Carl's Notes

I've been playing Team Fortress 2 for quite some time now, and Valve has been doing some interesting promotions in the past few months in conjunction with other games companies that release their games through the Steam game platform.

One of them was for Poker Night at the Inventory, released by Telltale Games.

It takes four characters, one from the game Team Fortress 2 (the Heavy), one from the comic Penny Arcade (Tycho), one from the serial game Sam & Max (Max, the "rabbity-thing"), and one from the animated Flash series Homestar Runner (Strong Bad), and pits them against each other and the player.

The promotion comes in when the characters put some of their notable items up with their bets, which the player can win if you can beat them out of the tournament while they have their item(s) up.
(for instance, the Heavy has a special edition of his minigun, Tycho has his favourite wristwatch, Max has his "Licence to Maim" and his Lugermorph, and Strong Bad with his "shutter shades")

So far, I'm remastering my Texas Hold'em game (I used to be a fair player, back when ijji had a poker game available) and have earned a few achievements, but so far no new items.

Okay, so it's not really so new, as I've been interested for years but never had the tools to do it nor the capacity to enjoy the results.

You might know that I play Team Fortress 2.
(if you didn't, you do now)

The software for creating custom content (ie, maps, mods, etc) for Source Engine games (which include all Valve games released in the last around five years) is free with any Valve games purchased.

I finally realized this and decided to try my hand at creating a new map or two.
(mods are currently way beyond my abilities, and fortunately beyond my interest as well)

I'd learned about creating Quake I maps from an old book at the library about level creation, I forget the title now, but maps were created by "brushes" (six-sided cubes translated, rotated, scaled and sheared into place) and "entities" (invisible objects that did any number of things, including act as doors, buttons, elevators, etc).

Apparently, the Source Engine works in similar ways.
The brushes are the same, but the entities are rather different, especially as the Hammer map editor is capable of creating maps for a variety of Valve games.

So far, for simplicity, I'm starting with a King of the Hill map which was inspired by one of the maps created in the above-mentioned book called Telecross.
My memory is a little shaky on it, so I'm going to make some parts of it up as I go along.
(especially as parts of the map don't work in a slightly-cartoonish setting like TF2 as opposed to the semi-realistic setting of Quake)
I chose King of the Hill (otherwise known as KotH) as it was fairly symmetrical and has minimal game logic (only one control point and a small handful of additional entities for running the timers, most of which is automatic)

Development has been kind of slow, but the basic overall style of the map is pretty much down, the only major issues are the long lines of sight and how easy it is to get to the capture point.
(granted, the spawn rooms are not where they're supposed to be yet either, and those are some hefty rooms to be moving around after they're mostly completed)

I will eventually post screenshots of the map as it progresses, and I even hope to release it for others to play, but I will be doing so under the name I use in-game, so you won't find it under this name or my real one.

As for future directions, I want to build PropHunt and DodgeBall maps as well.
(PropHunt is a mod where one team gets disguised as level props, such as trolleys, barrels, boxes, etc, and gets about a minute to hide somewhere on the map, while the other team, which are usually equipped with flamethrowers, try to find all the props. Slight twist is the last prop alive gets their weapons back. DodgeBall is where a player seeking rocket gets airblasted between the two teams. You don't want to get hit by the rockets, as there are usually no health kits on the maps. Plus, the current stock of DodgeBall maps are pretty sparse as far as realism goes)

I'll be posting more once I have something interesting to say on the matter.