Dry Dock

Hello Mapcore community!

I’m excited to introduce my new map, Dry Dock, created for the Big Adventures CS2 Mapping Contest.

Dry Dock is a competitive 5v5 bomb-defusal map set within and around the dry dock of a working shipyard. Players will find themselves fighting for control of key locations around the merchant ship “Big Adventure” during a terrorist attack.

For now my focus has been on creating an interesting, balanced layout with a unique setting and fun bombsites. I’ve forced myself to keep the map elements as basic and blocky as possible to help with rapid iteration and reduce the chance of me getting too attached to any particular idea.

So far I’ve been lucky enough to playtest several times with a group of friends who regularly play private 5v5 games and the map has evolved a lot. Now I’m excited to share the map with the world and start testing with new people.

The setting I’ve had in my mind all along has been a fictional UK shipyard, blending functional, modern buildings and older, historical areas. The fisher price colour scheme is not intended to make it to the art stage, I added this to help new players with orientation and callouts during playtests.

You can find the map on the workshop here - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/fi…/?id=3291975861 Take a look and let me know what you think.

One comment I’ve had during playtests is that the theme isn’t always clear, particularly in the areas further away from the dry dock itself.

Here are some of the mood/inspiration images I’ve kept hold of while building the map.

The route to A involves a bit of parkour down what will be scaffolding at the side of the ship. The storytelling here will be painting and maintenance work being undertaken. In reality it provides a fast and fun way to quickly get to the bottom without adding yet more ramps/stairs.

The mid section will be based around shipyard material storage and temporary office type containers.

The buildings over towards the B site side of the map will be much older. I’m thinking shipyard buildings from 100 years ago that have been renovated recently for more modern purposes while still retaining a lot of the original features. I recently visited Manchester Science & Industry Museum and it captured perfectly what I had in mind.

A few updates to Dry Dock today. I've added an raised section around the back of B site, accessible via new stairs from the covered area towards CT spawn. I wanted to give a few more defensive positions but also introduce another option for anyone rotating to the site. I've also changed the material for several floors to help with identifying the position of nearby footsteps. Most notable is the tunnel section below mid.

I had a playtest with the Source Engine Discord boys earlier today, tonnes of helpful feedback but a few key themes for improvement:

- A site wasn't attempted much by the Ts. Pathing issues around site, unfair contact points in the dry dock and when they made it in to site there are just too many entrances and angles to comfortably check and hold.

- Mid didn't offer enough value for Ts to be worth fighting for.

- B initial contact point was unfair for the CTs

Lots of positive comments too, I'm excited to get working on the next version.

Thanks very much! I’m having a lot of fun learning CS2 Hammer