Phase 1: Planning
Step 1-1: The Concept
Don’t build a murder map just cuz you wanna build a murder map, build a murder map cuz you thought of a really cool idea and you want to see your idea become a thing.
I wanted to make a map based on the minecraft jungle temple:
And then I had the idea of having the temple built into a mountain with a waterfall and a path through it into the temple. I wanted it to be similar to the waterfall in Lego Racers (one of my favourite games from when I was younger):
An Thus the concept was born.
Step 1-2: Game Mechanics
In Murder one player has to try and kill everyone else in the map in a short period of time it is vital that the Murderer can get to all parts of the map quickly from all parts of the map. Building lots of dead-ends is a no-no. One-way paths are ok, but there shouldn’t be too many around the map. There 2 styles I’ve seen maps work out how to execute this well: Winding Paths, like Clue, or Interconnected Loops, like Haunted House or Dino Mines.
Already having the hidden waterfall path concept, I decided to emulate the Winding Paths style so I planned to add a path from a lake into the temple and have the temple interior consist of thin corridors.
Step 1-3: Practice Techniques
You want to know that you know how to build something and make it look cool before you try and build you’re map and realise you don’t have the skills to build it to the standard you brain imagined in Step 1-1.
I had practiced a couple times with world-edit and voxel sniper at creating terrain – specifically mountains. First basically copying one of Zakulle’s styles, before then adding a few tweaks of my own on the second attempt.
What I hadn’t practiced at all was building trees or temples, which is why when I got to that point I had to recruit some assistance.
Step 1-4: Layout
Yes, you’ve made it you finally get to place your first block. It most likely won’t be a block anyone will see when playing on the map, but it is block placing time. Layout what you wanna build with a general outline, based on what you think it’d be cool to look like. When outlining natural things/ terrain avoid straight lines (not completely, but a lot) especially in any of the eight main compass directions: north, south, south-east, south west etc.
For the temple map I started simply plotting out the 3 major aspects: Mountains – Pink, Temple – Blue, Water – Orange (I used grey wool to measure out the width of the river and make it a consistent curve)
Phase 2: Building
Step 2-1: Terrain
No matter what you’re building (unless it is just interior) you need to start with the terrain. You can edit a hill to accommodate a house on top of if but you can’t build the hill underneath the house after it’s done. If you miss this step you can build a pretty good looking building but a building built to fit around a landscape will almost always look better.
I made the mountains voxel-sniper-ing in some gravel and allowing it to fall into a reasonably natural shape and then finished it off with the melt brush.
After adding the shape of the mountain I added potential tree placements.
Never fear to stray from your layout as you can see I added some more mountain to fill in the gap on the right. And here I planned to put in more trees than we ended up with.
I then added a hemisphere underneath the circle the map was built on so far and dug the water way out one block.
Using World Edit replace changed the gravel mountain into white wool to match the rest of the ground and this makes up where the stone is on the finished map. I dug out the rest of where the water would go and dropped a layer of sand and a layer of gravel of the whole map. Which would be the dirt and grass respectively in the final map. I used dirt as a temporary waterbed. You can see in the middle of this picture the ratios I used for replacing the current blocks with the final design, the signs have the block ID and percentage chance I wanted them to have.
At this stage I also then sorted out the underside of the map, I had planned to have the lobby beneath looking up at this but that didn’t happen in the end. I used voxel sniper again for this bit, air balls and wool balls to add and remove blocks, then melt again. The “peaks” where all done by hand to get a pointy/jagged effect.
I replaced all the place-holder blocks, filled in all the water, removed the blue wool and built my first tree. This is the point where I decided I needed help; I didn’t think my tree was that good so I held a build comp to see who could help build me a cool looking jungle tree.
atalwar came and built the other three trees on the temple map and tweaked my one’s roots a bit.
Step 2-2: Buildings - Exterior
There are many different architectural styles that you can choose from you can even choose a weird combination styles but you must stick to the style throughout your build. To do this it helps to create a palette of blocks which you should try to stick to whilst building, you can always add to your palette if you feel the need. I used google images to get a feel of what I wanted the temple to look like and based the building of the temple from 2 images I picked.
The pillars in the inspired the pillars surrounding the temple in the final map, which where designed by OrangeOreoDragon.
I knew what I wanted the temple to look like but not how to start building the temple. I asked Orange to start building a wall of the temple and I added details as we went along namely the central channels based on this image. atalawar designed the ground floor entrance way. Once we had completed one wall I rotated it round 3 times to complete the temple shape and I built the canopy-esque roof and staircase to the top floor.
I then took the parts of the mountains that overlapped with the temple and paste them over the temple replacing the edges with blocks to make it look a bit like the temple was built around the shape of the mountain. I had originally hoped that the temple would cut into the mountain at the other back corner but the temple was a bit too small for that. To make up for this I built the broken pillar over near where it could have happened.
Step 2-3: Buildings Interior
Similar to how you must make the ground before you can build the building on top. You should finish the exterior before starting the interior so you know how much space you have for your floor plan. Make sure you stick to your palette and style with the interior too, but you can have different blocks for detailing. Orange wanted to add painting in temple to hide a pathway, but they were so out of the style it just couldn’t happen.
I began by digging out the waterfall path and then we basically just randomly placed corridors and staircases until the floors were full. Building in the “somewhat ruined” style allowed us to have curved walls around the place which makes the paths both more interesting and confusing to move around in .
Step 2-4: Detailing
The finishing touches. Adding things to fill up “blank” areas, maybe add in another colour around the place.
For Temple I added leaves around the mountains and floor to spruce it up a bit and put vines on the trees, temple and cave. Orange also went round and attempted to “parkour-proof” the mountain sides placing a few more leaves. And finally redstone was added on the floor for the classic murder blood effect
Hope y'all enjoyed this
Step 1-1: The Concept
Don’t build a murder map just cuz you wanna build a murder map, build a murder map cuz you thought of a really cool idea and you want to see your idea become a thing.
I wanted to make a map based on the minecraft jungle temple:
And then I had the idea of having the temple built into a mountain with a waterfall and a path through it into the temple. I wanted it to be similar to the waterfall in Lego Racers (one of my favourite games from when I was younger):
An Thus the concept was born.
Step 1-2: Game Mechanics
In Murder one player has to try and kill everyone else in the map in a short period of time it is vital that the Murderer can get to all parts of the map quickly from all parts of the map. Building lots of dead-ends is a no-no. One-way paths are ok, but there shouldn’t be too many around the map. There 2 styles I’ve seen maps work out how to execute this well: Winding Paths, like Clue, or Interconnected Loops, like Haunted House or Dino Mines.
Already having the hidden waterfall path concept, I decided to emulate the Winding Paths style so I planned to add a path from a lake into the temple and have the temple interior consist of thin corridors.
Step 1-3: Practice Techniques
You want to know that you know how to build something and make it look cool before you try and build you’re map and realise you don’t have the skills to build it to the standard you brain imagined in Step 1-1.
I had practiced a couple times with world-edit and voxel sniper at creating terrain – specifically mountains. First basically copying one of Zakulle’s styles, before then adding a few tweaks of my own on the second attempt.
What I hadn’t practiced at all was building trees or temples, which is why when I got to that point I had to recruit some assistance.
Step 1-4: Layout
Yes, you’ve made it you finally get to place your first block. It most likely won’t be a block anyone will see when playing on the map, but it is block placing time. Layout what you wanna build with a general outline, based on what you think it’d be cool to look like. When outlining natural things/ terrain avoid straight lines (not completely, but a lot) especially in any of the eight main compass directions: north, south, south-east, south west etc.
For the temple map I started simply plotting out the 3 major aspects: Mountains – Pink, Temple – Blue, Water – Orange (I used grey wool to measure out the width of the river and make it a consistent curve)
Phase 2: Building
Step 2-1: Terrain
No matter what you’re building (unless it is just interior) you need to start with the terrain. You can edit a hill to accommodate a house on top of if but you can’t build the hill underneath the house after it’s done. If you miss this step you can build a pretty good looking building but a building built to fit around a landscape will almost always look better.
I made the mountains voxel-sniper-ing in some gravel and allowing it to fall into a reasonably natural shape and then finished it off with the melt brush.
After adding the shape of the mountain I added potential tree placements.
Never fear to stray from your layout as you can see I added some more mountain to fill in the gap on the right. And here I planned to put in more trees than we ended up with.
I then added a hemisphere underneath the circle the map was built on so far and dug the water way out one block.
Using World Edit replace changed the gravel mountain into white wool to match the rest of the ground and this makes up where the stone is on the finished map. I dug out the rest of where the water would go and dropped a layer of sand and a layer of gravel of the whole map. Which would be the dirt and grass respectively in the final map. I used dirt as a temporary waterbed. You can see in the middle of this picture the ratios I used for replacing the current blocks with the final design, the signs have the block ID and percentage chance I wanted them to have.
At this stage I also then sorted out the underside of the map, I had planned to have the lobby beneath looking up at this but that didn’t happen in the end. I used voxel sniper again for this bit, air balls and wool balls to add and remove blocks, then melt again. The “peaks” where all done by hand to get a pointy/jagged effect.
I replaced all the place-holder blocks, filled in all the water, removed the blue wool and built my first tree. This is the point where I decided I needed help; I didn’t think my tree was that good so I held a build comp to see who could help build me a cool looking jungle tree.
atalwar came and built the other three trees on the temple map and tweaked my one’s roots a bit.
Step 2-2: Buildings - Exterior
There are many different architectural styles that you can choose from you can even choose a weird combination styles but you must stick to the style throughout your build. To do this it helps to create a palette of blocks which you should try to stick to whilst building, you can always add to your palette if you feel the need. I used google images to get a feel of what I wanted the temple to look like and based the building of the temple from 2 images I picked.
The pillars in the inspired the pillars surrounding the temple in the final map, which where designed by OrangeOreoDragon.
I knew what I wanted the temple to look like but not how to start building the temple. I asked Orange to start building a wall of the temple and I added details as we went along namely the central channels based on this image. atalawar designed the ground floor entrance way. Once we had completed one wall I rotated it round 3 times to complete the temple shape and I built the canopy-esque roof and staircase to the top floor.
I then took the parts of the mountains that overlapped with the temple and paste them over the temple replacing the edges with blocks to make it look a bit like the temple was built around the shape of the mountain. I had originally hoped that the temple would cut into the mountain at the other back corner but the temple was a bit too small for that. To make up for this I built the broken pillar over near where it could have happened.
Step 2-3: Buildings Interior
Similar to how you must make the ground before you can build the building on top. You should finish the exterior before starting the interior so you know how much space you have for your floor plan. Make sure you stick to your palette and style with the interior too, but you can have different blocks for detailing. Orange wanted to add painting in temple to hide a pathway, but they were so out of the style it just couldn’t happen.
I began by digging out the waterfall path and then we basically just randomly placed corridors and staircases until the floors were full. Building in the “somewhat ruined” style allowed us to have curved walls around the place which makes the paths both more interesting and confusing to move around in .
Step 2-4: Detailing
The finishing touches. Adding things to fill up “blank” areas, maybe add in another colour around the place.
For Temple I added leaves around the mountains and floor to spruce it up a bit and put vines on the trees, temple and cave. Orange also went round and attempted to “parkour-proof” the mountain sides placing a few more leaves. And finally redstone was added on the floor for the classic murder blood effect
Hope y'all enjoyed this
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