Insurgency Sandstorm: Community Update #7: New Map, Hillside

[Asid]

Community Update #7: New Map, Hillside
Fri, 6 September 2019



Hey everyone, my name is Michael Tsarouhas. I am the lead game designer on Insurgency: Sandstorm. Today’s Community Update is about our upcoming new snow map Hillside, which is available right now on the Community Test Environment. Hillside is a recreation of the classic Insurgency map Sinjar and will be coming in our next content update. Sinjar has been around since the original mod release back in 2007, and was originally created by Jeroen van Werkhoven who is today, our lead level designer. To play Hillside, go to your Steam Library and download “Insurgency: Sandstorm Community Test Environment” if you own Sandstorm.

Sinjar was one of our most brutal, challenging, and to some even outright unfair maps, as our community wouldn’t hesitate to tell you. Funny enough, our stats indicate Security wins a Sinjar Push map in Insurgency 2014 48% of the time, almost an even 50%. Even though there was this bile, Sinjar was one of our most popular maps, sitting as the third most popular Push mode layout in Insurgency 2014. Despite the difficulty for half the server, Sinjar always seemed to get the votes come map voting time. People loved to hate that Omaha beach style assault on objective A. We knew we had to have it again for Sandstorm, but this time with a bitter cold to accompany the bitter defeat.

We took some time to talk to our developers on our level design and art teams working on Hillside. First we have its original creator, Dutch lead level designer Jeroen van Werkhoven, now moved and sitting pretty in our Calgary studio. Jeroen will be answering questions on Sinjar’s design and history for a map that has seen the test of time since he released it over 10 years ago. Then we have Brian Birnbaum, originally a community mapmaker and the creator of Kandagal for Insurgency 2014 in our Gamebanana mapmaking contest. We liked Brian’s work so much that we hired him shortly after his submission, as we’ve been wont to do with many other developers on our team. Since then, he’s been an integral part of our level design team for every one of our projects, and is now heading up development of Hillside. Finally we have Matthias Schmidt, one of our environment artists who you might remember us mentioning a few Community Updates ago. Matthias helped beautify Ministry’s interiors, and now has helped create a completely unique new snow environment to serve as the backdrop for Hillside.



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