Demi Veritas

One of the main things I despise about map design is the concept that you are moving within a container. This is mentioned in part by the creator of the Minevera mod, Adam Foster. In brief email correspondence with him I mentioned the realism of his maps and mentioned my complete understanding of his levels, and the architectural sense that steamed from the layouts. I then briefly mentioned that I was an architect to him and asked him some trivial questions about the vertical nature of his maps.

His response, which I appear to have lost to an archive, mentioned his grandfather being and architect too and that he took great interest in looking at drawings of buildings in his youth, this point stuck with me. It appears that architectural education is of some benefit to map design.

Zaha Hadid, what a mentalist

While in college I found that planning a project was often much easier in plan, laying out spaces side by side as they would appear from the air, this was a standard architectural student tool at the beginning, at a later stage we learned the benefit of looking at a project in other ways, and understood that it was a very useful tool.

At this point I’m getting ahead of myself, back to the container issue for a moment. It effects many common problems in map design, mappers make routes between areas and frame these with walls, often not considered , the section, that is, they do not consider the ground they will walk on or the roof that covers them.

This is very important in single player maps where everything is controlled, calculated and arranged, the readability of the map must be rigid, must be grounded in reality or it risks being one step above an on the rails shooter. Multiplayer maps are a different breed; they require balance to facilitate fairness, and often times this is taken as an excuse to reduce the clarity of the maps architecture. This should not be the case however, if I may be as bold to take a pint as example. CP_steel, what a map, its multiple angles and game play really were a fantastic idea, but the layout is too confusing, too contrived it lacked any sense of cohesion and only people who learn every nook and cranny really know it well.

Exploring why, and when to move up and down should not be a function of simply adding a stairs when needed, the very surface you walk upon should undulate beneath your feet falling away at times.

With these points in mind I am not sketching my levels in plan; first of all I draw a section, and look at the map in a different light.

Well, I’m going to make a Team Fortress 2 level and just to be controversial I’m going to make it a capture the flag map. I have a few ideas rattling around in my head, I know I want it to have the alpine style, so expect trees, stone, lumber mills and a dark cool night time skybox. Beyond that I know it will have 3 towers.

Boundless, incomprehensible sketches litter my desk in work, fine details are worked out as the larger plan gains solidity. The growing enormity of what I am doing slowly presses into my skull like a swollen thought.

What the hell is this?

The maps name will be ctf_3fort_alpine, the similarity is intended.