SD Snail A3C

[Tiftid]

Snail - My quest to make "SD but good" continues.

A traditional SD map, featuring a control point instead of an elevator.
The control point is below the Australium, with the intention of it being easy to rotate from the Australium to the point, but harder to go back, and also with the intention of making the point a less desirable place to be, so people don't camp it as is common in SD.
Ideally, players should individually decide whether to pressure the Australium or the point, and can easily rotate in emergency situations where they're about to lose.
Also, if nobody manages to cap in 6 minutes, the round stalemates. Well, it's more like 5 minutes and 10 seconds, since the round doesn't start until 5 seconds after the timer does, and the Australium stays locked for 45 seconds after that, giving teams an opportunity to not immediately lose the round even if they immediately lose the Australium and/or the point, because they can fortify wherever the enemy is weakest.

 

[Tiftid]

The changes in this one are actually pretty small, almost worth calling this an A1A instead of an A2. You know, just your casual A1A that takes two and a half weeks to make. I blame school.
I hope I got the logic right, because there's no way I'm spending my birthday debugging logic.

Changelog:
-Trimmed some areas off the map to make it smaller - it's now a bit bigger than koth_highpass.
-Experimentally created split spawns, which spreads players around a lot more, which should hopefully lead to fewer cases where the australium is just uneventfully being walked through unoccupied spaces - I understand that players being too spread out was part of the problem before and is generally considered to be unfun gameplay in TF2 (without a direct incentive for it like PD has), so I've chopped off areas in hopes of focusing teams more around their lobbies, which should hopefully also lead them more naturally towards the point.
-Transformed the point into an elevator, making it harder to take cover while capping and making it safer to approach the point while enemies are capping
-It now takes 24 seconds to capture the australium, no matter how many players are capping at once (elevator ascends 192 units at 8 units/second)
-While capping, if enemies are on the elevator, it will descend at 8 hu/s (the same rate as it ascends when uncontested), which should help individual enemies to stall the cap long enough for their teammates to arrive
-Increased the round time to 7 minutes (was 6 minutes)
-The HUD now shows the intelligence compass
-The point model now starts glowing 30 seconds after the round starts, when players have likely already chosen their course of action, allowing them to see whether or not the route they've taken leads to the point, and leads them more directly to the point after respawning - it also changes its skin and glow colour to match the team who's capping the elevator (light grey when contested or neutral)
-Changed the slope of the windows between the flag spawn and point area from 1:4 to 1:2 - this should allow players to slightly more easily see that there's something important down there.
-Greatly reduced the number of security fences w/ rails used in gameplay space
-Added a cubemap to make the water blue instead of purple

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[Tiftid]

I also managed to not spend my birthday debugging logic. Though, that was a month ago.

Changelog:
-uploaded 0 new screenshots

-opened the australium area up a lot by moving the fence that was previously a little above ground level to the raised platform that the australium is on - this means it blocks the same sightlines, but makes it a lot easier to move around in that area, and better points players towards the new route down to the control point
-added a new, one-way route to the control point from the lower part of the australium area - this has an intel blocker and should act as the obvious rotation route for players who have found that the enemy team managed to sneak the australium to the point without them noticing, and better facilitates the gameplay dynamic I had originally envisioned, where players stay in their lobbies until the time comes to rotate to the point and fight
-added a ramp to the australium area to direct players more towards the separated side area and make it easier for players on the lower ground to actually reach the australium, making the lower ground less of a retreat spot and more of a lobby
-rerouted the waterbound route to be accessible from the lower australium area and the lobby before the point - this should encourage players to actually use it to rotate

-added a bomb to the point, which acts as cover and the finale
-added a weird thing to the side of the point which accepts the australium and hopefully provides a visual indication of how far the elevator rises
-sadly removed the australium pipe

-the elevator now moves upwards at 6 hu/s instead of 8 - it still needs to move 192 units upward, but now it takes 32 seconds to do that instead of 24
-the elevator, when being contested, now moves downwards at 6 hu/s instead of 8
-while there are no flag carriers on it, the point used to move downwards at 64 units per second - this has been reduced to 24 so it feels less punishing when you C9, but it'll always feel punishing no matter how fast it is, since walking off the point means you need to climb all the way back onto it if it doesn't move back down, or make it go back up from the beginning if it does.
-reworked the point area
-the flag now returns after having been dropped for 10 seconds, but is disabled for 15 seconds after returning
-whenever the flag is picked up, both teams' routes from spawn to the point lock until it returns, encouraging players to feed into the australium area and choose whether to rotate to the point in hopes of contesting it or stay at the australium area in hopes of getting the flag as soon as it returns.

-made the map a bit smaller
-at this point you should expect that I'm going to rework the health and ammo placements all over the map every version

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[Tiftid]

Changelog:
-various logic fixes
-extended the round timer from 7 minutes to 8 and a half minutes - the map stalemated twice when it had decent playercounts, and it was probably because the fast return time of the australium encourages a "one-and-done" playstyle where if a team loses their push onto the point, they have to return to the australium if their team can't hold out long enough. This is by design and I don't see it as a bad thing necessarily, but it doesn't play well with a short round timer.
-the dropdown doors at the australium area are no longer team-locked - I did it in the first place because I thought them being freely open would enable people to flank too easily, but now I don't think that's anything to worry about
-lowered both teams' respawn wave times from 5 to 4, since I felt like players were spawning just too late to participate in a lot of fights that I really wanted them to participate in
-the setup door which covers the australium until it first becomes available now closes whenever the australium is disabled to stop people from grabbing it the tick it returns and circumventing it being disabled

The layout might still need a major revision, but that can come later, once I figure out whether or not the gameplay loop I want is actually possible.

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[Tiftid]

Screenshots are still outdated. With this version, I'm justifying it with the excuse that I'm not at all proud of this version and will probably end up reverting to A3A's geometry to base A4 off.

Changelog:
-increased the flag's return time from 10 to 12 seconds
-increased the time the flag spends disabled after returning from 15 to 20 seconds
-shortened the anti-flag visualisers, made them only visible while the flag is held by a player and added a hazard strip beneath each one to signify that the area will have a visualiser once the flag is picked up - partially as per @Alpherio's feedback

-reshaped the waterbound connector between the australium and elevator - it now includes a small health and full ammo not too far from the point, which should create a place for people attacking/defending the point to retreat to, which should help to create more interesting gameplay dynamics than "take aus to point, get dunked on by demo".
-removed the connection between the waterbound route and upper point area - this should hopefully draw players more towards the waterbound area
-very slightly uncramped the connector between the australium area and waterbound route and put medium health and ammo in there
-moved the small health and ammo that were in the dropdown route out of it, and upgraded the small ammo to medium
-adjusted the australium area to feature a ramp instead of a propjump
-raised the elevator by 64 units and removed the ramps leading up to it so that people can't safely rain down fire on the elevator anymore, unless they're actually occupying the high ground, which takes a longer time to reach the point
-tried to make combat in the point area longer-range and less demoman-dominated - this includes putting a medium health kit on low ground very close to the point, which should help to make it so that teams aren't just immediately destroyed if they fail to get the elevator all the way up
-substantially thiccened and tallened the australium receiver thingy, making it more usable as cover for everyone in the point area

-bashed the logic with a rock

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[Tiftid]

Changelog:
-Fixed a possible logic issue, the same one that stole so many potential victories in A3A
-Removed the small ammo from the dropdown to the elevator because it's a really good sentry spot even without giving engies any help

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