What is your Sketch?

cookiesurvival

L2: Junior Member
Jul 5, 2015
53
35
What is your Map Sketch?

Not all map ideas get fully implemented into their maps, sometimes they might not even finish their maps to implement their ideas. So I'm taking a risk and ask, what is your sketch of your map that your making or already made?
Here, Ill show my mine as an example. :)

EX.
Pl_funnyrock:
TM24y4z.jpg


Koth_lampbridge:
CyG6qLm.jpg


P.S. I'm a bad drawer. :crying:
 
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Egan

aa
Feb 14, 2010
1,375
1,721
Well, here's the stuff I did on paper for my koth_egan_72 entry:

Page 1: Initial brainstorm
Dqymevz.jpg


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
ptUvb6j.jpg


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
mLrIK4H.jpg


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:

37oCvtN.jpg


19RCFFT.jpg


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
owdVwfq.jpg


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
tAKmLzU.jpg


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.

P5gGkAE.jpg


rTpGrII.jpg


Through the 72 hour contest I had to redo the gamemode, here's 'page 6' illustrating that too:

E5zab5U.jpg



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!!
GORgEv0.jpg

h34dAD9.jpg


Arena surf notes (I used these a lot, they are still important):
4djjlLK.jpg


'Oddball surf' which was just the neutral flag CTF:
ejteKik.jpg

oHnz2yA.jpg

w35RUqO.jpg

Ended up becoming this:
4e8903ddb41b6.jpg


Some random surf idea:
jY60nyC.jpg


A CS:S jailbreak map I was working on until I realised JB is boring af:
JkLZjPv.jpg


Ideas for a industrial surf map:
sio3Sni.jpg

QOl6poX.jpg

mNKhBts.jpg

Ended up becoming this:
4f02540eb9bb7.jpg


Circular surf arena map:
1rmbdhF.jpg

Ended up becoming this:
5021e55b3b4c6.jpg


Okay that's all.
 
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MoonFox

L10: Glamorous Member
Mar 17, 2015
739
74
lol... I start with a name a thematic premise, like PL_cooler. (which originally was set in the afternoon, then I saw the PL map with the alien capture point and went I want to do that.
 

MoonFox

L10: Glamorous Member
Mar 17, 2015
739
74
Well, here's the stuff I did on paper for my koth_egan_72 entry:
quotes snipped by a mod

also... some of your pictures failed to load, in the aspect of the pictures don't not pop up the picture is actually bigger, here see it.

edit: refreshing the page fixed it
 
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Moonrat

nothing left
aa
Jul 30, 2014
932
585
Holy crap, I should print shit out like that. I'd much rather be reading Nodraw's things than fuckin Geometry...
 

MoonFox

L10: Glamorous Member
Mar 17, 2015
739
74
Did you really need to quote every single picture? :I (also the pictures are fine for me, must be an issue on your end.)

I'll get some pictures of my sketches when I'm at my desk.

eh... still learning how to select quote.
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
7,135
6,056
Any a1.

I haven't planned a level on paper for years. Going straight to 3D planning is the way to go.


The one thing source has over other game engines is hammer's amazing bsp tools. They're perfect for sketching. It's just about all the source does well. And the only engine that does. Heck even John Carmack called them brushes because he likend their usage to painting with geometry.
 

Shogun

L6: Sharp Member
Jan 31, 2014
260
220
Just to add to what YM said, going straight into the editor is really great because you can immediately experiment with different geometry for the same area, but make sure you're not over analyzing stuff. It's alpha 1, it's going to have problems whether you like it or not, and as long as none of those problems are server breaking you'll be fine. Don't try to make everything perfect or else you'll lose steam real fast and get stuck in a hellish loop of opening the editor, working for 20 minutes, giving up and closing it, opening it a couple minutes later, repeat. I have been stuck in this loop for over 3 years and I managed to release one map that was so over thought out and linear that it wasn't fun at all.
 

UKCS-Alias

Mann vs Machine... or... Mapper vs Meta?
aa
Sep 8, 2008
1,264
816
Planning on paper often results in a flat area as you cant draw the 3rd axis (even if you do a 3d way you still lack the sense of depth and can misalign things that way). And drawing bridges becomes even worse. Its mostly going wrong when people use paper with a grid as they allways will use that grid as a guideline. And this is just a bad thing as it gives messed scaling. You draw with 256 wide blocks, yet in hammer you often will even go to 16 wide blocks.

A 3d drawing on paper is the only thing that works for me because it can set a style for the area, and even then i dont do that myself (actualy i do, but not on scale but on the idea. The scale etc i just remember and the drawing is just a reference of it). i rather just build in hammer. Not only that but often the result isnt realy looking the same as the end result (sometimes far from it)

And here i have some sketches:
Skullcove
This was the original idea of the map. The heights being similar to that of coaltown. But exact heights werent realy planned and were to figure out ingame. I marked those with a darker background. to at least set the idea a bit more clear. The idea was slightly rushed as i at that point rather would have been going for wave design.
And also since snowbat was going for its initial build i had to try to explain it to him. Although at some point i just completely took over and changed most of the brushwork. The end result now only shows a few key points, but most of it was still rebuild from scratch.
2012-12-11-general%20map%20design.png

After its first build in hammer the front just didnt end up the way it should be. it was messy and the perfect example of why i rather dont draw ideas on paper. So for the front i took a better approach and also did ensure i did draw it in a better way.

First the top down view to set the spawns and the angles to use:
2013-04-28-nieuw_spawn_idee.png

And then a 3d image to make it more clear:
2013-04-28spawn3d.png


This spawn was the one i went for and is still in the map.


Intercept
For intercept i just liked the idea that i only had to go for its gameplay (as slow/poor detailer this is realy liked). And i did draw a rough shape of the map. It was mostly used to plan events of captured control points. The idea of the buildings was based on a festival where you were outside all the time and only inside near the control points (which would be stages).
20131205-mvm_intercept_idea_v2.png

And you can see that the pathing on the image was a bit of a mess, but still closely matching to what it is now. At first I didnt like it that much and i even tried to get some better idea for the start by drawing the way 1 control point would go. I still wanted a gravelpit style in captures. But i completely was out of ideal on how to do it. So i decided to draw something fresh as a first control point:
20131205-mvmidea1.png

This still wasnt realy the solution as it didnt match the gravelpit style i wanted. So i did set the map aside.

A month later did take a look at it again with hopefully a fresh idea. The first thing i did was to simplify the front:
20140106-mvm_intercept_first2caps.png


Then the 2skillset contest was announced. Personaly for me this realy was the reason to start with. no longer i had to set an idea for the end result of the map. I just completely ignored that step and only left some rough wide shapes of buildings that could be used for detailing. I now completely focussed on getting the map working. This was the trigger to start building. And its result was worth it.

However, after the contest no one has detailed it (i wasnt surprised with all the entity work in the map). So i tried to go for a new style that valve picked. A moonbase. But this showed a major problem, i am poor at detailing and worse at creating entirely new styles. I realy need a good idea to be able to detail a map well. I did try the moonbase stuff at first, but it just didnt end up the way i wanted it to be. I dropped that style and instead waited for something fresh. That became egypt style. A style i now still use and will finish the map with.

However, the original idea did not realy have a good hatch area. I built one that just had 3 paths and showed interesting movement, but it was chaotic. I wanted to simplify it yet still keep some key parts in it (hard to defend, a higher path, a bridge). So i went to the drawing board to see how i can get 3 paths to smoothly work together:
new%20hatch%20area.png

I also did place that drawing on a linear angle to the map (instead of 90 degrees) as 1 issue was that people just blindly walk forward and then get lost at C (pun intended). However, i liked the angle in the map. Since the front area had a very good result with instances to get some rotated brushwork (and it worked very well there!) i also decided that this last point should be open to end up rotated. Thats why the connecting parts to the dish area werent well drawns. its something that i had solve enforce in hammer itself.
 
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Idolon

they/them
aa
Feb 7, 2008
2,105
6,106
Two sketches from the making of Mom. Neither is particularly in-depth, but they helped to work out some problems in my head.

XBmfP5qvbm_b83yQB2G9Wyg0rftLRCC0uvDK3KrXhZA

25x79RCRK-U-I-NJ7Sq7yKVEqOSbMGKGLnzwSxKJjlw
 

Kube

Not the correct way to make lasagna
aa
Aug 31, 2014
1,342
1,849
Two sketches from the making of Mom. Neither is particularly in-depth, but they helped to work out some problems in my head.
-snip-

That first sketch reminds me of this:

waterfall.jpg