[HL2_Odyssey] Occupation

[GRiNET]

Occupation

• Game: Half-Life 2
• Context: Part of the HL2-TGA-Project

Description & background
This map is a part of the HL2-TGA-Project where I am one of the level designers. My level is taking place right after the Cathedral level where the player is going deeper into the city.
In my level, the player is going through some alleys to later arrive at the center of the city, the old town. At the center of old town, the town hall is located and unfortunately for us, held and heavily fortififed by the combine.
When the player reaches the main street they can see and hear rebels fighting the combine and quickly the player will jump into the fray.

Role in the campaign
The player will be fighting the combine, retake the square and hold out for a brief time to feel in control.
This to set a shift in power in the campaign. First, the player is weak and hunted, but now more people in the city have begun to resist the combine's hold on the city.
Therefore they now join the player in the struggle and provid extra firesupport. Since I am in the middle, I am introducing the crossbow to snipe out high value targets such as machine gunners. 
I am also introducing large scale battles and the turn of the campaign.  My design idea on this map is to make the player feel vulnerable at first before they have taken the square. Being under heavy machinegun fire makes you feel weak and vulnerable.
But after taking the square the player will feel strong, powerful and smart to have succeeded with this feat of strength.

Alpha build
Here is the first build of my map. I've been putting in some extra man hours in to polish things up so therefore everything is textured and looking less alpha than it really should.

LINK: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bys6E59JXPuUeHVOYk9xQnhWS2M/view?usp=sharing

Alpha screenshots

 

Edited December 2, 2016 by GRiNET

[will2k]

Welcome to mapcore, hope you enjoy your stay.

Solid start on this map; I quite liked the open street theme and progression

Advancing through the large plaza with the help of the rebels is a nice touch.

I believe some more cover in the plaza towards the combine machine gun nests would prove a much needed help for the player (you could scatter some on the edges not directly in front of the MG). As it is now, once you go past the last cover, you still have a solid 15-20 meters run in the open exposed to constant stream of bullets from the machine guns. I barely made it with 20HP playing on hard difficulty

Also make sure to add health kits and batteries at the museum door to reward the player after the fierce battle that they just endured

Keep it up.

[GRiNET]

 

@will2k Thank you so much for playing through my map. I appreciate your feedback! I strongly agree that I will have to rework the cover area in the middle of the plaza, as of now it feels very rigid and too linear to feel real. As for the tip to add health kits and batteries at the museum door, I think you will like the upcoming version of this map! ;-) As a side note, thank you for writing all those great tutorials on optimization in the source engine. I am reading through them quite often and altough I find it hard to understand they have helped me immensely. Perhaps you can answer some questions some time in the coming future? I have taken some notes when I tried to optimize my Day of Infamy map for the competition and I can't really get my head around certain things.

Thank you,

GRiNET