If at first you don't succeed

So I made a first release of my map for last week. Unfortunately it didn't do so well, in my own opinion mostly based on the spawn points. Not so much that they didn't do their job but more because the spawns and the paths leading away from them weren't really as intuitive as they should be.

I was hoping that avoiding signs would force me to make it better and better until everyone understood where to go, then when I add the signs it should be perfectly clear. It seems to work so far, since I've changed three out of four spawnpoints for the second release of the map.

Spawn #1
The first spawn had a problem that was really easy to fix since it mostly relied on moving it back to where respawning players had vision to the first capture point. This shouldn't really have made it into even the first alpha release since I was aware of the problem already. Guess I was just so happy that I finally got all the entities working that I wanted to playtest immediately. Moving it back a couple of hundred units as well as up the stairs.

I'm still considering moving it back a bit more into the house upstairs but I'm also a bit concerned with the sniper vision, currently fixed by a couple of crates being in the way. I want to test this location properly then if it doesn't work I'll just rework the entire corner to remove vision from the first capture point.

Spawn #2
While the first spawn was easy, the second one was trickier. It is used for RED to defend stage 2 and for BLU to attack the final stage and since it's used for both teams it needs to be easily accessible for both. I just didn't manage to do it with any of my solutions using the same spawn points for both players so I went with a single spawn room with separate spawn locations instead.

Before- and afterimage.


Spawn #3
The last spawnroom is only used for RED defending the last 2 capture points and it's working great for the very last point, not so much for the third one. My first solution just had a rather narrow walkway doing a ninety degree turn which most players ignored and just jumped down instead.

I've tried both making the area more open to be inviting as well as making it a straighter route from the spawnroom to the point so we'll see how it works out.

The map is not done yet but it's improving. I actually woke up yesterday having dreamed about mapping so I think I'll be taking a couple of days off.