At that time Sinjar was one of the most requested maps to be recreated for the standalone version. I joined New World Interactive just after the release of Insurgency 2014 standalone. Many years went by and Sinjar stayed very popular, and was even running on servers 24/7, which was an awesome feeling and quite surreal. Eventually Sinjar became one of the most popular maps in the mod. It wasn’t so popular at the start, but I remember after a while more and more people started playing it. After a long period of finding ways to get around engine limitations, the map was ready for release shortly after the mod came out. It became this behemoth of a map that almost didn’t fit on the grid anymore inside the level editor. So to achieve this, I had to make it a lot larger. ![]() It just didn’t feel complete, and I wanted to give the player a lot more freedom. I started with creating the hill and everything kinda fell into place for that area pretty quickly, but it wasn’t enough. While I was connecting the dots to find the gameplay and setting to fit in this criteria, I started visualizing a “D-Day” experience. I remember while I was doing a rough design of the map an idea popped into my head to create something that was different, and very challenging for the Security team.Almost impossible. Jeroen: The original layout of Sinjar was created more than a decade ago when I joined the Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat mod team back in 2005. Take us through the history of Hillside, formerly “Sinjar”, in previous Insurgency games and why you decided to remake it for Insurgency: Sandstorm. Matthias: Brace yourselves, winter is coming. Summarize Hillside for us in five words or less. Matthias helped beautify Ministry’s interiors, and now has helped create a completely unique new snow environment to serve as the backdrop for Hillside. Finally we have Matthias Schmidt, one of our environment artists who you might remember us mentioning a few Community Updates ago. 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. 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. Then we have Brian Birnbaum, originally a community mapmaker and the creator of Kandagal for Insurgency 2014 in our Gamebanana mapmaking contest. 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. First we have its original creator, Dutch lead level designer Jeroen van Werkhoven, now moved and sitting pretty in our Calgary studio. We took some time to talk to our developers on our level design and art teams working on Hillside. We knew we had to have it again for Sandstorm, but this time with a bitter cold to accompany the bitter defeat. People loved to hate that Omaha beach style assault on objective A. Despite the difficulty for half the server, Sinjar always seemed to get the votes come map voting time. ![]() 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. Funny enough, our stats indicate Security wins a Sinjar Push map in Insurgency 2014 48% of the time, almost an even 50%. Sinjar was one of our most brutal, challenging, and to some even outright unfair maps, as our community wouldn’t hesitate to tell you. To play Hillside, go to your Steam Library and download “Insurgency: Sandstorm Community Test Environment” if you own Sandstorm. 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. Hillside is a recreation of the classic Insurgency map Sinjar and will be coming in our next content update. Today’s Community Update is about our upcoming new snow map Hillside, which is available right now on the Community Test Environment. I am the lead game designer on Insurgency: Sandstorm. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Tsarouhas.
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