Manhunt - An Arma 3 Mission
A small scale Arma 3 PvP mission for my gaming group
Overview
Back in 2016-2017, my gaming group started running into issues where we couldn’t find any Player vs Player scenarios designed for our group’s size - which is about 4-6 people playing at a time. Disappointed, I figured the best around this is to write my own mission instead.
Manhunt pits a small group of players (OpFor) against a much larger enemy team (BluFor). The smaller team has to sneak through the island, accomplish objectives (usually involves just getting to a specific place), and finally extract via a helicopter. Their opponents have access to light vehicles, helicopters and are constantly being informed about the rough area where to look. This means that the OpFor have to be careful about the path they choose through the island, as well as make choices about sacrificing stealth in favour of speed.
Countless evenings were lost playing this game mode, and even more trying to fix various gameplay issues or fighting Bohemia Interactive’s SQF syntax. In the end I decided to share the mission via the Steam Workshop.
Development
I utilised the 3D ArmA 3 Eden Editor for the mission’s level design, and scripted it using BI’s proprietary SQF language. Since it is a context-free language it can be a pain to work with, as expressions need to have one and single meaning only. E.g. square brackets [ ] define a new array and a new array only, they cannot be used with a variable as one would expect to access an element (my_var[0]), that has to be handled by completely different syntax element (my_var select 0 in this example).
Testing was done with friends on an irregular basis, meaning balancing was a case of seeing what I find overpowered/underpowered and what is most fun for us.
Audience
A few years after I released the map I came to realise it has spawned a derived mission set on a different Arma 3 map (Malden 2035) , which then was featured in a Youtube video . It was nice to see a friends project get picked up and expanded further by others!