Curvature (5000 budget contest entry)

Curvature

This is going to be my entry for the 5000 budget contest, a small map for up to six players entitled Curvature. I've had it in my head for a long time to do something close to covenant architecture in a forge map, but as we all know, the object palette makes it tough to do (and even tougher to look good). This map, I believe, pulls it off - and on a very tight budget. All I had to do was make it tiny. Plus hey, look, a tree in a map, oh em gee. Curvature will be testing for the next X number of weeks on Tuesdays in GrenadeGorilla's/Zell Greylock's/my custom game night - our threads are in the customs lobby each week.

 

Thanks! We'll definitely be testing this one a lot so I'm sure you'll see plenty of it. Sorry about the title, I didn't even think about that.

Definitely up for some mutual testing sessions. Hit me up any time. Regarding the covenant thing, what I mean is more in the structure than the textures. Obviously nearly every forge object is gray or brown-ish gray, so I can't really make it all purple and so forth - but I tried to have very few right angles or flat, square sections; nearly everything here has curvature to it (hence the title). Even large chunks of the floor are at slowly changing angles (which believe me was freaking hard to put together and have it look halfway decent!). Basically this is as close as I could come to the fluid, curved feel of a map like Midship. And based on my only test so far, it is extremely fun bouncing grenades off all those curved surfaces...

 

Truthfully I'm not sure it's possible. I made another small map previously (even smaller than this one, meant for no more than 4 players) and it was like it just confused the game - people would spawn 6 feet from each other even though there were better spawn points elsewhere. I'm curious to see how it goes in team games and smaller games (4 players ideally), and hopeful that it will be less of an issue. But basically, the small size makes it physically difficult - there's not many "safe" spawning areas with six people running around - and the game's spawn logic seems to make it worse. I did however adjust the locations of the FFA starting spawns - I thought they were pretty good but Berb took off at a dead sprint and ended up behind somebody else (you?) within the game's first few seconds. I'm therefore relocating the initial spawn you were on to a slightly better place.

One thing I am thinking of doing is adding a few more spawn points and setting some of the existing ones to TEAM ONLY. That way there will be only so many spawn points available for FFA, and they'll be sprinkled around the map as evenly as possible. That still won't help much with spawning right next to someone that is running up behind or beside you, but it's all I can do. I tried fixing this on my previous map with a bunch of small neutral spawn zones and it didn't do a thing to help.

I made some other changes last night as well - fixed the "vents" Berb was escaping from (which I had thought were too small to fit into, but clearly not!), and replaced some of the floor pieces to reduce budget and slightly simplify the design. I doubt you guys would even notice the difference, but there's a small one.

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EDIT - I went over the spawn points just now and did pretty much what I said above. Basically I thinned out the existing points by setting the redundant ones in most clusters to TEAM ONLY - that way there's only so many available in FFA and they are as separated and non-cheap as possible, for the most part. So if two players spawn simultaneously, hopefully you won't be that close to the other guy, and even if you are near he won't be behind you or something. I also added four spawn points to some out-of-the-way places, two of which are set to FFA ONLY. We'll give it a run at some point to see how it goes, but I'm hopeful. I also think limiting FFA to 4-5 players max will help - six free agents running around creates chaos on a map this size. Six players on teams would probably be much less chaotic.

 

Yeah, I'm hoping! I've never gone to the trouble of having team and ffa only spawn points before (just initial spawns and spawn zones), but on a map this small it seems like it might be logical. You want to spawn next to teammates if you both die at once, but you don't want the game to even have the option to spawn you next to enemies in FFA.

 

Yes indeed, we did play it. Though with about twice as many people as desired... ha ha! I'm going to try to get a group together later in the week (maybe this weekend) specifically to run multiple 2v2 and 4 player FFA games on it. I actually kind of enjoyed 8 player oddball even though it was way too chaotic.

 

I'm not sure in terms of physical size, the layouts are extremely different - quite a bit of the space on this map is taken up with a large, fairly open center area that I can't safely spawn people in (though I did put one FFA-only spawn point there right next to the tree). Part of the issue may be that there's not a lot of this map that is protected from everywhere else, except for the two bases and the curved corridors which are too narrow to put more than one spawn point in apiece. I'm continuing to make small adjustments, we'll see how it goes in testing.

 

Thanks brox! I got to test it twice more tonight - slayer and then multi-flag, both 2v2 - and the games were good, though the teams were mismatched in game 1. I'm going to make a few more small tweaks and look to run it again more heavily this weekend and/or (probably "and") next Tuesday at CGN.

 

Me either! will do.

edit - Oops, didn't work. It removed it from the "subject" of my first post, but not the thread title. If you ask a mod they might do it - I'm happy to sign off on that.