It’s been forever since I wrote a post. I have been really bad about it, especially considering how much I’m paying to keep this website up.

I figured I would start by updating what I’ve been working on in Hammer, since my Arena Reskin post turned out well. Since I last spoke about Hammer, I acquired two maps from a creator who retired from TF2. He asked me to keep updating them. Those are Park and Skyline. I worked on and off on them for a few months. Unfortunately, other players don’t think they can become competitively viable maps from the state they’re in right now.

Hearing that was definitely a bummer. At least working on those two maps taught me a LOT more about the Source engine and Hammer. It was enough to push me to try my hand at making my own map from scratch! I had the theming in my mind since before I even acquired the other two maps, but I had never made the move to start on it. In the beginning, I wanted to try and make a few of the design concepts I had in my head in Hammer. When I tried, with the knowledge I had then, it wasn’t feasible. Jump to today, and I’m discovering just how much I didn’t know then.

The Map

So, this map I began work on is confidently titled Aquarium! It’s themed as an indoor aquarium. It takes heavy inspiration from the Shedd Aquarium and the Georgia Aquarium. I modified the idea of lighting I had in my head originally, which was this dark, very blue, artificially-lit aquarium similar to the Georgia Aquarium. This was because player and team readability suffers drastically in the Source engine with poor lighting.

I am making this map entirely from scratch; no logic prefabs from the other PASS Time maps or anything. It is just knowledge and occasional checking of the logic from other PASS maps I’ve worked on. If you want to learn more about how mapping in the TF2 community works, or you just want to see how updates are coming along for the map as I roll them out, you can find the map’s page here.

Great news for the 4v4 PASS Time community: we finally got our own map category on tf2maps.net! For a long time, we’ve been posting in the same place as regular 12v12 PASS Time maps. Having a section to share our smaller, more competitively focused maps means a lot.