Guest Blog: The Success of Half Life 2

Author's Note: Today's blog post has been written by guest blogger Darrel Dunn‏.


Valve Hammer Editor seems like it's history is complete with long details ranging from World Craft days to multiple Map use games like Half-Life. Half-Life first used Quake Engine in their game, so Hammer Editor seemed to be a great fit with their editing and compiling programs. Here's a video for visual support showing some of the basic uses Hammer Editor had on Half-Life games.

Team Fortress 2: Making Maps for Fun and Profit

Valve, being Valve, is unique in the way that the company will recognize and embrace the modders and custom content creators of the community. Valve loves modders (outside of VAC secure servers, anyways) and next to clever hat creators, it loves map makers the most.

This is Just Like Counter Strike!

I will be the first to admit, I have never actually played Counter Strike, in any version. I really only got into PC gaming rather recently, starting with TF2 and Portal. In fact, before starting this blog, my earliest encounter with the mechanics of a Counter Strike map was that of a video of a player getting stuck in a door.

But Counter Strike maps are considered classics, and often reused in other games as mods of one sort or another.

One such class if Counter Strike office or cs_office, which has mostly taken a life of its own in Garry’s Mod builds, videos and machinimas.

Cs_office is definitely an example of a well crafted map with a variety of distinct looking areas, from the snowy outdoors, to the mundane looking offices, to the dim garage level.

De_dust is also arguable the best known map of counter Strike, often used as a way to evoke nostalgia to recognition when referring to the game.

Unlike cs_office, it is a much simpler map, with fewer wide spread areas. Where in cs_office players would be scattered around the map, often in one on one engagements, de_dust usually involves many more skirmishes and team on team battles.

For further reading: Various Authors (2010). Counter Strike Wiki.  Retrieved from

http://counterstrike.wikia.com/wiki//

Guest Blog: Map Exploits

 Author's Note: Today's Entry has been graciously contributed by Brady Lundberg

Map making for video games is like an art form in a way, however creating a map requires much more than artistic skills. Logic, balance, and reason must fit inside maps to make it fair for every player while providing a challenge to them. So, let’s say that you have finished creating a map and you have played through that map several times making sure it is challenging and balanced. It is perfect, right? Well, unfortunately, that is most likely not the case.

 When games are released to the public, often players will try to abuse the games to find glitches in their designs so they can get dramatic advantage in games. Through playing games online I have learned glitches for various maps for various games from other players. Some things to keep in mind when creating maps to be sure they cannot be abused:

Interview with Swindle

 A classmate of mine has oh so generously volunteered to be interviewed for my blog. I asked him a few questions about himself and of Hammer.

Everything's Gone Zombies: The Maps of Left4Dead

In Half Life 2 and other adventure mods, creating a map is usually based around the scripts and reactions for that one player. In Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike, the maps are created to be balanced, and for the many players with in.

In the Left4Dead series, map creating gets a bit more complicated (no doubt resulting in the separate toolsets).
On one hand, the campaigns do have major 'events', such as those that trigger 'gauntlets' or the rescue attempts. On the other, the maps have to be balanced and prepared for the spawning of the enemy team in versus, as well as the generic zombie fodder.