Crevice: The Pit

This morning I took down the side cliffs and replaced them with pits of doom!


The lack of cliffs made the exterior look much more like an exterior. The longer running walls give more a trench feel. However, the transition from the trench to the skybox is now going to be that much more difficult.


Of course, I made sure the 1000dps brush worked correctly. Hurrah! Sadly, I realized that I don't know how to have the intelligence return if it gets stuck down there. Right now, the only option is to let the timer reset.


The next step make the exterior, pits included, more aesthetically pleasing.

Crevice: Wrong Assumption

On one of the early test runs with Kyle(MiniK), an interesting incident regarding design assumptions came up.

At the end of the catwalk pipes, there are lips to pass before stepping on the roof of the forts.

Kyle was messing around with a heavy and then stated that the map harshly favoured scouts. I asked him why he said that, and he replied that they were the only ones able to navigate over the lip when getting off the pipes, while most other classes couldn't transition from the pipes to the roof. Turns out Kyle had never learned the art of crouch jumping (which allows you to jump onto obstacles a bit higher than just regular jumping) and this lip required a crouch jump to get over. When designing and testing the map I simply took it for granted that everyone knew how to crouch jump.

I could have just left the pipe-to-roof transition alone and hoped that everyone who plays Crevice would eventually learn the art of crouch jumping. However, this route was a main route in the map and should be accessible for all players. What if a group of non-crouch-jumpers tried the map and decided it was bad just because a main pathway was blocked to most classes? I decided that crouch jumping was not a fundamental skill of the game and changed the transition.

I had to raise the ends of the pipes, but I wanted to keep the middle the same height to allow for triple jumping scouts to reach it from a level below. So, I sloped the ends up to match the lip. The change was great. The transition now felt smoother for all classes AND the map had more aesthetic depth to it.



This just shows the importance of testing with many different people and playing styles to knock down any poor design assumptions.

Crevice: Introduction

During the summer or perhaps late Spring, I began creating a Team Fortress 2 map. I was probably in class or waiting to write an exam when I sketched up the concept. The idea was to have a vertically oriented capture-the-flag map where two forts in a ravine were connected by exposed walkways on upper levels and covered walkways at lower levels. Traversing the upper walkways would be quicker, but much riskier due to the falling hazard and lack of cover, while the lower ones would take longer, but provide cover. I hoped the vertical orientation of the map would provide a unique experience that the valve vanilla maps did not.



Using Valve's Hammer Editor, I built and textured the forts and did the roughwork for the exterior environment. The forts wound up being less vertical than I had planned. Still, there is a vertical element and the height transitions filter which classes can reach different heights with special abilities (scout's double jump, soldier's rocket jump, etc.). The forts' interiors provide close and medium ranged combat opportunities, while the exteriors provide long ranged combat opportunities. Overall, the design came together well and the map feels appropriately sized for about 16 players.



I tried to do displacement work on the grass and cliffs, but made a few alignment errors, so I'm going to have to redo them. The lower levels of the outside look a little too unnatural still and need a bit of gusto. My other failure was in making cubemaps. The cubemap is what is shown on the reflection of certain weapons and objects. The process compared to making Counter-Strike ones is a little more involved and I accidently skipped some new-to-TF2 steps.

To add a more unique element to the map, I plan to knock out the cliff walls surrounding the ground level and replace them with a giant pit. Deadly map edges will make the ground battles more interesting, due to a greater emphasis on positioning and not falling to one's doom. As a bonus, I think this will visually add to the 'crevice' theme of the map.



Once the exterior layout is complete, I can hopefully move on to adding details and refining the lighting.