Over the past 4-5 months, I have just been busy. I haven't been able to play competitive video games, nor have I been able to do what I want to do other than schoolwork. On top of this, my computer had a tendency to blue screen every few hours when it was open (For some reason it was trying to load windows off of a separate drive I have when windows was already loaded into memory or something crazy like that?) Anyways, I fixed the problem, and I feel creative.

A while back I participated in a 72 hour Team Fortress 2 Mapping contest. I did ok in it, but I really didn't like my product. Well, another one is coming up, and it coincides with a small break in classes for me. So I'm going to try to do that one as well. But I haven't mapped since basically. So I want to try to get back into the swing of level design. Shouldn't be too hard, right?

To do this, I've decided I'm going to try to develop a decent level over the course of two weeks, starting today. I've decided to start drawing inspiration from different sources for Team Fortress 2's levels. Of these, the two main ones would be new updates for two of Valve's games: Team Fortress 2 itself and Counterstrike: Global Offensive.

I'll begin by saying what I want to do. I want to make an urban styled TF2 map in a similar vein to the map cp_steel, made by Fishbus. cp_steel is a 5 capture point attack/defend map, where Blu has the option of attacking either an incremental of four points or the final point at any given time. By capturing each of the four incremental points, the last point becomes slightly easier to cap, adding things like extending bridges, railings, or moving the Red spawn to a location that makes it harder to defend from.

I'll start by looking at what valve did in the new Two Cities update for Team Fortress 2. Specifically, the map mvm_mannhattan.

http://puu.sh/5Xc3A.jpg

http://puu.sh/5Xc6I.jpg

http://puu.sh/5Xc8h.jpg

http://puu.sh/5XcaE.jpg

Some example images. Note the red brick structure, the usage of yellow in certain areas, and the city construction of it all. This is a TF2 city map. The only one, really. At least of the style I want to. I mean there's Hong Kong and I guess German Village now in TF2 as well, but this style encompasses what I want. The lighting is kinda dull and it's just got an old time city feel to it. This is what I'm aiming for.

On to Counterstrike, in the new update, Valve released the map de_overpass to parts of the public for playtesting. In this map, the goal of the terrorists is to place a bomb on an overpass.

Some images from this

http://puu.sh/5Xcsw.jpg

http://puu.sh/5Xcur.jpg

http://puu.sh/5XcwR.jpg

I like the idea of having green in the map I plan to make. A park for one of the points, or something like that. This map has that. It also has an overpass, something I feel like would make sense in a city based TF2 map. So I want to try to incorporate those two elements into the map somehow.

In about 5 minutes I sketched up something basic for one of the areas, or a look at part of an area.

http://i.imgur.com/vGCKprB.jpg

It's not much but it'll get me started. I'm going to start on the actual blocking out today, and hopefully I'll have a version either out or done on christmas or the day after. That's not very far from now though, so I'll have to be fast.

EDIT: Oh, and I'm calling the map cp_windycity until I can think of a better name.