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Initial Plans

I've always liked the old Sniper Wars type maps in Starcraft 1, but we always had major limitations with what we could concievably do. With starcraft II, its anything goes. I'm planning on creating an advanced multiplayer sniper wars map, but to test out my ideas I decided to make a simple singleplayer level first. This project is the result of that.

The goal was to create an infiltration style mission that gave the player a bunch of tools to use. Some tools would be naturally better than other, but they could be combined in ways to give the player more creative solutions.

Level Mechanics

Since this was an infiltration type mission, there were a few mechanics I had to have. Namely, LoS blockers covers a large amount of the terrain the player can get to. Since the player has cloak, I had to pay attention to where I placed detector units such as Observers and Photon cannons. I also increased the target acquisition range of Zealots, to encourage he player's use of scouting tools before they make a move.

Height changes using cliffs were also used to put the player in either an advantageous or disadvantageous position. The player will have to rely on the terrain and the abilities of both the Ghost and the Sensor drone working together. The ghost on his own cannot possibly defeat all the Protoss it encounters, so it is up the player to basically treat each enemy encounter as a small puzzle, to find the best solution to get to where they need to go as quietly as possible.

The Abilities

The main concept I had was to give the Ghost unit an uncontrollable ever present "pet" companion. This is in the form of a drone that will always follow the player around and hover around their position. The Drone was made to be slower than the ghost to make the player slow down a bit, it worked out reasonably well because while it wasn't required for the player to have the Drone, it made things a lot easier.

The drone is used by the player to manipulate what they can see and how they can see them. There are 4 modes not including "off" that have their energy requirements and have their own affects. The four are Predator, Detection, Radar, and Thermal. Predator simply increases the vision range, while thermal is a combination of Predator, Detection and also makes it much easier to see enemy units in the dense foilage.

The ghost has his own set of abilities that use a seperate pool of energy. There is Cloak, Mind Blast, Blink and of course Snipe. The ghost also has access to a few "calldown" type abilities that have limited charges, such as Auto-turrets and orbital strike. The goal was to allow the player to combine all these abilities of the Drone and Ghost to give them a sense of freedom as they play.

Basic Plot

The map started out as a gameplay experiement, but I couldn't help but add a basic semblence of a plot.

The map starts out requiring the player to investigate 3 Dominion bases that were recently overrun by the Protoss. The player takes the role of an Umjoan Ghost. After accessing the second base he learns that the Dominion angered the Protoss by destroying an artifact that they were studying. When they reach the third base, they find that the Dominion had been destroying fragments of large crystals of unknown origin that were sacred to the Protoss.

Thats as far as I 've gotten. The plan is to have player find the crystals, and escort a trio of MULEs to the pickup site nearby, and to expect heavy Protoss resistance along the way.

All the data editing, triggering, terrain and unfortunatley the dialog were all done by me.

The basic layout of the map changed several times, and it is of course still not complete. It is still being worked on to this day to complete the final phases of the map.