is less "porous" than the typical Call of Duty map and much more of a corridor/chokepoint map. At least that's the intention. Anyway, I mocked it up:


And built it up a bit more, deciding that the St. Andreas church would fit in nicely:



And yadda, yadda, yadda, I did some more stuff, and now it looks like this:

Ground level near the offense start. On the right is what became of that middle road. The rubble piles are smaller so the furniture is used to block lines of sight. St. Andreas church is in the back on the left; St. Maria Himmelfahrt is in the distance on the right. Objective A would be straight at St Andreas and hang a right at that corner. Objective B is in the buildings on the right.
St. Andreas from the other side. Still yet to go through its detail phase. I'll probably want to attach the roof at some point, too.
A building (building_3 to be exact) halfway done. One of the early "I can totally build this from street view!" buildings.Also, why is everything so shiny in this game? Seriously...
Incipient rubble. This is on the defense side. Left road is that connecting road. Objective A is between the center buildings and the church behind it. That sign on the left goes into the bookstore. Objective B is in there somewhere.
The bookstore. In the back on the right is...

the office, which leads to...

The pub storage room which connects to...

The pub. Or the restaurant or whatever it is.

The Excelsior Hotel Ernst, which is famous or something?

Excelsior Hotel lobby, which I think is stylistically accurate, though liberties were taken with its shape and size. Also, I don't REALLY know what the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel Ernst looked like in 1945.

This is the hotel "courtyard" though due to space limits and gameplay demands, it looks more like some dirty back alley. Maybe it's the trash cans.

Some of that fancy German architektur. That is the St. Maria Himmelfahrt church in the background. In the foreground is some weird building that was there then but is there no more.

Does this even help?

Friday, April 4, 2014