Help me... help you... help me.

I'd say start with a koth, that's what I'm doing. A smaller map means less commitment, not as many entities to worry about, optimization not as critical, layout not as complicated, giving more time to learn to work with brushes and displacements, and with a bit of pre-planning you can extend it into a 5cp push map later.

My first forays into mapping were just throwaway stuff I never planned to use. A terrible attempt at a 5CP layout, a single giant control point room that I started adding on to for detailing practice, that sort of thing.

Tips from someone with a bit of experience:
1st tip: Plan ahead! I have several sketches of possible tf2 layouts on my bedroom, so I work on then. To get a good layout, see what VALVe has done. Some are ingenious (Nucleus), some are interesting (Badlands), some are just straight forward (Granary), some are simple, yet with something that marks the map (Gorge). Change the layout, create new doors, close old ones, change cp location, until it's your map now.

2nd tip: Related to my post in your other thread, it was just something really stupid I did. But I learned the basics. Everything you do gives you another bit of experience. Or do you think Coldfront came out that awesome just by luck?

3rd tip: Go at pubs, at lobbies, whatever, collect feedback based on yourself and other players. In CTF, people want Scouts to get the intel. In 5CP, people attack at one point and leave a defense at another. What are the most exciting periods? Why?

4th tip: Read tutorials, explore the dev wiki, learn design and detail theory, check MangyCargace's Frontier Essay, if you didn't got all of that, learn. Learn. That is the key part. You can combine all of those into one map, but it still will have its flaws. How you can fix? That's the art of level desing. Predicting the changes you will have to do. If you do something wrong, change. If you do something right, keep it. It's just like that. No wierd ass thing.


Basically, learn what you can do and how you can do something on Hammer.
Oh, and the "block" from the Block Tool is called a brush.

Definitely read through as many of the design theory tutorials you can get your hands on over in our tutorials section. I say that you should just start making some kind of map, it doesn't matter what. Just do something to learn, but be prepared to throw it out. I half-finished and then threw out three maps, and I've only just started working on one that I intend to see through to completion. Basically, just read tutorials, ask questions in the TF2maps.net steam group chat, and map.

GPuzzle said:

check MangyCargace's Frontier Essay

Click to expand...

Is that this? The link is broken.

Make a MVM map!

Actually that could be hard for a beginner, but the layouts and detailing are simple.

lazugod said:

Is that this? The link is broken.

Click to expand...

Yes. But the link is not broken for me. Are you sure you have a dropbox account?

You don't need dropbox to view dropbox files.