New Map: The Scarborough Bluffs

[MyeRs]

Brotherhood Mapping Presents:

The Scarborough Bluffs

Most up to date version: broz_bluffs_b2

Inspired by the beauty of the Scarborough Bluffs — stunning views, steep drops, and yes… don’t worry, you will find guns for safety on this map. Consider it a scenic walk with proper Scarborough precautions. A standard .loc pack will be created using only Torontonian language.

This map has not been play tested. I tried my best to align textures... The snow path is used to illustrate the randomness of Canadian weather and probably some other festive meaning.

A few thanks to people who assisted me during the process:
1) TiNi for tickling the map
2) Flamer for telling me to not be lazy on my alignments
3) Fzx for testing my jumps to make sure they can be done by truly anyone
4) Jigz for yelling at me for not matching because I was busy mapping, therefore forcing me to move faster
5) Senix and Juic3 for inspiring me to include a snow path
6) Cusoman for being the only reason I know anything about mapping

I'm not sure how it will play - I focused more on trying to improve my technical mapping...

Things I intend to look into adjusting for B2:
- Lighting (I used chatgpt's recommendations, but would like to remove ambient lighting)
- Any misalignments people find
- Probably find a way to make snow path flow better

[jitspoe]

One of the most useful things I've found when designing games and levels is just watching somebody play for the first time without comment, so I've attached a demo with the first time I played during Social Saturday.

General first impressions are that it's kind of clunky to move around in.  There's so much platforming, like the flag has a platform that you have to jump to, then jump again to the platform the flag is on (and there's a gap between them so if you're not focused on the platforms because you're in a firefight or something, you might have to jump back up).  I think it'd be more fun if it were streamlined a bit using stairs and/or ramps.  I feel like the flags should be easily grabbable while traveling backward shooting at enemies.  Maybe with some practice it'll be more enjoyable, but the frustration tends to outweigh the fun on the first play.  A lot of the design seems like it's deliberately done to further the skill gap.  For example, the big ramp you can't run on and have to get enough speed to get over it.  Skilled players will be able to use that for a quick grab, but less skilled players will be stuck taking an even longer route when they're already at a disadvantage from slower strafe jumping and such.  I realize you're intending this for the matching community, but if skilled players can already do the routes, making them more accessible to new players and bots doesn't harm anything, right?  If you do want keep that ramp, I'd suggest at least making it a different texture, like rock, so it's obvious it can't be walked on.  I never did figure out how to get to the 3rd story with the window while were playing.  Had to noclip later to figure out where the path went.  The snow path seemed fun, though.

On the technical side, there are a few misaligned brushes, some places you can see geometry through the sky (you can't count on sky to block geometry, so you might have to make some walls taller), and quite a few upside down and misaligned textures.  Not going to bother pointing each individual thing out until you've dialed in the gameplay, though, as some things might change a lot.

[MyeRs]

BETA 2 is now completed

Changes:

- Ramped dirt terrain that you need speed to go over is changed to the wall-rock texture to create more transparency to newer players
- Dirt-path to base had the roof elevated, to reduce the frequency of hitting your head when entering with speed
- Widened the snow path to create "less awkward" movement when you do not hit the speed
- Changed the bunker on low path and added a path below it back to base to make going snow path less punishing
- Opened up main path to snow to make accessing base from that path faster and less awkward
- added stairs on main base platforms to assist new players and bots moving around the map
- widened the base "building" to make it less awkward to move on
- Added a ladder access to one side of base "building"
- fixed a lot of misaligned wood textures

Planned for Beta 3:

- Fixing all remaining alignment issues
- Potentially changing slow path to second flag to be a set of stairs instead of ladder.
- Raising certain walls to minimize visibility of others parts of the map
- Misc other changes from gameplay testing in both comp/casual settings (still TBD on cap points, want to see frequency of caps in gameplay testing to adjust)
- Lights got messed up in compile - will fix in B3

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Notes:
- The difficult wall to go over slows down good players too, making the path more balanced (and good players still fail sometimes) - if it were easy / regular terrain, snow path would need to be deleted.
- The map was definitely more tailored towards 'competitive' gameplay (because outside of Social Saturday, that is the majority of player base at this time, so I didn't really think about public servers when making it - however, any future maps I make I will plan it out with the goal of both competitive and casual enjoyment).

Thanks Jitspoe for the comments - hopefully each beta can address some of the issues to make it more enjoyable for everyone.

[jitspoe]

Cool!  We'll give it another test next Social Saturday!  I did notice a bunch of textures on the red side (specifically the barrels and banner) are upside-down still.  Not sure if you're using Trenchbroom or something else to map, but a little protip if you are using Trenchbroom: You can build one barrel, align it perfectly, put it in a group, then do a linked duplicate for all other barrels.  If you ever need to adjust the alignment, it'll update on all instances of the barrels.

[jitspoe]

Here's the Social Saturday VOD if you're curios to see somebody else play it and hear the voice chat: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2672688485 Starts around 14-15 mins in.  It seems people weren't aware the 2nd flag existed since you can't really see it from the ground.  Perhaps you could find a way to tweak things to make it more visible and straightforward to get to.  Jumping on the hills in the back feels really awkward, so maybe you could kind of lower down part of the flag ledge and make all the ledges into more of a big ramp for smoother access to the 2nd flag and other path?  Attached an illustration (also pointed out some upside-down textures).

There are a bunch of little technical issues, but I think this bit you can see through the sky is the thing that bugs me the most (attached).

I kind of miss the white barrel on the ice path that let you hop to the bunker on the other side.

Hope the feedback helped!

[jitspoe]

Oh, I forgot to mention, the lighting artifacts are from arghrad, I'm guessing.  You could try using the ericw tools for better lighting, though that might require tweaking a lot of the light values.  I explain the settings in this video.  It's for trenchbroom, but you could tweak the BSP batch files to use the different compile settings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5BtADbOsCs