MODS

This campaign was designed explicitly for versus mode, and more specifically for my friends and me. It contains amplified opportunities for human-controlled special infected to pull off ridiculous solo and coordinated attacks.
The community I ran was incredibly supportive of both the testing of this map, and its release.
Lots of great memories.

STEAM WORKSHOP

DROP DEAD GORGES

Zombie Literacy Drive. Original Cabinet. Dyson's Bluff Lodge, Poincare National Forest.

DDG Outro Sequence

Dyson's Bluff Lodge, Poincare National Forest

early playtesting (vs.) . Highlights of pvp tactics in an early version of the campaign. video recorded and edited by PIXEL.

Zombie Literacy Drive. Attract Screen

My stubborn insistence on keeping this intro sequence led to the initial demise of this project. The map starts in the intro area of my Drop Dead Gorges campaign, only for the ground to open up and plummet the survivors some 14,000 units into the depths of the earth. The nav mesh completely disagreed with this approach and I gave up trying to convince it. Although this really had nothing to do with the point of the project, I left it behind.

What the project really aimed to do was to bring the underlying behavior of The Director to the surface and make it overt and adversarial (Rapture Science). In addition, I wanted to continue to push pvp ideas in the versus game mode, as I did with Drop Dead Gorges.

I’d completely forgotten about this until going through old hard drives in 2023. Replaying the 1 map I made for it prompted me start this project fresh in September, sans the greedy intro. Progress on that can be seen here.

RAPTURE SCIENCE

souq

[cs:go] Level Design, textures, and props.

DEFT

Most of the screenshots below are from the cs:go update to the map, but it’s in cs:s that this map saw thousands of hours of gameplay on a server I ran.

I made a lot of maps that are essentially gameplay carved into raw concrete. I did this so that I could spend more time playing the maps than making them, and also concentrate on experimenting with different spatial themes, some of which I’ve Illustrated here.

disruption

originally designed and built in cs:s, where it saw thousands of hours of play. revisited for the orange box update and overhauled for cs:go

iota

designed, built, and tested within a strict two-week window for cs:go

levn

designed, built, and tested within a strict two-week window for cs:go

crux

originally designed and built in cs:s (gameplay screenshots) where it saw thousands of hours of play. revisited for cs:go (overview)

ogre

another quick design for cs:go. This map saw no public release, but I like a lot of the ideas in it.

rift

an early cs:s map that marked the beginning of a series of maps (above) that aimed to be little more than pure gameplay geometry.

exquisite paranoia

c. 2014. Rhyming with the Source Engine. This was an exercise in stream of consciousness (as much as that can be a thing with something like this) that started with making a connection between Left 4 Dead’s No Mercy map and a cover of Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter…and then goes on to pick up other associations along the road and riff on them in different interconnected ways.

While I think I’ve done a decent job of presenting this as a complete thing, it was actually derailed at what I thought was a very early stage in its development by a crash that I could not solve. Probably an appropriate punishment for twisting Counter-Strike into knots.

EXQUISITE PARANOIA O1: No, Merci.

EXQUISITE PARANOIA O2: Custard Pioneer

EXQUISITE PARANOIA 03: In Chair, a Gate

EXQUISITE PARANOIA 04: Round... About

EXQUISITE PARANOIA 05: A Lunary Vent

EXQUISITE PARANOIA 06: At a Crossroads, Flagging a Ride

EXQUISITE PARANOIA 07: The Ballad of Niall Airmstrang

EXQUISITE PARANOIA 08: The James Page

EXQUISITE PARANOIA 0?: In Chair, a Bang!

team fortress 2

3 stage attack/defend from the way back early tf2 days. A cartoon take on the stripped down geometry. Don’t drink the Red Punch.

Exploiting game mechanics in Level Design inevitably results in strange spaces.

C. 2012 Spatial Ideas I was iterating on at the time and continue to employ in my work. The first series are general strategies I’ve iterated on across many maps. The second series are some of those strategies as designed into a single bombsite on the map de_deft.