Twilight of the Gods

Hey everyone,

My map is an AoS map set in the Blasted Lands of Azeroth. The premise is that the Scourge has nearly finished its conquest of the continent, having eradicated all resistance except the last remnant of Alliance forces, which lie at Nethergarde Keep. The Alliance forces must push back the Scourge or abandon their homeland forever.

I wanted to make an AoS that is different than other AoSes because it has multiple strategies that people could pursue to win. In this regard, I was highly inspired by two of my favorite maps, Eve of the Apocalypse by DarnYak and Rival Nations by MicrosoftXP and AwaKening. To this end, I have a gameplay mechanic I conceived called Epic Events. The idea behind this is that a battle is full of large-scale events that can totally change its momentum. For this purpose, I have come up with four events with which I hope to reward skill and strategy and that have the potential to change the momentum of the game. These events are:

Assassin: The heroes of one team attempt to assassinate the other team's leader NPC to throw the enemy into disarray. If they are successful, enemy heroes suffer an attribute penalty for a time.

Sandstorm: One of the frequent sandstorms of the Blasted Lands has kicked up, obscuring the landscape. In response, the triggering team's spawn wave concentrates in one lane to attack a single target.

Surge: A team's spawns are withheld for 5 waves, after which they spawn double for 5 waves.

Things that I feel are or will be selling points for the map:
- Multiple strategies allow for more varied, interesting gameplay.
- Frequent update schedule and detailed development map gets people excited about developments.
- Storyline fairly rooted in Warcraft lore, reflects what may happen now that the Lich King/Arthas is no longer bound by the Frozen Throne and has become the most powerful being in Azeroth.

I invite you to take a look at the map and tell me what you think. I hope to become a hosted project on wc3campaigns, and am open to all suggestions.

Many friends have helped me with my project, and I could not have made this without them:
Eddie - my best friend and a kickass bug finder
shvegait - Clan TDG leader, mapping mentor, great guy, and friend who has helped WC3 feel more like a community
Rising Dusk - design and code consultant, amazingly frank and insightful, endlessly patient, and excellent wc3c leader
ghenjis - kickass terrainer and my wc3 friend since I first joined wc3c in 2005

My good friend Hypatia and all her friends for being such willing test victims

Clan TDG and Dusk for being so willing to test new maps, bringing a hilarious attitude, and showing me the way Pyramid Escape was meant to be played

Credits:
CHUNK for letting me tinker with and borrow his Spidering Willcage heroes
DarnYak for letting me tinker with and borrow his Eota: Exodus heroes
AwaKening for letting me have all of his Level 4 spells to play with
Eul for making what was originally one of the better WC3 maps and such a fun hero in the Wavebreaker

Version 0.81a posted: http://forums.tenkai.net/viewtopic.php?id=33

Changelog included as part of the 0.82 changelog: http://forums.tenkai.net/viewtopic.php?id=57

I have added some pictures of the map to the main thread, I figured they would be more helpful than random screenshots of battle.

1st picture: Alliance base
2nd picture: Scourge base
3rd picture: Paths

4th picture: Summon Pad and Epic Item mine

Summon Pad - If all of the heroes on a team occupy spots on the pad, then a Sand Golem will summon. The players can control the golem through the use of abilities. If the golem is kept alive, it can grow quite powerful. It levels normally, and gains 2 stat points in each category for each hero it helps to kill. It is modeled after the Ice Lord in WoW's Arathi Basin.

Epic Item mine - If a team builds an epic item mine on that circle of power, they will be able to buy a new epic item every 4 minutes.

The map is good and the features are interesting, but the terrain is really boring. Terrain is one major sell point for an AoS map like what you have created. Spice up the terrain and improve it like adding some rocks and doodads. Even a desolate land needs some good terraining..

Anyway, good luck with your map.

Edit: The build is up now! Download here
Changelog here

Thank you for the positive comments, jonadrian. Ghenjis is going to terrain my map when he has time, so I think in the end terrain will end up being one of the map's stronger points. The man is a kickass terrainer :)

0.83 is out. New features: Epic items and improved balance. Download here.
Changelog here.

Enjoy everyone! I will update the screenshots section soon.

Hey guys. I've been working on the map a little bit this weekend but everything's been quite busy. I started the upgrades on my map, that is the next build's feature. I also updated the screenshots thread like I promised.

I have a question, if anyone cares to help me. See the tornadoes in the screenshot of Sandstorm? I need some way for those to block the paths. The idea is that only a certain number of tornadoes are active at any given time. I have already gotten them to appear and disappear as I want using ghost, but at the moment units can just walk around them. Unfortunately, hard-coded collision size limits prevented me from giving them a large collision size and solving the problem that way. Can anyone think of something else that might work? Thanks.

Hey all. I've been working hard on the map this week. It took me most of the week to figure out how to work the upgrade system, it is pretty complicated. AwaKening helped me with that, that was really nice of him. I also did some bonus hero designing, but that's just written down. So this past week I finished the upgrade system and implemented three of the upgrades, 6 more to go. So this coming week I will finish the 6 remaining upgrades, and I also want to use a multiboard for the bounties and timers instead of a leaderboard + timers. Then I think I am going to turn things over to ghenjis for a week so he can do the terraining. Then it will be finals so I won't be able to commit to working on the map, though I might work on it anyway. Next up after that will be putting in the bonus heroes and doing their spells (probably 2 weeks), and then after that will be the opening *17 minute unskippable* cinematic (*kidding*), which will probably take one week but maybe two if it takes me a while to learn how to do cinematics. I'll probably see if I can get Anitarf to help me with that. In May I have another week off where I will be out of town, and then I will probably have two weeks of intensive public testing and then it will be 1.00! I'm excited, even if you aren't :) I welcome all your feedback. If you are on battle.net and are willing to try a new map, give it a host and let me know what you think.

Looks quite interesting, I'll give it a try. Hoping to see some cool Heroes!!

Ah shoot... Uh Fulla, I've been spending most to all of my time making everything functional, there's only 3 custom heroes in there and one is missing some effects (though he's completely functional). Sorry to disappoint you. There will be custom heroes in the future, but that will be after everything is working. I wanted to finish the map first. I like some of the bonus heroes I have come up with so far that will be all custom, you may want to wait a week or two until I can get them in the map.

However, thanks a lot for your interest, I appreciate it. If you have any suggestions or feedback, I'd welcome it. Or if you have any suggestions for the question from my 04-06-2008 post.

0.84 is out. New features: Unit Upgrade system.
Download here.
Changelog here.

I decided not to use a multiboard. As I said before, this week ghenjis is going to take the wheel and make everything amazing-looking! If you have tried the map and liked it, you should be excited about that. If you are unfamiliar with the amazing terrain work he does, you should check out the weekly terraining he runs, it's quite spectacular.

Enjoy everyone! I will post my upgrade system soon somewhere in case it will help anyone. It emulates that of Rival Nations.

Bug fix build loaded after public testing. Get 0.84b while it's hot. :)

Hey everyone. Ghenjis has been working hard on the terrain for my map, but it's not quite done yet. I'll upload it as soon as he gets it to me. I can't wait to see how it has turned out. This week is another week off for me, as I said in my previous post it is exam week. Any work I do on the map will be impromptu, but if I do make any changes I will post them in the changelog thread.

Just to keep you updated, Ghenjis had the SAT this week so he was studying hard :) Again, I'll post the map as soon as he gets it to me. My last two exams are Monday, and after the 8th I will have enormous free time on my hands for a week, so I will definitely get the bonus heroes done in one week.

I also posted my upgrade system earlier, no one commented so it probably wasn't that helpful.

I also wanted to ask again if anyone could help me with my tornadoes. I still haven't figured that out yet.

Have a good week!

From the features in the first post, it sounds interesting.

Good luck with your map. I'll look forward to it.