Category: Dev Blog

Dev Blog : pl_carapace_a3

Posted on March 24, 2025 by - Dev Blog

To quote a comment I made in the “From The Vault” blog post a couple of weeks back regarding pl_carapace:

“I still have the VMF file for this map, however I don’t see myself doing any further work to it. I would rather commit that time to working on a new urban map “

Intrduction

So that was a lie

At the beginning of the year, I had been toying with the idea of making a new Team Fortress 2 map. I wanted to take something from concept, through development and ultimately release it on the Steam Workshop. I set myself a deadline of 12 months (a pretty reasonable amount of time for a side project I would work on in my spare time) and was going to make use of all the level design teachings and learnings I had acquired over the last 3 years. During January I gathered reference images and did some foundation work that all designers should do before starting a level. However when February came, I’d had already given up on the idea. I was so busy doing other things in my life that I just couldn’t commit the required energy and hours of an evening to working on a map. I hesitate to even say the project was dead upon arrival (it was dead before it had left the house).

2 weeks later I would be out of a job. I had known things weren’t looking amazing at work; we were hunting for a publisher in a economic climate where companies and investors were tightening their belts. What took me by surprise however was the immediacy of it all. I went from having a meeting Monday morning about what work I was planning to do that sprint, to being told I was to go home and start looking for new work (all within an hour).

This had given me a second wind on the urban map I had planned, and after finding the .vmf of pl_crapace for the blog post, I realised it really didn’t make all that much sense to start something from scratch. The map was there; it worked, it just needed a little love.

2 weeks later, it turns out it needed a lot of love. I’ll be honest, this update was brutal. I was working on the map ~12 hours a day, 6 days a week, and each day I felt like I was making less and less progress. This was not a sustainable way to work, however I was determined to complete the update and get it out before the end of March and I’m glad I persisted. I truly believe that I have broken the back of the work on this.

It was gruelling and tiring, and I’m certainly a little burnt out… but it was worth it and I look forward to the first playtest of pl_carapace_a3. Let’s dive into the update.

Alpha 2

I should probably talk generally about the alpha 2 version of this map before diving into the overhaul that alpha 3 went through. The map was originally made in 72 hours over a weekend in 2020; it was a payload map that took the players and the payload through an urban city ultimately ending up on a subway station. I wanted to capture the tone and aesthetic of koth_kong but in the payload game mode. I failed miserably at this! I don’t beat myself up too hard about it; creating a map in a 72 hour jam is a draining marathon, so even getting a map working and submitted is a success in my books. However I couldn’t look at the map and see it as anything other than a failure in meeting it’s original goals.

  • A failure in tone

I have no idea why I set the map during the day when koth_kong’s aesthetic work so well due to it night time skybox. Lights and signs pop far more effectively in a darker setting and the general tone is slightly more mysterious. You lose all of this in a day time setting and I can only assume I set it during the day for development purposes and then just forgot to change it.

  • A failure in theme

The layout itself feels less like a city and more like a random assortment of geometry scattered about a sandbox for players to run around in. The city skyline isn’t varied or high enough, meaning I never felt like I was actually in a larger city that was looming down on me.

  • A failure in gameplay

And ultimately the layout offered a few too many side paths for players to get lost in. The player focus is taken away from the cart, and so the gameplay itself suffers as a result (I actually think I might have over compensated for this in alpha 3, but I’ll get to that further down).

At the time of writing this post, the map has been downloaded 374 times on TF2maps.net and the only comment was left by a forum user, 3 years after the Jam, who really seemed like it for some reason. Huh – thanks chief!

With these problems identified, lets get working on fixing this map up!

Alpha 3

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  • General Fixes

First thing I set about doing was changing the skybox to night time. An easy change, and it definitely took the map one step closer to nailing the tone I was looking for. I ended up going for “sky_nightfall_01” and set up the environmental lighting to reflect the skybox change. There’s a really handy resource you can find on valve’s official developer site that gives you the values to plug in.

I also randomly scattered a large number of towering skyscrapers outside of the boundaries of the map to give the effect that there was a larger city this map was situated within. Adding some variety in height and dev textures really gave the city a bit of a depth. In the future I plan on updating this to be a 3D skybox, but given my lack of experience in setting one up, I didn’t really fancy doing it at this stage.

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With the easy stuff done and out of the way, I took a shot of tequila and mentally prepared myself for the hours of work ahead of me. I should note that I didn’t work on each section in this order, but it makes sense for me to talk about them in the order the players will experience them.

The rework of BLU spawn

If I could describe the start of the map in carapace_a2 it would be… underwhelming and unfocused. Of all the payload starts, this certainly was one of them. I wasn’t entirely sure what the game plan for either side was. BLU team had 4 routes upon leaving spawn:

These flanks were designed give BLU a chance of attacking a RED defence from multiple angles. The start of Payload map is often bloody as RED has had a chance to set up multiple sentry nests and can lock down choke points, preventing the cart from even reach the first point. Give the attacking team options and, with a bit of coordination, its harder for a defending team to create a fortress if attacks are coming from multiple directions. However, these alternate routes brought with them a number of issues. Namely that the focus was drawn away from the payload, i.e. the whole goal of the game mode.

The flanks were quite extreme and extensive often taking BLU team members far away from the action and deep into enemy territory. The far left path (1.) being extremely notorious for this as it has the potential lead an attacking playing all the way back to the final sections of the map without even encountering an enemy player. This would lead to some confusion as to where players were supposed to be going, and detracted gameplay from the more important areas where gameplay was supposed to be happening. It sort of feels like a company cannibalising its own profits by spreading its customers across too many products.

RED team on the other hand suffered from a lack of a defensive positions to hold. There wasn’t really a good spot for engineers to set up Sentry nests (at least not that would be useful for defending a cart push), and because of the 3 flanking routes, the defence had to be spread thin to cover all angles. Overall I didn’t like any of this layout and so decided to cut the attacking routes down from 4 to 2.

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The core philosophy with this change was “keep the focus on the cart whilst offering cover and alternate routes for the BLU team”. I don’t think its perfect, but its certainly better. There are 2 routes the attacking team can take

  • Push the cart
  • Head down to the lower level that acts as a flanking route

Every other route ultimately loops round and returns itself to the track and the payload. I offered the RED team a little enclave to the left where a sentry nest could be set up (which is still vulnerable from snipers and soldiers attacking from the opposite corner). RED team also got a sniper spot above that, which could also prove useful as a safe teleport exit.

I decided to keep the building to the right, but closed off any routes that took the players deeper into the level. For RED it acted as a solid defensive position BLU team would need to flush out if they wanted to protect their rear from attack when pushing the cart towards A, and for BLU it served as some good cover for advancing. I think I might need to reopen up the building to allow players to re-join the payload track at some point (right now they are forced to exit via the lower level which isn’t great, but I’ll see how the map plays out before making that change).

I also added a bit of layered height to the area. It felt a little flat and boring in alpha 2, so this certainly makes the area feel a little more interesting. I’ll see in playtesting if this was the correct choice or not.

Capture Point A

The original capture point of A suffered from a number of issues. The first (like BLU spawn) was a lack of direction. There were multiple paths sprawling all over the area which lead to a lack of focus on where the gameplay was suppose to occur. I was offering the players too much choice, which ultimately lead to an unfocused messed. The second issue was that it lacked any visual clarity and coherency. It really did feel like a clutter of unorganised greybox cubes, scattered around in an attempt to imitate an urban city.

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The new design attempts to rectify some of these problems. The flow of city feels more logical with both the building layout and the payload path following the flow of the newly added canal; taking inspiration from the Cheonggyecheon that runs through Seoul. Attacking players can cross the bridge to the other side to get cover from defensive fire, or alternatively drop down into the canal and enter from the lower level. RED team have a pretty solid spot to the right of the capture point to set up defences, although care should be given to the right as it is a good flanking spot for BLU.

The whole area has been opened up which does however bring with it some gameplay concerns. Namely that there is very little cover now for RED when they are leaving their spawn. Not an issue for setup, but as BLU are pushing closer to the point, I fear this might lead to RED getting slaughtered upon leaving their forward spawn. I’m a little concerned I made this area too open and simple, so this will be a key thing I’ll be keep an eye on in the next playtest.

Capture Point B

In an attempt to make B capture point feel a little more unique, I decided I wanted close it off. That was a stark contrast to A that now felt much more open. I want to give close quarter combat classes a chance to shine, so compacted everything in to this apartment complex. The payload now goes down under the building (inspired by the 3rd point push in pl_badwater) and both attackers and defenders can use the numerous flanking routes to get up and close to each other. I suspect Pyros and Heavies to excel here.

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I removed the unnecessary underground path BLU could take to… well, nowhere. And moved the BLU forward spawn a little further up. I fully expect this to be a explosive spamming choke, but that’s by design. You’ve got to allow for it in some places.

BLU team could also get on top the rooftops of some of these buildings using Soldiers, Demo, Scouts and even creative engineers who use their dispensers to climb the wall (I even added a health and ammo pack up there to encourage it). I don’t expect RED to ever use this area, but playtesters always surprise me. Rooftop combat is something I would like to explore in future updates as it would be something that would set it apart from other TF2 maps under the Urban tag, but we’ll wait for a future update to try that out.

Capture Point C

Capture point C remains identical in terms of the payload route, however the surrounding area has had a complete rework. I opened up the route to the right allowing both the RED team to reach the upper flanking routes to defend B, but also for BLU to be able to flank once B has been capped.

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The BLU forward spawn has now been moved to the end of this road (however it still only opens after C has been capped) and the route to D now has a building where the Basketball Court used to be (RIP BBall court 2020-2025). The metro station entrance now appears just after the capping of C offering some cover for defensive sentry nests should RED decide to abandon the defence of C.

Not much really to say about this section. I actually really struggled with the layout due to moving the RED spawn. I want the RED team to be able to access B with haste, but I don’t want BLU to find their way to RED spawn on the way to capping C. A one way drop makes sense, but the rear Red spawn room is underground making this a little awkward. A problem for future Graham I feel.

Capture Point D

Capture point D retains its “theme” but was pretty much built from the ground upwards. I knew I wanted the map to end in a metro station; something that has been in the original design since 2020. However the original layout just felt nothing like a metro station (except it being underground I guess). The track also went on just a little too long (It wrapped around almost 270° on itself like playing a game of Snake).

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So I cut the track length by a third (having it curve off to the left instead). I rebuilt the ending to make it more believable as a metro station as well as trimmed off a couple of routes BLU could use to attack. I am a little sceptical this area will act as a good final point however. There’s limited space for RED to set up defences and the fact that BLU can just drop in from upper levels really limits the effectiveness of sentry guns. This is definitely one of those “let’s see what the playtests make of it” moments, but I do fully expect to have to rework this area in Alpha 4.

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Closing Thoughts

So, how do I feel about the update? Mixed honestly. On one hand I’m super happy I updated it. I am much happier with the map, and the general flow when running around it feels much better. Its more optimised, less confusing and it even has spectator cams now (neat!).

On the other hand, I fear I might have gone too far in some directions. In an attempt to make the map feel more believable, I might have created something not entirely suitable for Team Fortress 2. I was playtesting some maps the other evening and couldn’t help but notice that doors are larger, ceilings taller and spaces typically more open. I won’t know 100% until I’ve had a few playtests however.

Regardless, the core of the map feels much better, so I am hoping any future updates with be small changes as oppose to the huge overhauls that I’ve subjected it to over the last couple of weeks. Until next time!

Game Jams 2017-2022

Posted on February 28, 2025 by - Dev Blog

Introduction

As mentioned in the Projects From The Vault blog post, this will be a trip down memory lane and a dive into the past decade of all the game jam projects I have been a part of. Through 2017 to 2020 I was on an absolute tear! I consistently attended The University Of Abertay’s Global Game Jam site and worked with the same 3 amazing developers to produce “games”, that looking back on now, I feel rather proud of. If we’re being honest here, these aren’t ‘amazing’ games (they closer resembled the nightly visits from the Benadryl hat man who frequents my flat) but they were conceived and completed within the jam deadline, and honestly I think that alone deserves a pat on the back and a victory pint. In the end, it was the journey that mattered, and not necessarily the destination.

Post 2020, I wasn’t living in Scotland any more and with my team members committing more time to organising and supervising the Jam, and less time participating, the Global Graham Jam (yes that was our team name), hung up its gloves and faded into distant memory. This was when I shifted to participating in Ludum Dare, a remote game jam held multiple times a year. These Ludum entries were far less successful.

It turns out making something as a solo developer proved a far greater challenge than making something as a team (especially due to my limited programming experience). But I tried my best and had fun in the process which is ultimately what counts. All projects are still displayed on their respective Jam websites, however whether they are worth a download and a play, is another matter entirely.

Note: At the time of publishing this post, the Global Game Jam website appears to be down. Thus, none of the links to Global Game Jam projects will work.

ＥＣＨＯＣＨＡＭＢＥＲ

2017 where it all began. Of all the game jam events we did, I seem to remember this one the most. which is strange because I think this was the one I was most sleep deprived for. I had joked previously in 2016 that I was going to enter the Global Game Jam and make a game based around finger puppets holding a séance (the plan was that I would fit the theme around it when it was made public). I would ultimately not compete that year due to reasons I cannot remember, but found it hilarious that the theme was revealed to be “Rituals” (this would ultimately start the trend of me correctly guessing the Global Game Jam theme each year prior to the event).

In 2017 however, I was determined to jam, and I wanted to make a vapourwave game (again, like a child determined to force the square block into the triangle hole, I was going to make this idea work with the theme). I remember missing the start of the jam because I was in Glasgow seeing a show. Midway through the set however, I get a message informing me that the theme was “Wave”! (It should be noted, I never correctly guessed the theme again, making this trend extremely short lived).

I had done weekend jams before, so this wasn’t a new experience for me, but what was new, was that it was done in the university surrounded by hundreds of students all working on their own projects. This was a great atmosphere as it really did feel like we were “all in it together”. I feel like you don’t get this same experience working alone in a bedroom. Sure you can join discords with people posting their work or track updates via hashtags on a twitter feed, but its not the same as getting up from your desk to take a break, stretching your legs with a bit of a walk, and chatting with other developers as they gush over the latest thing they’ve just implemented into their build (It almost never actually works when they try to show you, but the enthusiasm is contagious). If you’ve never participated at an “on site” game jam, I highly recommend it.

ＥＣＨＯＣＨＡＭＢＥＲ wasn’t so much of a game, as it was an… experience? The closest I can get to describing it was as an interactive novel, or maybe a point and click adventure game. You press forward to make the car and drive and simply answer questions from Caesar (your Dolphin passenger) who starts spouting philosophical texts we found on Tumblr at 2am. The design process would consist of someone on the team saying “oh that’s a fun idea” and then it just got added. There wasn’t a long term plan or even a design really.

It was simply “what is cool and weird and how do we fit it into the framework of the game?”. This sort of manic approach to Game Development was pretty fluid and liberating, and really lead to some genuinely creative ideas. There was probably a fun game hidden under all the memes and meta humour that we could have finished, but as with the 72 hour Mapping Jams, you really do lose a lot of the momentum on a project once the jam has officially ended. In a way, I’m actually glad that we never worked on it further. The project remains a self contained entity, locked into that special weekend in 2017. A project conceived, made and ultimately finished, cemented in history. Its special to me, and had we dug it up months later and continued working on it, changing it into something it was never intended to be, it would have felt wrong. Sometimes its enough to simply make something and then let it go.

You can still play ＥＣＨＯＣＨＡＭＢＥＲ to this day as the executable file can be downloaded from the Global Game Jam website.

Local Radio DJ Simulator Hero 2

The following year, the team returned to work on our second Global Game Jam game “Local Radio DJ Simulator Hero 2″, only this time, we had a new member. (I should probably take this moment to mention Gaz, Kayleigh and Robin; the other three members to make up The Global Graham Jam, who without, I would not be writing this Blog post. We had all worked together on Glitchspace prior to this, and it was a pleasure working with them again on these four Global Game Jams).

The theme of this year was “Transmission”, and we were pretty convinced on building something using the XBOX 360 DJ Hero controller that Gaz had brought in before the opening ceremony. Taking the original purpose of this peripheral literally, we ended up making a game where you played the role of a Radio DJ, who flicked between taking calls from various listeners and playing the songs that they requested. In a similar vein to ＥＣＨＯＣＨＡＭＢＥＲ, the game was essentially an interactive novel, with minor “gameplay” mechanics; the key one being to decipher what song the caller actually wanted to hear as they never gave you the name specifically, but rather a description of the song itself. “I want to hear a song, that a man dying from thirst in the desert would want to hear” the caller would yell, as I manically rummage through the music collection in search of the Wonderwall cassette.

The songs themselves were MIDI renditions of famous club bangers from the 80s, 90s and 2000s, each with an animal pun slipped into their title (it gave us all a good chuckle and kept the copyright lawyers happy).

The DJ Hero controller could be used to scrub back and forth through the song, adjust the tempo and pitch, and it even had button with the sole purpose to spam an airhorn sound effect when mashed by the player. I should note that these were purely aesthetic, but I could definitely see them being expanded into actual gameplay mechanics; i.e. a listener telling the player that they have a job interview in 1 minute and must listen to a full song by Kurt Crowbain if they are to ever be successful in getting the job.

As a game, this definitely had some potential. Revisiting it today, I could see it fitting into the same corner of the market as games such as “Paper’s Please” and “Not Tonight”…

“Local DJ Hero – a radio DJ desperate to keep ratings high during the graveyard shift at a failing Local Radio Station, takes calls, plays the hits and gives regular traffic updates, all in an attempt to keep the station and their career alive”. (I think I had just finished reading Alan Partridge’s second book ‘Nomad’, before the game jam, which might have been why I leant so hard on the Local Radio DJ theme).

It “could” work with a bit of a redesign. Much like ＥＣＨＯＣＨＡＭＢＥＲ, you can still download this executable from the Global Game Jam Site, however its seems unplayable. You actually need a DJ Hero Controller to even start the game; I couldn’t get passed the title screen on my build (but could get an extremely loud “YEAH BOI” by pressing 2 on the keyboard which kept me entertained for a couple of minutes). And whilst we could change it to function solely with a keyboard setup, I really do feel like it loses a lot of the charm without the DJ deck. It was definitely one of those “you had to be there” kind of games. At least I still have a midi download of Gasolina saved on my HDD to remind me of the weekend.

What Does Home Mean To You, Graham? 3

What Does Home Mean To You Graham? (full name: “What Does Home Mean To You, Graham? 3, the sequel to: Local Radio DJ Simulator Hero 2, the sequel to: EchoChamber” – this joke got old by our third entry and was subsequently dropped in 2020), was the third Global Game Jam entry by the team. This is where the jams all begin to merge into one for me. I don’t actually remember all that much about the jam itself other than it being developed to use an N64 USB controller I had purchased and that PS1 Hagrid was used in the initial development of it (a trend I would continue on for jams in the future).

I do remember the game pretty vividly however. The player is stuck to the couch and is asked to find and obtain certain items from within the room by their parents. Essentially a scavenger hunt, except they can’t move. Instead they extend out their paw (I should mention, the player character is a cat for some reason) and grab the item they have been requested to obtain. They then retract the paw holding the item and earn points by give it to their parents. Simple…

Except every item in the scene is a physics object. Absolute chaos would unfold as you extend your paw to grab the plant at the back of the room, but accidentally nudge the bookshelf, causing it to collapse onto the dining table, which in turn would flip the jigsaw. A domino effect that creates a completely un-navigable room of mess… And then your parents would ask you to fetch the coffee pot, completely un-phased by the carnage you had just witnessed. There was also a little DDR game you could play on the TV, which I don’t ever remember us implementing but it’s cute that it’s there.

This was probably the most “game” game jam entry we ever worked on and I could definitely see it being developed into a small multiplayer party game. All players fighting each over a single specific scrabble letter from a bowl of scrabble pieces that ultimately ends up on the floor.

Only a MacOX build can be downloaded from the Global Game Jam Site, and as my Macbook recently decided to throw a tantrum and no longer turns on, I was unable to boot this bad boy back up and try it out (which is a shame).

RepAir

2020 was certainly a year. The disruption to my life and my daily routine caused by COVID meant that I often struggle to remember specific details of what happened throughout the year and this Global Game Jam is no exception. I just cannot remember anything about this game. I recognise the screenshots, but I cannot remember the theme*, the mechanics, or even making the thing.

(*As I was re-reading what I had written, I actually remember the theme being “Repair”, hence the name RepAir, which was HILARIOUS at 4am when it was conceived.)

I do remember that it was a slightly more stressful jam with the team’s responsibilities being split between needing to organise and run the jam itself whilst also working on our own entry. I had also moved down to Cambridge at that point so coming back up to Dundee for a weekend of jamming and then immediately returning home for a week of work was a lot more taxing on my body.

There’s surprisingly few images of the game on the Jam page, absolutely no social media posts made about it and furthermore, there isn’t even an executable file uploaded to the submission. Its weirdly eerie to think that we made this game, yet there appears so little proof of its existence.

Rereading the description of the game, players are required to approach customers in a queue at the airport and provide them with tickets that meet their needs for the best price they can afford whilst still making a profit. Not much I can really say about this one, other than I wish I had taken a few more pictures of the jam to prove to my future self that this wasn’t all just a dream.

After 2020, I never returned to Abertay’s Global Gam Jam. It went digital for 2021 (and maybe 2022.. I can’t quite remember) and when it came back to being an in person event, I just never found a good opportunity to return. Also the team had greater responsibilities surrounding the organisation of the event, so it was getting harder to produce something complete each year.

Instead my focus shifted to Ludum Dare. A completely online game jam that takes place multiple times throughout the year. Themes are voted for by the public, and entries are played and rated by teams after the end of the jam. The more games you play and rate, the more exposure your game gets on the site. I’d attempt 5 Ludum Dare entries over the next 3 years, but would only actually submit 2 of them.

Baby On Board

The first entry came about mid 2020 during the COVID lock down called Baby on Board built in Gmod. Ever since my time working at Junkfish, I had been fascinated by Gmod as a game making tool.

It was built in the Source engine with an extremely well documented LUA scripting tool layered on top. All the networking code came ready out of the box allowing a multiplayer game to be build with minimal networking knowledge required. I had previously learned how to work in Gmod, using it for a Junkfish prototype years ago. So figured it would be cool to return to it and make something for Ludum Dare.

I teamed up with another developer and we set about building a multiplayer game mode around the theme of “Keep It Alive”. A team of players were tasked with keeping a sinking submarine afloat, fixing holes in the ship, shooting HL2 zombies (it is Gmod after all) and ensuring the Admiral (who had been turned into a baby doll… for some reason) doesn’t drown.

I’ll be honest with you, this thing was barely functional as a game and I’m actually surprised it received the minimum 20 required votes to get officially placed. The barriers of entry to this thing were insane; To actually play it, you needed to:

> Manually place files into different Steam folders
> Own a copy of Gmod
> Set up the game mode within Gmod

And to top it all off, you needed 3 other players to all do the same in order to play (all of which had to add the hosting player on Steam). We optimistically set up a Discord channel to try and organise gaming sessions but sadly (and understandably), no one joined. The Discord server doesn’t appear to exist any more which is a little sad. It amused me to think that someone might stumble across our entry years from now and click the link hoping to find a thriving community of “Baby On Board” players.

The game itself also wasn’t really complete, with a lot of the mechanics barely functioning as intended. This project definitely needed some more time in the oven and I can only assume the 24 people that gave it an average “fun” rating of 2.976 were doing so out of kindness or because of the novelty factor. If you, for some reason, feel compelled to play a half baked Gmod game mode, you can find all the necessary files for it on the Ludum Dare submission page.

The Rubeus Cradle

The Rubeus Cradle was the first game jam attempt done entirely on my own. Having polished up on my Blueprint knowledge prior to the weekend I was ready to dive head first into the shallow end.

I had done little bit of prep work prior to the jam so I wasn’t going in too unprepared; There was a 3D modelling package call Crocotile3D, which took sprite sheets and gave you a relatively usable interface to build them into primitive 3D models. I had tested this out prior, and had surprisingly good results. PS1 Hagrid also made his return, but would ultimately be relegated to a 2D character portrait in the top right. The theme was announced at 11pm as “Unstable” and my mind initially went to an “unstable world”.

I remember spending an embarrassing long amount of time on the first evening just getting a bunch of random geometry to spawn into the level and then awkwardly float away from the player. The blueprints weren’t pretty, and the execution was laughably amateur, but I found myself incredibly proud at 6am, when it all suddenly began to work and I could put away the bottle of wine that had kept me company for the evening, and get some well deserved sleep.

In The Rubeus Cradle, the player took on the role of PS1 Hagrid as he jumped around this strange cosmic environment, collecting seeds, planting them into dirt patches, watering them and ultimately harvesting the berries once they were fully grown. Think of all the tedious resource gathering you do when farming in Minecraft but with none of the crafting that completes the loop and makes the whole process feel satisfying. There were 4 solid islands the player could jump to in order to gather the require tools; Water had to be filled from the well, the hoe needed to be collected to till the land etc. Only one tool could be carried at one time, so you had to keep track of where you left everything.

Between each of these 4 islands, there was 20 unstable platforms that would float and rotate aimless in the abyss. The player could use their wand to pull the platforms towards them and right-clicking on the mouse would lock them temporarily in place. This made the platforms walkable, so the player could navigate between the various islands. Grow and collect 5 berries without falling in the abyss (or losing any of your tools) and you win.

I had wanted to expand on the wand functionality to allow the player to rotate the floating platforms before locking them in place, but at the time of creation, quaternion rotation wasn’t viable in Unreal blueprints, and would require some C++ to get working. Given my only C++ experience was making an ASCII game of minesweeper back in 2010, I did think that it was perhaps a little optimistic of me.

The game wasn’t flashy, but it worked and was completed (somewhat) within the time frame of Ludum Dare, so I was happy with the result. What I find wild however, was that less people played and rated this game than Baby On Board, despite all the faff you had to go through in its set up. There’s a Dropbox link available on the Ludum Dare submissions page if you want to give it a ago.

And there we have it. This was just a brief look into the game jams I have participated in over the last decade. There were others that I haven’t written about (namely because they hardly qualify as “game jam entries”). Most are half baked concepts that I thought would be funny, like the “Anvil of Sodom” a Hagrid themed JRPG made in RPG maker VX that failed due my lack of Ruby knowledge. Or “Carry On Delivering” a stand alone game built on top of Half Life 1, that was based on the Carry On Series (Where that concept came from, I have no idea).

Or the real time digital card game that had a tick rate dictating when the player would draw a card or when an effect would trigger (that one actually had a good design and its a real shame it never materialised as I really think the idea has some fire behind it – though I probably should strip the Hagrid theme out first)

Ultimately, game jams are incredibly fun, and I highly recommend young and enthusiastic developers give them a try if they haven’t. You don’t have to make anything good (I’m evidence of that, and look how my career turned out!), you just need to make something you can look back on in 10 years, feel immensely proud of and then ultimately write a blog post about.

Projects From The Vault

Posted on February 24, 2025 by - Dev Blog

Introduction

Its certainly been a while since I last wrote about any of my work on my site; 7 years to be precise. Rereading the old development posts of CP_Nautilus was like flicking through an old photo album; each memory bringing a strong feeling of nostalgia (but you cringe at the haircuts you thought looked cool). That doesn’t mean I’ve been idly wasted these years, sitting on my hands doing nothing. On the contrary, I had intended to start up numerous development blogs regarding Team Fortress 2 maps I was working on, debriefs of Ludum Dare and GGJ projects I had participated in, rules for boardgame prototypes that cluttered the dining room table in my flat. But, unfortunately, adult life gets in the way. Its been an incredibly busy 7 years with numerous job changes, home moves, literal country moves in the case of the last 2years. The desire to write about my projects, let alone finish them just hasn’t quite been there.

Until now! What I have (like any game designer) is a plethora of unfinished projects that are now ultimately lying on an old HDD in a cupboard somewhere labelled “to finish”. Let’s be realistic, these projects aren’t getting finished. That doesn’t mean they were a waste. I had fun making them and I drew a lot of lessons from the challenges I faced, but I know these projects aren’t getting any more love from me.

What I thought would be fun however, would be go back and document some of these old projects; the context they were made in, my thoughts on them now, as a more experienced and wise developer, and generally just to give them a nice send off. This specific blog will focus on my own solo level design projects, with a separate blog being written up for all the game jams I participated in. So, without further delay, lets dive in.

CP_Nautilus

I’ve written pretty extensively about CP_Nautilus in my previous blog posts. It was my first proper TF2 map, and by far my proudest and most developed project that I’ve worked on in my spare time. It started officially during the month and a half period of unemployment in 2015 that came as a result of the redundancy from my first industry job. I was desperate to get some level design experience and Source provided incredible tools for level designers to work with.

Countless hours of every day in the week, were spent working on this project with no real idea as to what I was actually doing. I was tossing props and brushes into the editor without all that much thought or design, and would then edit until it resembled something that I liked (to be fair, my methods haven’t changed all that much over the years). I remember feeling a real of sense of cabin fever during these long weeks of portfolio work. My only real social contact with another human being being the Starbucks Barista who would consistently write “Grim” on my morning coffee (I still to this day know if this was a genuinely mistake or just a joke I didn’t quite get).

9am – midnight everyday was spent working on the map, but due to a lack of experience, that time was inefficiently used. I spent a lot of time fixing small issues that I would later go on to completely remove. Huge amount of work was wasted after the first iteration of the layout proved too confusing for playtesters and thus needed to be simplified.

I had ambitions that greatly exceeded my skills with the tools, which in principle is a great way to improve, but in practise led to a lot of wasted work in a period where I was desperate for a portfolio piece. Huge lessons were learnt during this period, however the map would ultimately go on hiatus for 3 years after only 1 iteration, as I would get another job in the industry that would eat into my daily hours.

Version 1 was very confusing to navigate and far too detailed in some areas for a greybox that hadn’t been tested

I would return to produce 3 more iterations of the design (documented in blog post a3 and a4). This time, I was far more experienced as a level designer and was more skilled with the Hammer Engine. The design was more refined, the greybox cleaner and I felt like the map was getting into a pretty good state. However I had definitely burnt myself out by the time Version 5 was uploaded to TF2Maps (the website where developers can discuss, host and playtest each other’s maps). I was still working a full time job at a game studio, so all work was being done in the evenings after I had gotten home. The momentum fizzled and ultimately never returned.

The actually VMF file for this map is lost now. In 2021 I build a new computer and stupidly didn’t think to move any files over from my previous HDD. I “think” a copy still exists on my parent’s PC back in my home town. A bit sad to think about how so many hours of work has been lost to the digital void, but some projects are perhaps best left to memory. You can still download the actual BSP file from TF2Maps however and even read the discussion thread. It was actually quite interesting for me to go back to 2015 and read where my thoughts were at the time.

After returning to the map 3 years later, huge areas were re-worked to be cleaner and lighter, as well as addressing a number of the key gameplay issues raised by playtesters 

72 Hour Maps

I thought I’d lump the next 3 maps all together into a single post under the title “72 hour maps”. TF2Maps hosts regular 72 hour mapping contents. The idea being that a mapper sits down for a long weekend and works to complete a map over the course of 72 hours (somewhat similar to a game jam). This is a very taxing experience, however one that is incredibly fun.

Over that last decade I have participated in 3 of these mapping jams, submitting a map for 2 of them. It’s surprising how much work you can get down by not sleeping and living off a diet of endless coffee, however the experience often left me drained of motivation and so these maps never really got worked on after the jam had ended. If you are a level designer, I highly recommend checking these contests out as they are extremely fun and memorable experiences. And so, in chronological order:

pl_distribution [2015]

This was my first 72 hour jam and was probably the one I had the most fun with. I remember carrying my PC back from my office* on the Friday evening it was due to start, setting it up in the living room of my flat and creating the playlist that was going to keep me company for the next 3 days (*I had recently been hired as a level designer for an indie company in Dundee, but the company was running on a tight budget and lacked the money to provide me a PC so I had to use my own – those are the small little details I fondly remember of my time as a game developer in Dundee).

What I created was… something. This was my first map since finishing my initial work on CP_Nautilus, and I was keen to try out a different game mode. Payload maps are interesting and fun to play but ultimately a level designer must approach them with a different design philosophy from capture point maps.

You have a train being pushed along a linear rail so you can almost always predict where the key gameplay is going to take place Not to mention there’s additional logic required just to get the map functioning in the first place. I still remember the relief at 10am on the Saturday morning when the map was finally working and playable.

 (I even took a screenshot to celebrate the occasion)

If I was to do it again, I think I’d aim to get a working version of the map playtested quicker (this seems to be a running theme with a lot of my personal projects). Had the issue of scale and pacing (two issues which ultimately would require a lot of work to rectify) been spotted a day earlier, I think I might have had the energy and determination to get them fixed. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and was proud of myself for actually submitting something, even if it wasn’t my greatest work.

Unfortunately both the VMF and BSP for this map have long since been lost (not even available for download on TF2Maps, which is a shame). I had to dig these images from an old Facebook post from 10 years ago. Maybe one day i’ll stumble across it again and will run around just to see how bad it actually was.

koth_untitled [2017]

My second 72 hour jam event wouldn’t take place for another year and a half, and this one was less successful. I think what didn’t help was they pushed the start time back from 6pm to 11pm, which meant I wasn’t able to quite get the energy from the hype I previously had in 2015 to carry me through the first night. I remember being extremely tired before I had even really begun, and it was only downhill from there.

I can’t even remember all that much, as most of the weekend was a bit of a blur for me. I do recall wanting to make something “alpine themed” and something simpler from the previous attempt in 2015. I settled on a king of the hill game mode set around a broken bridge that had collapsed over a raging river. Clearly I hadn’t got the memo from myself on creating a “simpler design”, as water in Team Fortress 2 has always been an awkward gameplay element to work with (not to mention its implementation within Source is a bit of a pain). I remember spending hours trying to get a flowing water effect to look good, as well as messing around with push entities to force players towards the edge of a waterfall. I’m always in favour of pushing the boundaries on design within games, but I feel a 72 hour mapping contest is perhaps not the best environment to do so.

There’s not too much else to say about this one. I had a full blocked out map, but never got around to actually submitting it or even playing on it. My heart just wasn’t in this one it seems.

pl_carapace [2020]

3 years later and after 5 months of COVID lockdown, I have an itch for another 72 Hour Mapping jam. This one returned to the more appropriate start time for me of 7pm and I was coming in with a little bit of pre-production work already done.

I wanted to make an urban map similar to koth_KongKing but with a payload game mode. This is a highly under utilised texture pack within the TF2 mapping community and one of my favourites. I had a rough paper layout and a collection of reference images to work with. I felt pumped! This was probably my most successful of the 72 hour jams I’ve done, as not only did I get a working level, I even managed to get a second iteration tested and committed.

Now, the final commit still wasn’t great; The urban them never actually made it anywhere into the build and there there were definitely some glaring issues with sightlines in the main area. The city felt a little nonsensical in layout and the scale of the map was still a little big. But overall a huge improvement on both the previous attempts I had made.

I still have the VMF file for this map, however I don’t see myself doing any further work to it. I would rather commit that time to working on a new urban map (but who knows what the future holds for this). You can download the latest BSP from TF2 maps.

cp_SaxtonsBooty

CP_SaxtonsBooty was a project started during the second COVID lockdown in 2020. The map started off as a King Of The Hill map with the hill being the inside of a giant skull cave. Players would approach from either side of the cave and would try to take control of the centre point inside of the skulls mouth. However this type of symmetry in the map design made some issues immediately apparent. In KOTH, designers want the fighting to occur around the Hill (hence the King Of The Hill). Once a team captures the point, they make a effort to fortify their position and then push the enemy team back towards their spawn, whilst the enemy team regains strength, builds up its ubers and prepares for a push on the main point.

When a team is approaching from the side of the Hill, this game plan isn’t quiet as applicable any more. Meaningless fighting occurs from either side and the Hill becomes something of an after thought. I could have found a way to edit the design of the map to make the theme work with the game mode, however after some rethinking, I changed it to a 2 point attack/defend game mode.

The theme of the map remained the same; A pirate shanty town, but now attackers would have to fight their way up through the town. The first point in the lower market place and the final point being inside the mouth of the skull cave. Elevation proved to be a big driving force behind the design as I wanted the attacking team to have a beautiful view of the city and the skull, as they were stormed their way up through the streets.

Credit to Janet Simeonova

My partner at the time sculpted a wonderful skull to be used for the final point and the buildings were built to look like they were constructed from old ship parts. The whole aesthetic was everything I had wanted from the initial concept, however I was running into a number of design problems with this iteration as well. Certain classes in Team Fortress 2 really benefit from height advantage; namely the Soldier, Demoman and Sniper. The elevation would allow the defending team to rain down unimaginable chaos and spam from above. My initial way of solving this was to allow the attacking team to enter most of the houses on the way up.

Attackers could use the walls and ceilings of the buildings as cover for their attack. But this opened up the potential problem of players getting turned around and lost in the maze of the shanty town. I decided to leave that as a future problem to solve and push forward with the greybox, and after a couple of weeks the map really did feel like it was beginning to take shape.

The rough concept of the changed map from KOTH to CP

I really wanted height to play a huge role in the map. This feeling of the shanty town towering down on the attackers

It ultimately would never make it to a playable state which is a shame, since I was extremely fond of the theme, atmosphere and the general direction it was taking. What’s worse is this is another VMF lost to the void. I’m certain there is backed up somewhere in a dropbox or USB stick. I would like to run around it again and see where work can be done to at least get it playable… perhaps a job for a rainy afternoon.

"Misc"

Abertay University Talk Level

This was a quick level that I built along side talk I was preparing for students at my old university. I wanted to have the slides walk through the process of level design and show off images from a consistent project to back it up. I can’t find the slides or any of the other additional materials I used, and the map was never playable, but I still have screenshots saved in my google drive.

Day Of Infamy Train Station

Whilst at the EDGE indie festival in 2017, I had a chat with the New World Interactive dev team about their game Day Of Infamy. When I found out it was built in Source, I said I would have a little play around making a level. The general idea was to build most of the level inside a giant bombed out train station inspired by Grand Central Station in Manhattan and Antwerpen-Centraal station in Antwerp. I didn’t got too far with the project, but it was fun to chat with the devs (and I did get a free T-Shirt out of the whole exchange, so overall I consider that a win).

Doom + Prodeus

At some point over the last 3 or 4 years, I had a desire to work on some old school maps. This ranged from retro games (Doom and Half Life) to newer games styled on retro predecessors (Prodeus) to the downright weird (Daikatana). The Daikatana level never materialised (the level editor was as clunky and awkward as the actual game itself), but a few afternoons were spent messing around in various other engines.

Nothing tangible to show for these, except this neat little gif I found of an underground train level I made one afternoon in the Prodeus level editor.

And that’s it. This has been a dive into a number of the personal projects I started, and ultimately abandoned over the last decade of my life. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip down my memory lane as much as I have. Until next time!

Dev Blog : cp_nautilus_a4

Posted on January 3, 2018 by - cp_nautilus, Dev Blog

Introduction

Like a fart in the wind, alpha 3 came and went with naught but a wrinkled nose and a mutter of “smells a little odd in here”. There were 2 playtests for a3, one that I managed to play in, the other one I did not (and it’s sods law that the one I was unable to attend had almost twice the number of players). Alas we strive on! The biggest problem was that I forgot to change the capping times from “dev” to “test”, so teams were capping points in 5 seconds as opposed to desired 15. See, I want to spend as little time as possible testing out things I already know work, so by setting the cap time to something ridiculous like 5 seconds, I can run through the map very quickly making sure everything else works. Simple… I just need to remember to change them back. And the biggest problem with something like this being an issue is that EVERY TESTER FEELS THE NEED TO TELL YOU. It’s not that the feedback isn’t useful, it’s just that you only need one or two people telling you it’s wrong for you to get the idea, and if everyone is telling you the capping time is too low, they aren’t focusing on other more important things like “map is confusing”, “This sightline is busted”, “Spies are terrible here because there’s no great ammo routes” etc – Basically stuff that I hadn’t noticed, that I could iterate on. It’s one of the main reasons you should clip alpha stages of your map. Because if you don’t, players never shut up about it, they get fixated on it and it distracts from your playtest.

Now don’t get me wrong. This isn’t the tester’s fault at all; This rather morbid smelling slip of gas is completely on me, and I know for a fact that if I was playtesting a game or a map and there was a giant Error message on my screen, i’d probably point it out too. But it does sort of soil the whole testing experience.

Alpha 3

That saiddddddd, both play tests offered me great feedback, although I sort of knew going in what one of the MAJOR flaws in Nautilus was; BLU spawn. With the Alpha 3 overhaul I did just enough to make this section playable but knew it wasn’t great, that said the minute I started properly running around it and testing it out, I realised it was worse that I initially anticipated.

  • BLU spawn was too close to Point A

It was far too close to the spawn for one thing and the routes were just corridors (there was no meaningful or fun combat zones that the players could actively fight in). Typically there’s an open area when BLU initially run to their death upon the spawn doors opening, followed by some connecting rooms that lead to the first point. This allows RED a chance to hold off BLU and let the time count down before inevitably having to fall back to the point to defend. Nautilus didn’t have that. Instead players could run straight from the spawn, through a few corridors and right onto the point with little to no meaningful resistance. Coupled with the botched cap time and it was safe to say that RED weren’t happy. The first port of call was to open some of the early sections of the map up even further as well as move the point away from the BLU spawn.

  • The lower path now lead to nowhere

Another issue which manifested itself from the redesign was that right path lead to a lower level that sort of went nowhere. It originally led to the point but after hacking apart A in alpha 3 the area seemed a little redundant. I had a thought that it would allow demos and soldiers a chance to get some height on the point, but they could do that anyway (and without damage) via the middle route. So the area was just a bit of a waste.

When BLU got to the point problems went from bad to worse for RED as the small area for the teams to fight in meant sentry guns were useless and what small defence RED had could be wiped out reasonably easily. Overall A and BLU spawn held on to too much of the original design and the end result was just a bit of a mess. And the cherry on top of all this trash was the giant sight line from RED forward spawn to the point that I somehow managed to miss. It was clear that I was going to need to strip all this out and start again.

  • Navigation was still a mess

Other sections didn’t fare much better; For some reason I removed the stairs out of the far side of B’s pit in alpha 3 and as such falling in there was practically a death sentence as the stairs to the left were the only way out (short of rocket jumping). Thinking back I think it might have been to make space for the huge and out of place ramp down to the lower levels of C… my bad. The main route from the final red spawn to B was also a nightmare for many not really knowing where to go. In fact navigation throughout the whole level was generally a nightmare with players frequently getting lost. This is the problem with working on something so closely for such a long time is that you’ve got the layout memorised, you could fly through it in your sleep! But hand it someone completely new and there’s a good chance that of the 3 direct routes to the point, they’ll take the 4th and end up in the ass end of nowhere. And so once again, I picked up my hammer for we had some building to do.

Alpha 4

  • BLU spawnroom update

Ooft another big one, lets get too it! First I completely rebuilt the spawn room. Typically in Team Fortress 2, spawns rooms for the blue team start in a single room and then branch out of the antechamber into a much large room with multiple exists for attack. This is to prevent spawn camping and cramming everyone into a tiny room. The previous spawn room was guilty of this so it had to go. It’s still not perfect in my eyes (would ideally like it even bigger!) but it’s a start.

BLU’s spawn room got a complete makeover

And now it even has an antechamber!

From the screenshots you can also see that the lighting has changed. In an attempt to actually make the name cp_Nautilus make sense, I’ve tried to give it a more aquatic colour scheme. It’s very much in it’s experimental phase right now, but as the next few updates come out, i’m hoping to solidify the lighting and underwater skybox.

  • Burn it all down! And by that I mean Point A

I stripped all of the starting area out save for a few elements that I actually quite liked. So let’s start with the giant pointless middle section. It served ZERO purpose in Alpha 3 acting as a little spot for players to run down, look around, shrug and then ultimately get killed by a stray Demoman pill – fun right? I wasn’t 100% what i wanted to do with this area, just that I wanted it to be grand! In Alpha 3 the structure in front of the point felt a little… weird. It didn’t make sense; “why was it there? Why did the architect decide it was needed!? That said, I actually quite liked the structure of it and wanted to try and preserve it in some way.

The main room was completely opened up allowing more room to breath. It’s still not perfect, but it’s a huge step in the right direction

So I kept what i could and started hacking apart the rest. I drastically raised the ceiling and spread out the geometry. The old A had a very claustrophobic feel which many people complained about. These changes were designed to fix that.

I also really liked the idea of flooding the lower level. There’s something about water maps that I really enjoy, and I feel mappers are often hesitant to add large amounts of it to their tf2 maps (let alone incorporate it into their gameplay). Let’s face it, the Water Temple is the second best dungeon in OOT.

At first I was going to have a lower passage almost fully submerge the player underwater leading to a longer and more dangerous route that would appear behind the point allowing for ambushes, but felt that was maybe a bit over the top. So I instead settled for a giant overflowing pool in the main room that’s subsequently flooded the lowest level of the map up to about shin height. I was informed during playtest that if it’s too high it can negatively impact rocket jumping but no one seemed to actually experience this. A lot of people liked the theme though, so it’s definitely something i might push further.

Point A’s “fight” area was made far larger, the top passage allowed for a quick route to the point but is poor in cover so players risk getting picked off by snipers and sentry guns down the corridor. A lower route was added which connected to the main hall. This was the longest of the routes but appeared behind the point offer great ambushing potentials for spies and scouts. After watching a few games and thinking more about this route, i’m not actually the biggest fan of it and instead might have it go under the points instead in Alpha 5. The middle route takes players to the right either behind the waterfall or through the sub room. It’s very similar to alpha 3’s route, but takes a little longer.

Point A was opened up allowing for less CQC

  • Rebuilt RED forward spawn

That nasty sight line had to go so i moved the whole spawn room back around the corner and rebuilt it to better suit it’s new position. Someone actually complimented how it looked which was nice since it’s entirely dev brushes. I agree with this individual, it DOES look nice! Too bad it’s getting even more modifications in Alpha 5 – RIP RED forward spawn (a4-a4). Players now had to leave the spawn and follow the arrows around the corner to the point before they could defend it which made for a far more bloody capture of A than in alpha 3 (where they could all stand by the spawn door firing rockets and sniper shots at a completely exposed point).

  • Added a BLU forward spawn and re-added ramps at B

People were complaining that they needed to walk a great distance from BLU spawn to C after capping B, and whilst I do sympathise, I just assumed engineers would build teleports… Alas I caved to the pressure and threw one in by B point. While I was there I also made the area a little wider and re-added the ramps.

A forward spawn was added near B for BLU and the ramps made their majestic return

  • General fixes

Finally I fixed the capping timers along with a few clipping issues. Moved a bunch of pickups around to compensate for the new geometry changes and replaced a bunch of the crate brushes with actual props as people were complaining the off grid brush was messing with their sticky bombs.

Conclusion

And there is alpha 4! It’s been uploaded now for over a month so I’ve already watched a few playtests of it (was unfortunately down South for Christmas so didn’t get a chance to play in any =[ ). Now that the Christmas holidays are officially over I’m ready to ramp back up to speed and get Alpha 5 on the go! Lots of changes to B coming in the future; it’s holding on to too much of the alpha 2 past and must be stripped away for fresh new and more interesting ideas! Nautilus is moving in the right direction, but there’s still a huge amount of work to do!

Dev Blog : cp_nautilus_a3

Posted on December 7, 2017 by - cp_nautilus, Dev Blog

A note regarding version numbers

cp_nautilus_a1 and a2 were almost entirely identical with a2 being released a day later fixing a bunch of simple gameplay issues in a1 that should have been there on release; lack of clipping brushes on stairs, lack of nobuild brushes in grated off areas and actually adding health/ammo pickups etc – hey we all make mistakes on our first upload.

Introduction

Around April 2015 I started work on my first actual Source map. I’d always wanted to create TF2 maps; Having sunk a good 1000 hours of my childhood into the game, I figured i had the game knowledge down and as someone who wanted to move into level design it seemed only fitting that I started mapping. But prior to that, I had neither the time, knowledge nor motivation to learn how to create a map in Hammer (great for an aspiring level designer, I know).

Redundancy from my first job then hit and I suddenly had an abundance of time and inspiration on my hands (it’s surprising how the desire to not starve motivates a person). And so, out of the dust that was my first job in the industry came cp_nautilus_a2! And well… it was a hot mess. A valiant effort (so I’ve been told) for a first attempt at a map, but still a mess of brushes, meshes and level logic that sort of fuse into something resembling a TF2 map.

cp_nautilus_a2 was a 3 point Attack/Defend CP map. For those who don’t play TF2, Attack/Defend maps revolve around BLU team needing to push and capture one point after the other (usually in an linear sequence), whilst RED team set up defences and hold off at each point for as long as they can. BLU team wins if all points are captured and RED wins if they hold out until the round timer reaches 0.

I really like attack/defend style maps; they offer a certain “narrative” to a multiplayer map that’s missing from regular 5 point symmetrical CP maps. There’s a definitive start, middle and end which allows room for a designer to outline a story within the flow of the level;

“Players start on a train, they push into the station and then onto the streets, through alleys and the city square, reaching the climax and a final showdown infront of city hall”.

All you then need is the players to fill in the pieces. Anyone who’s played a multiplayer shooter has had that one game where the round timer is almost up and your team makes the Hail Mary push that wins you the game. Attack/Defence maps accommodate this narrative really well and is why, in my opinion, they are so highly rated in the TF2 community (Dustbowl despite it’s flaws is the second most played map after 2Fort and even the most hardened of TF2 players can’t tell you exactly why 2Fort is so popular as it’s a pretty terrible map all things considered).

Alpha 2

“Birth” – cp_nautilus_a2

Why Nautilus? The original theme was to be an underwater facility of some sort. As such it was dark, dank, grimy and generally an unappealing place – this would subsequently be a regular complaint the map received as TF2 is traditionally a bright colourful experience, and many didn’t think the “grittier” feel suited the style of the game. But on top of that, the map just wasn’t that great. So what made the map such a mess?

  •  From a design perspective it was a navigational nightmare 

BLU team exit the spawn from one of two exits; the left path leads BLU into either this side building or up a ramp to the upper level, whilst the right path offers 4 routes (one to the left path, one to the upper level, one to point A and one to point B). Despite the navigational signs, the flow of the right path naturally leads players to Point B which was a common issue in the first play through and the left path took the players through the building down a random side passage. Neither path’s natural flow took the player to Point A which led to many players getting lost in the belly of the map before even capturing the first point.

The lack of a forward spawn for RED meant that all defenders were also spawning at the very back of the map and needing to trek past Point C and B just to reach the initial point of combat. The layout was just too confusing for many new players and no amount of arrows was likely to help.

Straight out of the BLU spawn there were 4 possible routes for the player to take. The natural flow always took them to 4 which was the one i didn’t want them to initially take.

  • It was a technical mess

I’ll cut myself some slack on this one as it was my first map, but there were a bunch technical blunders that made iterating on the map somewhat awkward. The entire map was built on a grid size of 1; this is not only evidence of sloppy brushwork, but also meant even the most minor of changes risked creating a leak. Clipping brushes on the spawn doors didn’t block projectiles meaning players could kill each other before the round started. The displacements used around Point A and C were laughable (and still are in a3). Stair height and width weren’t in keeping with official TF2 standards, it all just screamed amateur, which is totally understandable (i had only been mapping for a month at that point); But fixing these problems would be a mammoth task and one i wasn’t too eager to engage upon at the time.

  • It was detailed too early

I made the excuse back in a2 that the reason I was detailing early was to give myself a feel for the theme and setting, as well as refine some of the layout design. In hindsight this was a terrible excuse and it subsequently hurt the map. Small detailing is fine, it makes an alpha map look a little more than just a bunch of brushes thrown around. But too much and iteration becomes difficult. I remember opening this map and being faced with an mess of brushes and meshes. It was exhausting to even look at, let alone start to make changes to.

This is way too detailed for an A1 version of a map (to be honest it’s too detailed for even a B1).

  • It was half finished

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Point C was sort of “half assed”. There were long empty rooms with nothing in them except boring geometry that served only as a way of connecting one point to another. The consistency was just jarring.

A few rooms were just boring and empty. You can definitely see the exact point of the map where i stopped caring.

  • Did anything go right?

Behind all this negativity however, there was actually a huge amount of positive gain from nautilus. It got me involved with the TF2 mapping community, it taught me the importance of testing early, testing frequently. I actually had a working map (which is more than can be said for future projects) and i learnt a lot about the Source engine in general. But for the most part I saw it as an unsalvageable project.

And so the map gathered dust. I found a new job shortly after the release of a2 so decided to shelve nautilus, reopening it a few times in some wild attempt to fix it, but nothing ever materialised. It served as a reminder to me as to “what not to do” when making a map and taught me a lot about the mapping development process. I would go on over the next 2 years to build a bunch new levels, only some of which getting close to a1, but nothing to the scale of nautilus.

Alpha 3

“The Rebirth” – cp_nautilus_a3

Until now baby! WOOOOOOO. cp_nautilus_a3 was uploaded to TF2Maps.com 4 days ago and we are good to spin it for another round! I can’t remember what gave me the idea to go back to this monstrosity, but i’m glad I’m did as the rework of nautilus has rekindled that drive to get a map out of the alpha stage and onto the workshop!

Oh boy where do i begin with this one;

  • Fixing those darn technical issues

Before any major work could begin on the layout, the entire thing needed to be moved onto a larger grid. So the previous map was moved onto a grid size of 4. I would have liked it on something larger like 16, but I went a little crazy with some of the angles so 4 will suffice for now. It is however, far more manageable than it was before which was ultimately the whole point of fixing it up. This took an uncomfortably large amount of time to change, so people take note; DON’T BUILD ON A GRID SIZE OF < 4.

The stairs and door frames were all rebuilt to the proper standardised scale, and the spawn doors were fixed to prevent those pesky bullets, pills and rockets entering the spawn rooms. The forward spawn for RED was also added and working (although for some reason it churns out a bunch of console errors that seem to have zero impact of the functionality of the spawn room… will look into that one later).

  • Rebuilding of Point A and C

Point A and C recieved large geometry overhauls. I tried to keep as much of the original layout as possible (building on top of trash is often better than building from scratch), so whatever geometry could be salvaged was.

Point A had the right path blocked up only offering BLU 2 choices (one to the upper level, the other to the Point) and the left path had the awkward side room stripped out now only offering the player one route to the point. It’s more linear and streamlined (some might say too linear) but will hopefully allow for an easier navigation route to point A. A RED forward spawn was added down the end of the tunnel (with a second door exiting onto the centre HUB room) that offered the defence a direct path to A. Fingers crossed players actually make it to the correct point this time!

Point A was completely rebuilt,opened up and rotated 45°

I added some giant windows and a skybox as people complained about the lack of natural lighting and replaced that horrid corridor connect A to B with a much nicer connecting room. The centre “HUB” connecting room was slightly adjusted to accommodate for the new layout changes and the whole point of A was placed at a 45° angle to offer a more visually appealing and interesting layout (I’ll touch on this later, but upon reflection I feel it was a mistake).

Point B mostly had it’s detail stripped out and the layout of the room simplified. Also added a giant ramp down to the lower level

Not much change to Point B. A an awkward ramp was ham-fisted in to connect it to the lower levels of C (this will most likely get remade in the next update) and the original connection to C on the east wall was blocked off.

Point C however, was the shining beacon that made this update for me. It’s a three tiered descent down to the control point that obvious favours attackers but from a narrative perspective It feels like a satisfying end to a 3 point attack/defend map (I’m going to make it work… somehow). The large open area and obvious height advantage to BLU offers demos, soldiers and Snipers crazy good sight lines so that’s definitely something I’m going to have to keep an eye on.  More routes and cover are definitely needed to allow RED to reach some of the higher levels undamaged/detected, but its a huge step forward in the maps layout and now serves as the “money shot”.

[twentytwenty]

The final point is a 3 storey descent into the depths of the mountain

  • Stripped out the detail

a3 might actually look like a step backwards from a2 visually, but honestly I think it was for the best. The detail can be added back in when needed, but for now a quick pipeline that allows for fast iteration and compiling is crucial and that just wasn’t happening in a2. I’m still working on what i want to achieve with this visually, but I have some ideas that I think will work quite nicely.

Post Alpha 3

So going forward what needs doing:

  • Lots of play testing!

I have a plan to get at least 2 tests of cp_nautilus_a3 done before considering any changes. I know what I want to do with some parts of the map, would like some actually play time in it first before I go ahead.

  • More geometry changes

Point A is still a mess. I put this almost entirely down to the fact that I tried to maintain as much of the previous version as I could. I also blame the 45° angle change i made last minute. It was poorly thought through and as a result has some really weird geometry around A. Furthermore, it’s WAY too close to the first point. I’m surprised this was never brought up in the original play test of a2, but time from spawn to first contact at A is really short and needs to be extended. a4 will likely see another overhaul of this point.

Point B is going to get some more love as well. It’s a little cramped and honestly not that interesting of a combat area. I’ll likely make some small changes at first and if I’m not satisfied I might burn the whole centre section to the ground and build it from scratch… I’ll see how I feel on the day.

Conclusion

So there we have it. After 2 and a half years of sitting on my hard drive, cp_nautilus is back on the construction line and with all the ideas and experience I have accumulated from those years ready to be unleashed, I’m excited to see what the future brings.