Journal #8861

Alright, first Journal, lets do this.

I never really had much communication with a mapping community, my first one was in GameBananna but nobody really reviewed my maps (all of them suck don't bother) so I stagnated whenever I made maps. I always wanted to make a successful map, be it on Half Life or Counter Strike, I wanted to make a map that is fun to play in, a very hard job to do.

Fast forward to today, I decided to start on a new, simple project. I tried making a counter strike before but I managed to screw it up through vertex manipulation. So I made a new one, and in one or two hours, I made a layout I was comfortable with.Already this looked better than most of my other work. The next image shows the layout of the whole map, where ts and cts are, etc.Of course I shouldn't just make a map for the sake of making it, I need to make it original and stand out from other maps. First: Where is it? I've already included Dust textures and felt this map worked well with it, so it has to do somewhere in the desert. I first thought of making it somewhere in Africa, but I recently watched a documentary about the Soviet-Afghan War, and decided that's what I am planning on. The terrorists are the Mujahideen forces and the counter-terrorists are the Soviets (With M4 rifles lol).So I got the theme but that's not enough, how does the map perform gameplay wise? Every CS map has sightlines, a center, and 2 bombsites. Following the theme of this map, I decided to add a gameplay theory that could be more 'radical' from other CS maps: Conventional vs Guerilla Warfare.

I'm using these terms very broadly but here is what I mean: The CTs have control over all the sightlines in the map in one location that is very easy to get to: the fort.Which has control over Bombsite A...And a sightline towards the path to Bombsite B...This obviously gives the CTs a huge upper hand, in a competitive setting, they can just put one CT there and 4 others to protect the bombsites, Very Overpowered.

However, this doesn't mean the Ts can't fight back, as the Ts will always have control over the center of the map, which the CTs will always have to fight for and can easily lose due to how quick the Ts can establish dominance over.The idea is that the CTs can have a good static defense while the Ts have a wide array of flanks that can overwhelm the CTs. This theory will be covered on later, particularly in video form.

Another gameplay mechanic I want to briefly cover on is the terrain. One of the biggest disappointments I have with many maps is how flat everything is when moving. There are obviously some height differences in some areas of every map, but the lack of slopes that the player can take advantage of is what I want to fix. This map will be very dusty, more dusty than Dust and Dust2, and allow players not only attack while moving on the X/Y axis but also on Z axis, allowing full 3D movement (I might be over-exaggerating but I will try to make the most of this).

So these are my ideas that I want to bring out in this map I will call for now de_afghan (I will change it since someone else has used that name but don't have a good name for it yet).

Here is the list summary of what I'm making:

1. A map based on the Soviet-Afghan War

2. Use Conventional vs Guerilla warfare theory

3. Create a terrain that allows quick movement over Z axis.

I will continue making reports on the progress over the map, at maximum weekly. Hopefully I won't lose confidence in the future.

Here are more pictures of some parts of the map current map.