SC2Mapster

Hello everyone, welcome to Chaotic Thoughts, an inside view of the development of Thoughts in Chaos the third episode of the Antioch Chronicles. To start this column, I'm gonna share some of the fantastic work done on one of the early missions. You might remember that in Episode 2, we had the chance to infiltrate a Command Center to acquire some classified information that changed the Antioch world forever. Following this tradition, we now give you... the Nexus!

That's right, one of the missions will have our heroes get inside one of the most iconic protoss buildings. Trench will have to sneak his way around enemy Protoss to retrieve a person of interest. As if that wasn't enough, he'll have to contend with the threat of attacking Zerg as well, so keep your eyes open! This beauty is the product of combined talent of many the team members, each putting their signature style to get this place operational. Let me take this opportunity to elaborate how things get done Antioch-style. The first stage is defining what we wanted to see in a given mission—brainstorming the type of mission we want (build and destroy, infiltration, etc), what role it plays into the plot, and where it should take place; all of this happens way before we open the editor at all. Following that, we sketch out the flow of the map, a basic outline of the pathing and general geography. This gets then passed to another member who builds the basic layout and geometry (tileset, pathing via cliffs).

Once that is finished, the actual terrain polish and the triggering begin in parallel (our development pipeline allows for that without any team member overwriting the others—we'll talk more indepth about this in a later column). Usually, we complete terrain in a single pass. In the case of this map, we ended up revamping the terrain several times as we found that we needed to make things more exciting. For example, what was once a simple hallway turned into this:

For triggering, we work based on the script we finalized before we began working on the campaign. However, we've found that the script tends to woefully underestimate the amount of incidental dialogue needed permission – things like hints, for progression, banter between characters, etc. Once all of the triggers are done, all that's left is to test them out and get the final audio files hooked up. We are very proud to share the work that we did on this map. It's just the first of many things that were looking forward to highlighting as we move towards release.

En taro Antioch!