Technically the first version of Roman Gardens was created somewhere in the year 2019 where I had the same idea as above, except I had no idea what I was doing. That version, as you can see on the left, never made it far and was likely significantly worse than the current one given that it was never playtested.

The next version of Roman Gardens in an unexpected twist actually made it to the end development. Opening this map up to take the screenshot to the left actually left me feeling really sad and disappointed, hours upon hours of work thrown away. A whole finished version of a map scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up. Why? The answer lies in one simple concept that I suspect may be the downfall of many new mappers. Playtesting. For some reason, not once did I think to play this map early on with bots or people. When I did finally play with bots, expecting to see my creation do its finest work I was instead met with a pitiful mess that was waaaaay too large and open for its own good. Thus the map you see was scrapped completely, the only thing remaining of this version in the final map is aspects of its design like the floors and walls on the side (which are now their own custom textures, taken directly from this failed map as a tribute to it) and the rest of the design ques. Let this forgotten version be a lesson to all mappers starting out, playtesting is VERY IMPORTANT and you SHOULD be spending some of your time doing it.

The weeks following the restart of Roman Gardens were a time where I worked on Faculty Errand 2 out of a need to recover from having had to scrap something as large as that. I needed a break from it, so I took one. Not much happened to Roman Gardens during this time.

From the ashes of the previous Roman Gardens, the current Roman Gardens was born. The development of this map went along much faster than the last, which was a relief to me considering how long I had spent on the last iteration. I was determined to fix the mistakes I had made last time and make this the last restart that needed to happen. This time, the map was playtested as soon as a layout was created (as a map should be). From there that layout was refined to be smaller and more fitting to CSGO's Arms Race gameplay.

Eventually I had the idea to add two cramped side areas to the map, which I thought would make the gameplay more tactical like CSGO intended for it to be. To an extent this worked and definitely made the map more pretty and varied. I guess I've always had a problem with putting beauty before gameplay, huh. In any case, these side areas could still probably have used more work and could be updated in the future.

The rest of the development went pretty smoothly and mostly consisted of constant testing, clipping surfaces accurately, detailing and navmesh editing (more on this in a moment). I tried adding color correction, but the more I tried to add it, the more it the benefits were outweighed by how ancient and poorly thought out Source's tools are in some places. In the end, I'm pretty sure I would have had to make the color correction in a different game and port over the file which is ridiculous and I wasn't going to waste time with that.

Next came the outside areas of the map, this is mostly comprised of the skybox but there are a few parts outside the playable area that aren't. This was done relatively quickly compared to my other work on this map and I'm pretty happy with the result. I even included a few crates on the side of the main building area so that you could see outside of the map if you so pleased.

The last thing I did to the map before release was spruce it up a little with the addition of overlays and decals, and then it was finished. The work of many months, failures and successes in all, and tired evenings finally coming to a close on December 11-12th 2020. Roman Gardens was finally released to the public on the 13th of December and remains my favorite map that I've made for now.