He told me the exact type of areas he wanted produced, and how these would all fit together. Firstly he wanted a "hub area" where players would begin the game, and could select missions from.
We discussed which game engine we would like to do this with - initially the Goldsource engine, though we eventually settled on the Source engine since it allowed for easier terrain creation, and generally seemed to be an easier engine for mod teams to use.
I quickly set about searching for photographs of rural California, which we wanted to depict in this first map area. These photographs proved extremely useful for quick architectural inspiration (when previously I had made buildings from my own imaginary designs), and thus I was able to quickly create some early screenshots to show off the mod - something that proved useful for drumming up interest in the project early on.
Soon into making the map, I began to feel the limitations of the Source engine when it came to making large outdoor areas, which frustratingly forced me to limit the size of areas depicted (or in some cases reduce detail levels to optimize the map). I did not want to stray from my plans, so I kept as close as possible to those as I could.
Once the terrain and architechture for the map were finished, I spent a lot of time fine tuning the lighting. One part of my design brief was to set the map at night - something that was proving awkward with the default light entities in the Source engine, which bizarrely would not let me set darkness beyond a certain value.
Thus I turned to colour correction to darken the map, wash out all the RBG colours, and overlay a blue tint.
When that first "hub map" was largely completed I began work on a second map for the mod, which would feature sequentially as the final map of the mod. I designed a large, open environment which players would need to navigate through to reach their final objective.
The plan for this map was to transport players from rural California towards the beginnings of suburbia.
Creating the suburban area was quick and easy to do, but creating the large open rural environment took a great deal of time - particularly since the area I had envisioned was about ten times the size of the average Source engine map, and large areas of terrain are cumbersome to make in the Source engine.
To ensure that players would have the illusion of walking through a very large open environment, I placed yet more terrain within the skybox. Use of the skybox also allowed me to divide up "VIS" areas, since I could push players through small bottlenecks to get from one VIS area to the next, all the while maintaining the illusion of a an extremely open environment.
This map is still a work in progress, though it should be completed soon. I shall be adding foliage, chokepoints, and colour correction. I intend to display two colour correction effects - one darkening effect for the rural area, which eventually fades to a monochrome orange for the suburban lighting.
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