Narrative Dimension

When I first wanted to do a payload map - a year prior to beginning this map - I wanted to do a more typical one: Blu pushing a bomb through a canyon area. I put this aside because the canyon space I wanted to make was so very complex and to get what I wanted using displacements (the Source engine's way for doing terrain), would have been prohibitive. If you look at terrain - tunnels and rock faces - in Hammer maps, you see a lot of unnatural joiners: cliffs merge with concrete walls, for example. It works, but it wasn't what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do would have been hell to do with displacements. So I shelved it.

Fortunately for me, a year later a ton of these desert-themed, terrain-intensive maps appeared (Badwater, Hoodoo, Frontier, etc) - so I think my first map idea would have been lost in the crowd.

Instead I decided to try out the Red payload idea, and that it made it possible to do something unique.

In virtually all other payload maps I know of, you have the Blu team pushing a payload into Red territory. The Blu teams are the attackers, the Red the defenders.

The first payload map - Goldrush - did this, but Valve didn't seem to provide technical support for doing it the other way (Red pushing). So, following the path of least resistance, and figuring "it doesn't matter anyway", all other payload maps have followed this mould.

The problem is TF2 is set up such that each team (Red or Blu) has a unique colour schema and architectural style. Red spaces have a lot of wonky architecture, wooden or rusty materials, warm hues. Blu team has more squarish architecture, more grey metal and concrete materials, cooler hues. Thus each payload map so far has been the Blu team pushing the bomb through a red-toned world (Goldrush, Badwater, Hoodoo), or in some cases they have done away with the distinct Red and Blu worlds to have a more neutrally-toned world (Cashworks, Swiftwater). But I've never seen a payload being pushed by Red through a blue-toned world.

Switching around the which-team-is-pushing element lead to the idea of Red seeking revenge: if Blu was always blowing up Red bases in all the other payload maps, maybe Red wants some payback! Now the level became not only a level, but a journey into the world of Blu and what lies behind Blu.

The map begins on the Red side of the map (as per typical TF2 practice). In the distance, you can see a burning Red base. Is it the Goldrush base? the Badwater one? the Hoodoo one? Any of the above. It's a Red base, it's burning after a Blu payload blew it up, and now Red is pissed!

So why or how does Red appear here? You can intuit that in the Red side: a train has obviously smashed its way in here to deliver the payload in a container car. The only parts of the map that officially say "Red" are the distant base and the container car. The rest of the "Red Zone" only looks Red - it isn't officially Red, hinting that maybe Red agents were planted here ahead of time to prepare the way. Hey, it's not logical, but it's TF2: it doesn't have to be.

Red team pushes the map through a grey zone that separates the Red from Blu area, coming out into what I call the "Blue Trainyard". Originally, this space was supposed to be more like a traditional mining facility, hence it's wooden building with corrugated metal siding (much of which I made from displacements). I guess the basic rational for  this area is that it is a temporary ramp entrance to haul construction materials up to the "Factory" (next).

You first see the "Factory" at the Blue Trainyard, where it is hinted to have an ominous purpose: that it produces explosive bombs to ship out to Blu agents around the world (mooahAAAHA!).

The boxcar and smokestack here are pretty apparent images of sinister motives. (Maybe a little too sinister?) If you think of Red as a dark communist menace, you might think of Blu as a dark fascist menace. Thus this Blu architecture here (and to follow) is tall, monolythic and unmoving. If Red has a cynical, neglectful personality where human life means little (revealed through crumbling buildings and industrial waste), Blu, I theorized, is possessed by a coldly efficient and calculating ideology.

(Okay, maybe I'm getting too serious here. Actually, red and blue as traditional colours for opposing sides harkens back to the first toy soldier wargames, which focused on the then predominant superpower struggle: England [red] versus France [blue].)

Now you enter the main "Factory", split up into three large chambers, with yawning pits that hold "dark satanic mills" in their abyssal regions. You see a conveyor belt sending Blu payload bombs back the way you came from, presumably to be loaded onto Blu trains.

This area was tough to make because it was so huge that, to prevent lag I wanted to optimize it any way possible. I placed massive hint brushes, dividing it up diagonally, horizontally and vertically in many key ways - which was hard as hell, but to get a higher framerate I take advantage of the fact most players will probably hide in the corners to not get shot by snipers. And like every good Source mapper, I use prop fades: the giant machine props in the pit bottoms are only visible from the bottom level, under the bridge, fading out above that. (None of this will make any sense to you if you don't map Source levels.)

Also, there is a small gap (which originally started large, but which I made smaller and smaller over time) between "Factory Chamber 1" and "Factory Chamber 2" (the latter the bomb does not travel through). This forms the ultimate sniper angle on the whole map - a more than 5000-unit-long sniper shot that I went to pains to maintain and optimize. But I also provided bypasses for scouts and whatnot to get to said snipers out of his view.

Leaving the Factory area you come to a tan hallway and which leads up to the "Office". Every factory has its office for management, and this space is where Blu delivers propaganda to is employees while secretly managing it's global payload bomb operations against Red. (Insert more villainous laughter here.)

I thought it was a nice touch to use some of the plant props in the Office waiting area, as potted plants (if I don't say so myself). I made the planters out of displacements. I also like that when you are coming up the maintenance hallways, you run through a dusty back hallway full of pipes and vents then come out through a one-way screen and suddenly you find yourself in a nice office, with polished floor and even plants (in the middle of a factory?), and somehow it all makes sense.

You may notice what I did to break up the large monotonous walls in these cavernous spaces. Shadows. Being a film guy, I understand that lighting is also about shadows. In technical terms, this meant a lot of lightmap optimization: every wall with crisp, highly-contrasting shadows needed a highly-detailed lightmap which had to be paid for by applying low-detail lightmaps to many other surfaces elsewhere that had even, low-contrast lighting (either fully lit or fully dark). It was tough optimizing all the lightmaps.

Here's another thingy. Many of the cavernous spaces had large, blocky, angular shapes. I broke up many walls with shadows, as noted above - but I still felt the sharply angular corners were distracting up close; those corners where the two horizontal seams of a wall-floor joint would meet the vertical seam of a wall-wall joint. They came together too precisely - didn't look right. Yet I didn't want to put in too many I-beams or other protruding geometry, the kind you see in other maps, to break things up because I liked the sense of a huge, empty space. The solutions I came up with were corner guards and dust piles.

The corner guards were inspired from seeing them in a grocery store - and then I remembered seeing them all over the place in industrial sites, to prevent trucks and front-end loaders from smashing into walls (I've been to my share of industrial sites, doing gripping on films and so on). So I made those out of pipe corner props and put them on most convex corners. To explain them, I made an scene where a skid had clearly smashed into one of these and dented the corner behind it (a bit of wall made of displacement). Now players know why they're there.

For the concave corners I just stuck in small displacements textured as sand - as if dust had collected in the nooks and crannies. Factories are dusty places, so this gives the sense I intended: a huge, empty space that nevertheless had activity in it at one time. Since these might seem like oddly out-of-place piles of sand to some players, I slipped in a single broom (made of func_details) in a remote corner of the Factory, beside a neatly swept dust pile. When players see it, they'll understand that the dust piles are exactly what they are.

While you have been traveling this main route with the payload, there is a network of secondary maintenance halls that leads from the Red Zone ultimately up to behind the Office (see above) and the "Roof" (see below). These have pipes, vents, junk and so on - hidden maintenance spaces where workers, electricians, plumbers and others toil in grime and dust.

A particular place of note in these maintenance hallways is the "Crack". This is a remnant from the original idea of doing this level as a canyon: it was to be a natural crack that let a shaft of light into a mining tunnel, throwing a beautiful shadow. I liked it so much I kept it, but had a problem justifying why there would be such an unusual a crack in a factory. I rationalized that the roof was under repair. It was also tough to get the light to not entirely burn out the roof surface while still throwing enough light on the wall far below. When I brought the map out onto the Roof, I realized also that the Crack could become a battlement: a place where Blu could set up to shoot down at Red guys coming up.

The Crack serves a final purpose: to show the player why there is gravel on the Roof. Not many people know that it's pretty common to spread gravel on the rooftop of a flat building - so lifting it off at a place (with a shovel and wheelbarrow to emphasize this) offered an explanation to players puzzled why the roof seems like the ground.

(Actually, while I'm on that, if you look closely at the joints, seams, beams and so forth on this level, you might figure out that I know something about architecture and construction. I've done renovations; took drafting and woodworking; my dad was a carpenter [we built our own house and other things]; et cetera. This is invaluable when it comes to detailing game levels - you put in stuff that makes sense.)

The Crack also lead me to the idea of the bomb coming out onto the Roof and falling into an unseen centre of the Factory. I think. Anyway, the Roof was a tougher part to map. Reason: I used the typical Goldrush/Badwater props for the final explosion animation, as we see them reused in other maps too (not having the resources,  expertise or time to make a custom one). These dynamic props break apart, send shrapnel up in the air which then falls and lands on invisible geometry. The original geometry was that of the buildings surrounding the Goldrush final bombsite, and/or those surrounding the Badwater bombsite - I'm not sure the difference in the two animations. Anyway, the debris lands on invisible, sometimes angular rooftops, clearly rolling down places then dropping off. I needed a substitute, but didn't want to do yet another bombsite surrounded by buildings with angles rooftops (ala Goldrush and Badwater).

The solution I came up with was giant "Vents". You see lots of ventilation stuff on a rooftop - why not giant angled vents? So those vents and all the stuff around them are placed to "catch" the falling shrapnel.

The Vents also look cool when you are pushing the bomb and come out onto the rooftop for the first time. They seem to stare down at you. I really believe that spaces should open up with a punch - with a vista that tries to take your breath away. (Again, this is more film influence.)

But I also needed to divide up the space around the Vents and the bombsite with walls and floors of some sort to make the area playable as a level. Well, if the Crack is undergoing repairs, why not the Vents too? So now the Vents are surrounded by what look like temporary wooden walls, as if the whole roof were in disrepair and undergoing a major renovation. (And you may notice waaay back at the Blue Trainyard a ventilation unit sitting on 3 skids - perhaps waiting to be brought into the Factory and dropped into place on the Roof.)

Also, I though it would be cool for players to actually be able to get inside the Vents here or there.

This leads to another problem and its solution: I wanted to retain the first Red spawn - way back at the map start - as the main Red spawn. (I add in two smaller Red spawns farther along, which get triggered as the bomb advances.) But I wanted to have that beginning Red spawn as the main one, forcing Red players to feed into the central maintenance hallway shortcuts. The engineer teleporter feature will hopefully make this feasible (see Gameplay). But for those players who  can't teleport, and need to get up to the final area fast, what? Since I had already established the presence of Vents, above, this lead to a way to justify getting them there fast. A wind-tunnel-like vent (the "Wind Tunnel", even though it's another vent). You step in here and it shoots you forward with a blowing wind sound. Actually the floors are conveyor belt entities - but it seems like you're being pushed by air. It speeds Red members upwards toward the Roof, but also impedes Blu guys from coming down it.

One interesting find just off the half-way point of the Wind Tunnel is the "Bomb Loader" - a little rube-goldberg-ish bit of visual eye-candy players might pause a moment to watch. It perpetually loads Blu bombs into a hatch, thus reinforcing the idea this is Blu's payload bomb factory (in case players couldn't figure that out yet).

A final element. Having built this roof space, high up above the ground, I didn't know how to decorate the 3D skybox - the horizon - around it. At first I placed in lots of sprawling terrain and distant hills - as you see in a lot of other Team Fortress 2 maps. First, it didn't feel right. Second, the height of the rooftop didn't allow me to properly screen things out - you could see that the skybox was empty. Then one day it hit me: make it a city setting. Everything fell into place. The distant horizon now became a city sihouette; the space immediately outside the factory's Rooftop now could be adjacent buildings. Also, I made those buildings also Blu, to give the idea that Red was penetrating not only into a Blu factory, but into the very centre of Blu territory. Furthermore, I think this may inspire others to make maps set in cities, as this is an under-explored theme (most TF2 maps are set out in remote, rural areas).

Next: Gameplay...

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