I see that there are lots o' tutorials f Created 14 years ago2010-02-11 19:44:23 UTC by Suparsonik

But, there is basically none about TFC.

Any tips on how to make a good TFC map?
I've been hired by a server to make some awesome maps for them.

I very much doubt you've been "hired" considering you have no previous experience in TFC mapping. I've been doing this for a lot longer than you and I've only been paid for it twice.

As for your question, all you have to do is keep in mind that multiplayer maps have to flow. It's very important not to have any dead ends. Every route has to be a potential escape route, a potential way round to flank, etc.

I'm not being paid. I offered to do it for free.

And thanks.

Hope these guys with the server are going to be prepared for the level of awesomeness they'll undoubtedly witness in your first attempt at a TFC map.

...

I'm sure there's Quite a few tutorials out there, just search around. Might be harder to find now with TF2 out and fudging up your search results though.

Many of the tutorials for TFC don't exist, or at least don't anymore since TFMapped went down. I've been meaning to upload the basic tutorials that I salvaged but I've been quite busy the past couple months, not to mention too lazy to do so.

The first bit of advice I'm going to offer you is a warning. Although the basic structure of TFC and Half-Life are similar the differences in the way they function are severe, and that severity depends on each game mode. The translation of this is that just because you can make an "awesome" map for Half-Life, does not mean that you can jump straight into TFC and do the same, let alone have the game modes function properly. TFC revolves around the use of the info_tfgoal point entity, which controls everything from spawn points to flags and ammo/armor packs, and the i_t_g brush entity which acts in a similar fasion to the trigger entities (except it adds more conditional options).

The easiest way to counter the change is to "copy" an existing map's setup, eg: Dustbowl's style for Invade/Defend, 2fort's style for CTF, etc. Notice that I wrote copy in quotations as you need to tailor each setup to the needs of your map.

On top of that you need to take into account other factors, such as what Huntey pointed out. The flow of the map is extremely important. If you have a map that consists of a single line from Team 1 to Team 2 the map will undoubtedly fail, and fail miserably for obvious reasons. The corollary, however, is not true. If you have 1,000 different ways to get to each base it makes it impossible to defend and/or it will cause confusion and lead to people getting lost in your map, which is bad.

The right blend of paths depends heavily on the game mode, your plan for the map and the abilities of different classes. After you have the structure and gameplay mechanics finished you still need to conduct a series of playtests to pinpoint where you may have balance problems and address them accordingly.

The easiest style to replicate is a generic CTF map, however, I could give you a walkthrough of how dustbowl works in terms of paths, defensive positions, choke points, and capture point setup. I will instead leave that for you to figure out. Take a look at why certain maps are set up the way they are and provide reasoning for each. When you can do that you should be able to design a map around those aspects.