This, is Arathi Basin.
It's a battleground in that niche, underground role-playing game people tend to refer to as World of Warcraft, and a couple of weeks ago, I decided to start making it in the Source Engine. This all came about after I and a couple of my flatmates were working on coursework for a Game Engines module, where we had to create a level in UDK to display our competency in it. For the coursework itself I'd gone for something original where I just threw stuff at the screen until I figured it looked good, and as it turned out it looked daaaaamn good. One of the aforementioned flatmates though decided to remake this map, Arathi Basin, in UDK, and it got me thinking...
For a while I've been messing around in the Dota 2 tools, but haven't really had a real project to push forward and release. I'd done a remake to get fully to grips with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's SDK - a re-imagining of the classic Halo: Combat Evolved map Damnation. I figured an equally useful way to learn the new Source 2 tools would be to do something similar - and decided to shamelessly steal my friend's idea and remake Arathi. It made sense - an enclosed, open area with small teams looking to control a set amount of capture points. On top of that, Dota started off as a mod itself for Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, so this sort of brings thing around full circle. A reason for chosing Arathi over other WoW battlegrounds is also that scale-wise, it's similar to the Dota Map. Warsong Gulch is very small and would have been dull to map, while something like Alterac Valley just wouldn't fit on the boundaries of the Dota 2 map. While you CAN exceed the bounds, it starts to break things like pathing, fog and lighting.
Gettings things off the ground was pretty simple. Dota 2's Authoring Tools have a tileset editor, incredibly similar to the way Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2's maps are build. This, to summarize, puts a flat plane across the entire game space, and gives you tools to raise/lower terrain in set 128-unit steps, paint textures with a fairly powerful material painter, place props and place important gameplay elements like structures, trees and turrets. Using these, I created a basic overview of the game space.
This went through several iterations, going through various tile-sets but eventually relegating the Dire set to just the Dire base (instead of doing a 50/50 map, or using Dire colours on the Mine). The good thing about Source 2 is it also includes the old Brush-based system of creating geometry too, so the next step was adding buildings. As of right now, most of the buildings are placeholder, with only the Lumber Mill having more complex visuals, but the plan is to eventually have them all look stylistically similar to their original World of Warcraft designs, but with more of a Dota edge.
The next step now is to implement the actual game-type itself; and working out where to start is giving me a headache. Arathi Basin in WoW used a system where there are 5 control points, which can be captured by a team holding the area. Each captured point increases the rate a team acquires resources, with the first to acquire 1,600 resources being the winner. There ARE a couple assets and rumours of a "Conquest" mode being in very early builds of Dota 2, but it's not supported as a mode in the same way as Control Points in Team Fortress 2, or the different modes of Counter Strike. So I'm going to have to find some way to work around it. Another concern down the road is balance, so if I have the time I'll have to start looking into the game's Hero Roster - potentially picking a small set of heroes for each side that I can balance with each other. There are over 100 characters in Dota 2, all balanced for one specific game-type on one specific map, so things are likely to start breaking if I just throw things in as-is.
