CTF-Kitchensink

My first map, conceived because I always called the server I ran "the kitchen sink" and I thought it would be a fun idea to make a giant board to play in. I was also inspired by Kid Ying's famous Bedrooms boards.

June 10, 2001.

Wow! That was fast! This is a truly unexpected honor to me: My first map received Map of the Week status on PlanetUnreal.com! I'm incredibly grateful for Rainecloud's glowing review!

There are a couple of things he said which make me feel the need to explain some things about the map. First, jumping to the biggest flaw in my map, he's dead on with how I feel. The lighting. It's not perfect, and it's really bright! I struggled with this in two ways. First, as a beginner mapper, I'm just getting the handle of everything. Second, considering the entire board takes place immediately beneath or above a fluorescent light, I couldn't find anywhere to PUT any dark spaces. Well, on second thought, I could have made the drain quite dark, couldn't I?

Ah!! I wanted to mention the amusing graffiti! These are the player names of my good friends from Zentropy Partners (and my best bud, Kezzek from The SafeHouse) who participated as the beta (and alpha!) testers of my map. I thank them profusely for their help and critcism while creating the Sink.

The red base, as Rainecloud says, IS more open... what can I say? I'm just an incredible fan of CTF boards that are not symmetrical, that's all! And one of the bases is probably always going to feel a little more defensible than the other. The red base DOES have some advantages, though. The food boxes around the base provide valuable sniping positions, and the edge of the counter makes the place quite dangerous. True, the defenders can fall off the edge, too, but you have to be careful if you're attacking from any direction but the far end of the rolling pin. (One disadvantage of the blue base is you can fly the redeemer directly in and the defenders can't escape its path very easily...!)

Game play? Yeah, that's the one thing that I think worked out exceedingly well, even though I didn't directly PLAN it in the first place. I step back and look at the Sink, and

I'm honestly PLEASED with the way it's stretched out across a few z-axis levels, and includes both long-haul flag carrying goodness as well as in-your-face deathmatch-style areas.


And the biggest compliment Rainestorm gave me was on the bots... THANK YOU!! You wouldn't believe how long I'd pulled my hair out on just this point... how many times I'd ripped up all the paths and re-laid them... tweaking a node then testing... whew. That's all I have to say: Whew!

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