Crawler - sticky ceiling map - UPDATED with video! EDIT - Added video walkthrough below. New map I'm working on, hopefully to be finished in time for Forgetacular. Couple screens below, looking for feedback and testers. It's an intense arena map but not quite as small as it looks in the screens - just hard to get a good overview type picture. The key feature is that a lot of the map has a sticky ceiling you can jump up and float on. That ceiling gives players access to the other side of the map's high ground (the only other way up there is through the opposing base), as well as to a shotgun and a jump-up hole that leads to an overshield - plus of course you can rain destruction on players down below. The downsides are, you move slowly, have little to no cover, can't throw grenades (they stick inside the ceiling!), and have just a few specific exits that let you detach from the ceiling. There's another area off to one side with another sticky ceiling as well. My hope is that people will check it out for the weirdo gimmick, but keep playing because it's just a small, symmetrical, very fun little arena map. The ceiling thing makes it interesting and different, but that isn't all there is to the map either. YouTube - Crawler - Halo: Reach map preview Tricky ways of getting weapons (notice sword has relocated since the walkthrough vid): YouTube - Crawler trickery
The "gimmick" isn't the whole point of the map, it's just an interesting wrinkle. I've gone out of my way to make it play as naturally as possible. You shouldn't get hung up anywhere; the area where you can stick to the ceiling is very confined with clear borders; the places to exit are marked with tin cup flags so players should have minimal confusion about that. And the ceiling gives certain clear advantages (getting from one side to the other, getting to the shotgun) but they are rather temporary - I don't think players are likely to spend a lot of time hanging up there, because I think it will be really easy for a player on the ground with a DMR to win that battle. Bottom line is, I believe that it should play like a regular map 80-90% of the time, with this one interesting feature used just occasionally, for specific reasons. Which I don't think makes it too different from the huge mancannons on Narrows, or the big lift/floating platform combination on Epitaph, to name just a couple of examples. Ultimately I hope it will play out like a more controlled version of the jetpack - like jetpacks everyone has, but that only work in certain areas. (And by the way, I do recommend this map be played with jetpacks turned off. They won't break the map, but they detract from the design of the top level, which for non-jetpackers has a very particular flow to it.) EDIT - Revisiting this thread today, I realized that you thought I meant this map for capital-A Arena. Actually this is just a symmetrical lowercase-a arena map, meant for team slayer per the Forgetacular contest description. It's an arena map in the same sense as Midship, Warlock/Wizard, etc., except the y-axis design is not symmetrical.