Castaway.tf

This is a thread for a map that I have planned, tc_pirateisland. I'll post updates as I work on it and I welcome any feedback, ideas, or criticisms anyone has.

So far it is in the idea phase only. I'd like to try and create as many unique locations as I can.

Here is a very rough idea using locations from the pirates of the caribbean movies:


One of the bases would be the aztec gold cave from Isla de Muerta, I'm thinking something like having the control point be on top of a pile of gold. While it's tempting to just reuse that for the other spawn too I think being more unique would be better. The other spawn I want to take inspiration from Shipwreck Cove, being some sort of wooden structure in the middle of a cove of water. I already had this idea for a scrapped ctf pirate map so that much is good.

Trying to make each area unique, but also flow with each other, is tough. The island coast and isla de muerta flow fairly well, but things like the swamp -> cannibal village, or cannibal -> village are tough. That in general is a hard one but it would certainly be unique. The cross section between island coast and cannibal village is going to easily be the most challenging to connect. I think the height issue of the cannibal village might make that a bad location as all connectors to it need to height compensate.

Right now I'm mostly interested in thinking of unique locations, so all the nitty gritty stuff can be done later. I'll try to make a very very rough mock of it in hammer in the next few days.

I am a busy person and mapping takes up a lot of time, so I don't expect this project to be done for possibly an order of months. But I figure it would be fun to post my progress and encourage others to make similar threads for their progress too. This will be a great personal challenge for me because to create it in the way I envision will require a lot of displacements, and a lot of good aesthetics, both of which I am poor at. It will be a learning experience either way.

I'm thinking that the cannibal village could be replaced with Tortuga (pirate town on an island, lots of wooden buildings) of some variety. Would help theming by having one team (probably blue?) have a more "structured" feel by having buildings and towns while the other team (red?) takes control of more natural areas like the coast and their gold cave

I have some layout ideas, but man I was not prepared for just how hard it is to design a tc map, it's probably layout wise the most difficult possible of all the base gamemodes. You're effectively designing 6 miniature maps, but in reality you design for the connections, so you're making 8 maps on top of that.

I discussed this with a friend of mine and I think the way I'm going to go about this is to make each of the main areas with points, then connect them with a single windy choke. After that, flank routes can be added as needed, but that sincerely helps my design process because if I have to think of the flank routes at the start it just complicates things. It also seems to be sort of how Hydro was designed, each of the connections between areas (other than the last points) have one major route, then 0-2 side routes from there, often with the routes all converging in at least one location. The only exception here is Dam-Dish which is considered generally the worst of the hydro maps, probably due to the design of having two separate main routes where no combat is guaranteed.

Designing the point areas themselves is also tough. I ran into this problem when prototyping a rd map in the past but it's hard to make layout decisions that don't just copy hydro in some way. I have some ideas and I'm going to try sketching out my basic idea later today or this weekend

I was working on drawing this but I decided I'm just going to map out a very rough layout in hammer first as it's going to be easier to get scale by doing it in hammer than by sketching