csWaldo

Beached is on the hub right now and so far the reception has been mixed, but good. I think the map does a good job selling the fantasy we want it sell, but as was expected, some people really don't like or can not handle the slant. We don't want to give up on that core theme of the map completely and so that number of people will never go down to zero, but we want to try and make the map accessible to as many players as possible. That's why we've been working on an update that tunes down the slant a bit in both A and Mid and we've also added visual elements that align with gravity and hopefully help ground our motion sickness prone friends The update should go live in a couple of hours. Here's a sneak peek:

Totally missed this until now, but looks amazing Screw the hostages I just want to look around

The quality of these is getting ridiculous. Really cool theme and amazing presentation so far

"All along the coast decommissioned vessels are being scrapped for metal - a vital resource for arms production worldwide. A recent increase in heavy weapons exports forces a terrorist group to wreak havoc at the ship breaking yard." It's us again, @esspho and I. Crude came together rather quickly and we knew it would be a safe and reliable submission for the contest. The theme for Beached on the other hand had been on our minds for a long while but early attempts at it failed. The layout we attempted is also a bit more risky than Crude and we weren't sure we could pull it off. We think this map came together very well though and so we are putting it forward to see where it can go. Beached takes you to a ship breaking yard somewhere in South Asia. We were really interested in the unique shapes and angles created by the half broken down ship skeletons laying on the beach. To add more variety and separate the different parts of the map more clearly, we decided that one bombsite would be close to the beach while another should be inside, where it ended up as the theater of a cruise ship. In between sit two closely connected middles, each offering their own additional path to one bomb site. We are hoping that the Ts can either choose to split up and take either site from two angles or quickly switch up their target through here. Though not initially planned the map ended up with a decent amount of verticality and we made sure that basically all sections of that can be reached indirectly through jumping. We're hoping the map plays as fun and dynamically as we intended it to https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3302965335 Radar: More screenshots:

Always thought this theme was overdue for another map. Hope we get to see more soon

As a little follow up, here are some stats from the hub so far. Keep in mind that sample size is quite and most players only have played a few matches on the map so far, so the stats move quite a bit every time I add new demos. Still it's very nice to be able to put some numbers behind the matches

Small Update: Crude has been on the faceit hub for a few days now and so far I think it's going pretty well. The overall layout seems to function alright (it's a 3 lane map, go figure ). Both bombsites appear to be fun and there are a decent amount of plants and defuses happening. A common complaint has been the map size and we are aware that it's on the big end. So far though I'm not fully convinced it is actually an issue and reducing the map size would mean completely reworking areas that currently already function well, so we are going to hold off on that. A bigger issue in our eyes is mid, especially the CT dominated half of it (thanks to @Fnugz for pointing it out). It is very connected to the entire CT half of the map, making it very difficult for Ts to gain and keep control here which makes mid plays much harder than they should be. Likewise this connectivity means that once Ts gain total control over middle, they can very quickly end up behind the bomb sites rather than attacking them, which is not a pattern we want to encourage there. We are already drafting a new version that isolates and simplifies mid to make it easier and less chaotic to use. We also want cut down and simplify the pathing in and around CT spawn to streamline rotations and cut barely used map space. We may not have this version ready before friday when our time on the hub ends, but we are still super happy about every demo and piece of feedback we get and will update here once the new version is ready Here's a little sketch of what this might look like in middle, CT changes not included:

We have the same theme cooking Oh well, the more the merrier

Areas look fun Are you planning to keep the spawns like this? Currently it creates a weird tension where the outside path takes you way past and around the bombsite rather than attacking it. A path that leads you so far away from your actual goal will likely feel less useful / desirable to players and it might even feel like a chore going there. This could become even more awkward depending on where the second bombsite would be. Simply moving the spawns to the left and right side of the map rather than the bottom could relieve this stress and make all paths feel more equal.

We pushed a new version that fixes the rampant moon walking and adds a new connector near B to improve T rotates.

You should tweak the tonemap and / or use darker dev textures. The sun is really blowing out in some places

That's a really cool concept but it will also be really difficult to pull off well. A vertical, stacked structure like this will be difficult to read on the radar and messes with the players ability to properly locate enemies footsteps. It's a bit hard to tell your current layout from the images you posted, but you'll need to think hard about how you can actually integrate an element like this into the map where it adds to the gameplay rather than taking away from it. What I would suggest would be a layout similar to overpass where you don't have a traditional middle and instead you have expanded A and B lanes, that split into two separate entrances for each bombsite. Then you could place this spiral between both bomb sites in such a way that it offers rotates for both teams in the same spot while still being separated. I'm not sure how that would look or play, but it's a cool idea for sure. Something like this? You could also mess with which arm of the spiral is connected to which connector in this diagram. For example:

@esspho and I take you to an oil field in a rocky desert. We're hoping to put a new spin on old ideas that should feel familiar to Counter-Strike players. Check out the map here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3237446696

Nice start so far! If you're unsure whether to focus on environment or layout first, it's a good idea to design both things hand in hand. Cool environment ideas can often inspire cool layout ideas and your layout will sometimes dictate certain environmental choices to work. For your layout, you might need to simply your middle areas a bit. From what I can see it looks like you have about 3 separate areas that all function similar to what a regular mid does. This also means you have a lot of chokepoints for your CTs to defend. Typically for a cs map you want roughly 4 major chokepoints that need to be defended in order to fully lock down the map. Any more than that and a team of 5 CTs will struggle to hold up a defense. I think simplifying all that space between your bombsites would help

Is that google maps geometry?