At a crossroad

As usual, I haven't been posting much but right now that's a good thing because I have been working on my art pass map instead. While I've seen some great entries that are likely to beat mine, I also manage to get pleasantly surprised by how the map looks in-game. That is indeed a rare thing since I'm usually my own worst critic.

The problem I've run into though is the texturing. Since my planning phase I've been using a mostly blue industrial theme with the high-contrast light maps. My first plan was to have the blue attack their own base after it has been overrun by the red team. The problem with this was that the red capture points clashed a lot with the generally blue theme of the areas around them. It made the points themselves stand out more but since I don't think anyone would really be interested in the backstory, people would just wonder why the red points were there but never look around to try and find out.

After that, I thought about switching the teams around, having blue quite naturally defend the blue base. Apparently this is a bad idea. Story-wise, it would make sense for the read team to attack every once in a while and on 5 capture point, king of the hill or capture the flag type maps they do attack. But there is no attack/defend map where the red team is attacking and several of the users seemed to think it was a bad idea to send one in for the contest.

I'd still really like to go with the blue textures for the main occluder building between blue spawn and capture point B just because they look awesome with my lighting setup but I can agree with everyone's opinion that it might "feel weird" to attack as red. Playing on a new map is in itself so confusing and most players play both attackers and defenders on any given map anyway so I think it would be possible to get away with it.

Am I just reluctant to kill my own darlings or will the Red eventually get an attacking map, who knows? For now I'll likely stick with the blue-neutral-red transition though. Even though it's unlikely to win, it's a bit more likely, I can always make a 5cp or Koth map later with one end using my original theme.

Click the link below for images.

RED theme CP A:


BLU theme CP A:


Neutral theme way to A:


Red-ish theme CP B:


Blue-ish theme attacker spawn exterior:


My "official" map thread can be found here
To check out some map theory worth considering while maybe not not following exactly, go to nodraw.net