Well, here's the stuff I did on paper for my koth_egan_72 entry:
Page 1: Initial brainstorm
I started with the idea of 'bosses' because I like fighting bosses and the pd_egan_72 entry from Jan 2015 seemed to suggest that the idea could work somehow. A while ago in the steam group chat I talked with Fanta & Ibex at 3 A.M. about the desire for the juggernaut gamemode like
dm_egan to work better and Fanta suggested just having one boss per team - and that idea lingered till now.
I thought about doing one boss per team in the form of a single flag pickup that shapeshifted the holder into a boss target and
somehow he was important to the gamemode. It could be koth, I write. I wrote down suggestions and ideas that popped into my head to counter the points and ideas, etc: Why are bosses important - koth so maybe the timer goes down each time a boss dies - what if the 'boss' was a noob scout who picked up the flag and died, would be like sabotaging his team - what if there were multiple flags then, one for each player on the team, or you could 'opt-in' to the boss system at a price..
I figured there were a lot of variables I could tweak and maybe a different idea would be better.
Page 2: Idea #2
This was poking into the desire of strict deathmatch-inspired gameplay that I am (apparently) looking for. The idea was to, as shown, have a kill count on your screen (like pd_watergate_b5) and an ability to deposit these kill amounts slowly into the koth point to decrease your timer even more - kills would be important in koth.
I should mention now that I am not too much of a fan of regular koth because it generally doesn't matter if I live or die, as long as we can defend the hill. It might be a pub mindset, and in that sense not wholly true, but typically you can get a kill and die and that's fine.. In arena mode on the other hand, not only is your survival incredibly important but just hitting
some damage on enemy players is important, your life matters
so much more, and it's awesome.
The more I thought into this the more I realised I was just digging myself towards the gamemode of the current pd_watergate where you can collect beers from dead players and deposit the potential to score actual points. I then go on to briefly ask myself what was wrong with WG.
Page 3: A decent idea
So, this is now going back to the idea from page 1 where there are multiple flags, but in this mode it would be everybody's first life. So, you spawn into the map, koth timer set to like 1 or 2 minutes.. everybody is given minor buffs and staying alive is important, if you die you lose your buffs till the next round - would be unlike arena where people don't respawn and get annoyed.
I discussed the potential boss buffs and the pros/cons of each, and I even starting thinking of the sketch for the map overall. Would be a koth map with a mid similar to Viaduct, Granary, & Highpass, and connectors similar to arena maps like Offblast.
At this point in time it was ~4am and I slept. A few days later I picked up the idea again and thought about it more, detailed the sketch a bit more, and (after looking over the rules to make sure it was allowed again) sketched out the general layout of its mid in hammer:
Of course come time of the contest I would redo the layout; it's easy to remake a layout once you know it works, once you know it feels good in-game - rocketjumps and the like.
Up until this point I was generally unsure if I was even going to participate in the 72 hour contest, I wasn't feeling so hot after spending so much time developing the gamemode for WG, and I didn't really want to commit myself to anything major so close to the start of the school semester (since I found out while developing WG that it's difficult to keep your grades up and make a map full-time).
On Thursday, the day before the contest I went back to the drawing board and thought about the gamemode some more so that I'd be more confident about it.
Page 4: Something not viaduct
I thought about Badlands' and Viaducts' routes in line form. I circled the major fighting areas, I thought about the feedback that I left on maps like
cp_overhang &
pl_sandsnake - that a point is more fun when it's not just an empty space, when there are buildings in and around to push into, to act as a team does. In sandsnake how it was very fun to make it easy to attack a capture point but make it hard to secure it for your team, how A point on mountainlab feels with its long cap-time.
I literally just imagined a cool space in my head and drew it as I saw it - Hydro-ish but not so close to koth_highpass that bloodhound would question our friendship.
I thought about this for a few moments and then realised I should make one final sketch of the overall layout so I knew exactly what I was going to make come 72 hour contest date:
Page 5: The final sketch
So here's the final bits of koth_egan_72, as it says it would be a mix of Hydro and Badlands. High routes around the point area for cool aerial combat, and 'automatic height' routes that naturally led players above mid. There would be tight beams across the top of mid, firstly because that's unique and rad, but also because it gives a place to land on as soldier but it's not overpowered since snipers can easily hit you from afar. The stuff layed out dimly in light lines was stuff I was generally unsure of - stuff I'd figure out once the rest of the scale manifested in hammer - I'm sure someone knows what I mean. And the overall layout generally stayed the same as I imagined it, I'm actually pretty proud of it.
Through the 72 hour contest I had to redo the gamemode, here's 'page 6' illustrating that too:
I feel like I'm a bit over-glorifying the idea of my 72 hour entry, especially as no one else seems to be doing this, but I think context is always good.
Edit: I found my old surf map binder! (2010 era)
I was a bored highschooler so I printed out the entirety of nodraw.net at the time to make it look like I was studying, little did they know I was studying tf2 maps!!
Arena surf notes (I used these a lot, they are still important):
'Oddball surf' which was just the neutral flag CTF:
Ended up becoming this:
Some random surf idea:
A CS:S jailbreak map I was working on until I realised JB is boring af:
Ideas for a industrial surf map:
Ended up becoming this:
Circular surf arena map:
Ended up becoming this:
Okay that's all.