KotH Farm51_a2

MegapiemanPHD

Doctorate in Deliciousness
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Mar 31, 2012
1,937
1,280
My contest for the 2014 summer 72 hour mapping contest. A alien saucer has crashed into a barn and Red n Blu fight over who gets to see what's inside. While I do like how the looks of this map turned out, I'm not sure how it will play. Unfortunately I feel that I went against the purpose of the contest by making a basic KotH map instead of being more creative. I still learned a lot though, such as how to make a decent 3D skybox. Something's up with the lights though as they are way too bright in the final compile. They wern't anywhere near that bad in my fast compiles so I didn't catch it in time to fix, if anyone has any ideas on why it's so bright please let me know.
 
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Freyja

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Jul 31, 2009
2,994
5,813
Here was my feedback in my voting post about this map.

koth_farm51
This map is really nice in a lot of ways. Unfortunately, the way it's set up brings the focus of fighting away from the point, which is the worst thing a koth map can do. I think the main reason for this is that the point - or more correctly, where it is, isn't immediately visible until you're essentially on the point. A lot more signage would help, as well as opening up the map a bit. The map in general was a little cramped, and I think there needs to be a larger distance between point barn and spawn building, as much of the battle takes place in that yard, which isn't fun right out of spawn.

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Most of the fighting takes place in these areas. Essentially, right now your map takes the focus away from the point which turns the map largely into a free-for-all deathmatch style map. This can be okay if it's what you're going for, Harvest does this and many people enjoy it.

Regardless of what you want to focus on, I think opening up the map a bit would vastly improve it. Most good koth maps, like Lakeside and Viaduct, have three "yards." They have the one right outside spawn, on viaduct this is very large. Then they have a building, behind that they have another larger yard. And then they have the point after that.

Currently, your map is lacking the yard right out of spawn. People are dumped directly into the yard just before the point and this causes most of the fighting to happen there, rather than over the point. This, combined with the fact that the yard is MUCH more separated from the point than other koth maps, causes the fighting to occur around the point.

What I would do was take your spawn back. You can almost keep the connections from the spawn area to the yard you have already, but make the spawn father back from that to give a bit of buffer for the fighting.

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This flank is almost never used, except for people retreating from the point. This causes the point to have effectivly only two routes onto it, which feeds heavily back into the previous problem.

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Red is the places people spawn from, while blue is the direction their attention is focused at the time. This is primarily why most of the fighting happens in this area. As you can see though, coming from spawn, there's no way for people to notice the far right flank, and so they funnel down the left side of the map rather than across the point.

If you move the spawn back, you could probably make it a bit easier for players to exit. Alternativly, making that yard wider would make that route more into view, or make the entrance from where the health packs currently area.

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This green light is horribly disconcerting and even messes with team colours. If you want to keep it, tone it down a lot.

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I don't like how much clutter there is in this room either. It creates a lot of awkward movements and collisions. This would work much better as a stairway and give moving around the point much more dynamic fighting. If you remove a lot of the clutter in this room I think it'll also improve the fighting in here.
 

Idolon

they/them
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Feb 7, 2008
2,105
6,106