Czerka Corporation

Czerka Corporation's playable environment is 100% made from scratch by me. The only borrowed props are the background buildings on the horizon. I created Czerka 1.0 in one week, after sketching out my ideas repeatedly to the point where I felt confident in challenging myself with an abbreviated development time. I spent the first half of the week modeling, and the second half texturing. I had previously begun working on Kothlis, but not yet finished it. So I still had the same ideas of creating a more multicolored environment palette, compared to the grey steel of Vjun. But like Vjun, Czerka would be an entirely built environment, devoid of any sense of nature. And like Kothlis, I endeavored to fit more into less space. The development of Vjun had been fueled by a personal desire to go big, really big, and the result, while pleasing, did have just the slightest feeling of sprawl to it. So the rapid back-to-back development of Kothlis and Czerka was the pendulum swinging back the other way, towards compactness, towards tight, tidy, and clean, with no excusions veering off into complexity or vastness. And this enabled me to be more playful with the texturing, which had been initially panned in the 1.0 release of Vjun. Now for Czerka I would imbue the buildings with bright yellows, violets, cyans, reds, and blues.

There had been various mod maps released for SWBF2 over the years that took place on the streets of Coruscant, the immense ecumenpolis and capital planet of the Star Wars universe. In fact, the very first mod map I ever installed for this game had been such a map, which I still recall fondly. And I took inspiration from these when building the 3D models which would form the playable environment of Czerka, as well as when I was selecting textures for them. My goal was to create a discrete "island" of buildings that stood apart from the backdrop of endless city. And for an in-universe explanation of this, the map's playable area would be the grounds of an arms manufacturer, the notorious Czerka Corporation of the KOTOR games. And so here we find everything one needs at a futuristc corporate site: the commuter station which receives the commuter shuttle, the commuter shuttle itself, the domed security checkpoint where the commuters to check in, the offices for them to work in, and the bar and lounge for them to relax in. I undertook to tell a story through my wholesale creation of this map's playable environment, moreso than for either Kothlis or Vjun. And like both of those mapping projects, for this one I likewise included a story-driven single-player mission, scripted using the game's LUA API.