This was a map made for a Level Design competition hosted by a competitive Urban Terror league in 2012, mappers where given 1 month to complete a map from scratch in an attempt to increase the amount of maps the game had in the competitive map pool. Over time it has shown than all of these maps have turned out to be great maps for public servers, none of these actually were any good for competitive play.

The theme I chose was a carnival, more specifically I took insperation from L4D2 Dark Carnival. I started with location names. If my map were to be memorable for players I needed to make sure there were sufficient landmarks that were all from a similar theme, I came up with about 30 things you could find in a carnival and chose about 12 that I thought I could get done in time. With the theme and location names in mind, I started thinking about lighting.

The lighting is the biggest role to setting the mood of the map, at the same time it needs to be done correctly so the players are as easily visible as they are in Casa. I brainstormed and went ahead with a night map with a blueish tone but with the carnival lights all on so players and the world are still very visible. I later came on to include worldspawn keys to make sure players were easily visible.

With all this in mind I started drawing my layout, starting with the carnival entrance it took me an hour and a half to come up with my layout, I fell in love with the first layout I made. The map gametype is based around TS & BOMB seeming its what I'm most familiar with, CTF was more of a "I'll throw it in" type of deal though it turns out, that's really the only gametype it was good for. BOMB was never popular in Urban Terror and Team Survivor rounds took too long on this map due to its scale.

After making the layout I sourced textures to suit the theme, by this time I realised how dificult some aspects of the map would be, so the theme changed to a carnival under renovation to make it easier to light and to give reason why the tunnel of love is only half constructed. With over 400 posible textures to use I started building the layout.

I included a collection of brush based entity tricks to have interactive games and objects throughout the level, which include; whack a mole, shooting targets, a working carousel, a bouncy castle, operatable lights, high striker machines, wheel of fortune and a few more.