That’s a good question. I’m not really sure what’s been up lately. I’ve been so busy during the last couple weeks that I just haven’t had a chance to really get the stuff done that I’ve been hoping to accomplish level wise. Here is what’s been happening. I started creating the level pictured here and I think I made it too large and it just doesn’t seem to work. I have this huge middle section to the map that I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out what to do with it so I’m just about ready to scrap the whole map and start a new one and maybe salvage some pieces of the current map into the next one.

These are really just early screenshots. At this point I’m really trying to just find the direction gameplay wise for where these maps are going to go. Let me try and explain what happened.

First I started creating the map with the idea that it would be a bank and one of the teams would start outside the bank in a loading dock which I’ve built and that the teams would run into the bank. I then decided that maybe it would look better as a shopping mall but after starting to build that, I quickly realized that Valve doesn’t include very many thinks that would work well as a shopping mall. I wanted to add some glass to the level that would break because I thought that would look cool.

Then I ended up creating a really large room that I was going to fill with an escalator, a glass ceiling in part and lots of racks of clothing and other merchandise. The problem I ran into was a gameplay issue. It’s not fun to play. Running through a detail store is kind of cool but there are too many places to be killed from and it becomes less skill and more about getting lucky by finding someone among all the racks of clothing.

I cleared out the room then of everything and then added massive amounts of boxes as fillers. After testing some different positions for the boxes, I still wasn’t able to really make a gameplay that seemed to fit. The space just seemed too large. It took about 14 seconds for each team to reach the center of the map. Again, this goes back to my 10 second rule I talked about before. It shouldn’t take a team more than 10 seconds to reach the center point.

So at this point, I’m thinking that I need to get rid of the middle room which then changes the map quite a bit in terms of what I’d need to rebuild and rework. I’m thinking I’ll build a bomb map which is quite a bit different from the death match style maps I’ve been building. Bomb maps tend to need to be more of a circular map with death match often being somewhat longer.

Here are some screenshots of the maps. Let me know if you have any ideas.