ZM_saxon

My second attempt at making a Counter-Strike map was considerably more complicated than the first. I wanted to do something altogether different to my previous work, and settled on the idea of creating a car park in mid-western America.

I designed each level of the car park, linking the sections together. I took care to design the separate levels differently, rather than copying and pasting the same layout over and over.

Once I began creating the map in Hammer, I found it difficult to distinguish the separate levels of the carpark in the 2D view planes. Thus it became useful to group the separate levels of the carpark, allowing me to hide layers I wasn't working on at a particular moment.

It took a month to complete the basic architechture for the map, but once this was done it was easy to add in details, props and lighting.

Having done this, I wanted to add two things that would set my map apart from other maps: the first being subtle use of colour correction to tone down certain colours, while increasing other colour values; the second being map specific player textures.

ZM_Dustpanic

This was probably the first map I "seriously" tried making for the Source engine. I wanted to create something that would look good, be fun to play, and wouldn't take long to create.

As with all good map designs, the layout came first. The layout for the map was initially inspired by a map called "zm_lila_panic", a map that I felt to be considerably lacking in balanced gameplay and wanted to correct. However as I developed my design on paper, it soon became clear that my map had little in common with the original inspiration and would be deserving of some new title, the map I had drawn on paper was very much my own.

At the beginning of the design phase I had decided that I wanted my map to resemble the classic counter-strike map "Dust". It was my hope that building something that matched the graphical quality of "Dust" would prove alluring to players.

Furthermore, I knew that the graphical style of "Dust" would be easy for me to replicate (particularly due to the abundance of prop models available) and would prove quick to develop.



The map took a mere week to develop, and following release became a popular map on custom map servers.

The map can be downloaded from the following link:
http://www.fpsbanana.com/maps/98247