Team Fortress 2 Map

3 Month of development - Hammer Engine

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United Kingdom

Western Air Temple

The level I’ve developed it’s a fully working Team Fortress 2 map for the game mode “King of The Hill”.

After a consistent inspiration phase, I then switched to the Hammer Engine, a quite old one compared with the Unreal's comfort zone I have been used to. That was the point of the module: Learning how to effectively transfer our game-designing skills to completely different development tools.

Check the full design documentation here: Team Fort 2 - Design Doc

Structure Overview

Verticality was one of my main objectives while working on this map, I wanted a structure where the control point would have been located in the low ground while the spawn points would have been at the top.

This vertical layout allows the creation of many routes to engage the objective & flank the enemies that are all intricately positioned above one another.

Initial Iteration & Inspiration

The inspiration phase for my map has been quite important, having a recognizable look it’s something that benefits the entire enjoyment of it. I’ve started everything by looking at other games maps, landscapes and shapes, I’ve seen that I found inspiring.

At the same time, I also started drawing different shapes from a 2-D perspective, so that I would have a solid base when starting to block out in engine

Affordance Considerations

Player’s affordance is mostly handled in 3 ways: Gravity, Arrows & Light.

Gravity:

Gravity is used in a very subtle way. It’s just because of how my map is designed: Going low-ground means getting closer to the center of the action. Raising ramps of the belonging team color will inevitably bring players to a safer location (The section below about the sight-line explains better this concept)

Arrows:

I used the big arrows with the players’ team colors in them to indicate the fastest direction to the capture point. In situations where there is a longer path that might still lead to the capture point, I used a less pretty arrow sign, and if followed will bring the player to the standard arrow once the path will get closer to the Capture point.

Light:

The lighting is very important in my map, that’s because the sun's position gives an excellent visual reference for new players while exploring. The amount of direct sunlight will change depending on the player's position on the map (without being too dark).

Sight Line

The player’s sight-line was something that always concerned me from the start of the development.

The challenge of my map is that at the spawn point, players are already on high ground. If this is not tuned, there could be the issue where in my map only snipers are in advantage, because they would just have to hold a safe position and keep an eye on the objective below.

For my structure, I’ve used the upside-down temple gimmick to have a consistent vertical cover that prevents long-range units to have an advantage over short-range troops trying to catch the capture point. Basically, if you are in one of the teams' bases, you will have almost 0 sights over the main objectives. This will force players to descend into low-ground where they will slowly start to have a wider view over the battlefield.

Changes & Furter Iterations

During the development, my map received many fixes and improvements in many areas thanks to the playtest sessions and feedbacks session where I had to observe how the work was flowing. The changes you can see below are a mix of the main ones that have been quite beneficial to the final iteration of the map.

Inspiration from Valorant

After the main locations of the level were reworked, I made additional tweaks based on other friends' feedback but also from other games with similar changes. In particular Valorant. I used to play a lot Valorant, it was interesting to see how after some updates developers made changes to specific sections in maps that once I thought were already fine, but after some additional analysis, it became clearer why some zones of those maps were considered unfair for players of all skill gap.

With these references, I applied this mindset to my map and started questioning a little bit everywhere if some corners could have been iterated a bit more; I don't believe the works are perfect, but I think anyway that this additional iteration helped the overall enjoyment of the map.

Check out other game/level design projects I've made:

Pilots

Peril

Portal 2

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