This is the first in (what should hopefully be) a series of posts, where I take a look at my older mod projects and critique them. Likely very harshly, especially early on, as I struggle to look back on my past works with anything resembling a sense of pride.
Left 4 Dead 2 – Sppoku (2015)
This was my first proper (in massive airquotes) map for a Source Engine game, in the form of a very messy, pretty broken “port” of the act from the original 1999 Halloween Tech Demo for Sonic Robo Blast 2. If I remember correctly, this was done initially through an old, very broken tool designed to take Doom maps and convert them to Quake. Of course, being a pretty bad level layout to begin with didn’t help, but my god did I butcher it even further.
The starting area alone shows how poor the quality of this map was, what with its complete lack of detailing (something I’ve always been bad at, but was even worse at back then). Items are just haphazardly strewn about in this barren field with very little care or thought (Tier 1 weapons are also present, which makes very little sense for Survival Mode if you ask me) and the lighting is ugly and nonsensical (where is the directional light even coming from???).
Said starting area is also incredibly broken from a gameplay perspective, as holding it results in the Infected hordes only having one entrance to the area in the form of a narrow tunnel in a lowered ditch. Due to how cramped it is, the players can easily just focus fire into it (which is how the 24 minute time seen in my screenshots was achieved).
Moving into the cramped tunnels also draws attention to the map’s god awful lighting even more, with phantom lights seemingly stuck around just to light up the area. The fact that they do a poor job and cause seams to be really obvious makes me think that this map had some sort of leak (it looks like I surrounded it in a box of developer textures, which lends credence to that theory, implying I tried a quick hack to fix it).
I also clearly knew even less about good Navigation Mesh creation at the time, as this (also very cramped) upper area seems to be completely inaccessible to the survivor bots. The ledges in the nearby room seem to have no connections on the mesh besides Infected Team only ladders (which are solid with no angled clipping brushes, allowing players to get caught on them with ease) and the large slope is oddly made up of multiple different ladders, yet the survivor bots make no attempt to traverse up it, seemingly due to a very spotty Navigation Mesh causing said ladders to not actually connect to anything at the top. Oops.
The main chunk of the map is taken up by the maze section that the original level layout had for whatever reason. Initially the original bar texture was used, but that made Infected spawning basically non-existant, as the players could see this whole huge field. Because of that little quirk, the fences were swapped out for these ugly, blocky metal walls.
The screenshot above also shows the previously mentioned developer texture cube (note the grey surface on the far right), alongside some of my silly attempts to “balance” the map by tearing out random one way shortcuts. In addition, the jump out of the ditch (which is supposed to be filled with water but just… Wasn’t?) was turned into a set of stairs (not even a slope), presumably due to me not actually understanding how to connect two parts of the Navigation Mesh at different elevations (which begs the question of how the jump in the opening area is properly connected).
Another minor example of me being stupid. I removed the very end part of the act by dropping a wall over it. Yet the Navigation Mesh continues through the wall and even has parts of the water pit remaining. Quality!
One final silly addition I made to attempt to “balance” the map, this ugly teleporter that warps from the end of the maze to a tunnel on the other side of the map. Of course the AI doesn’t know anything about it, so they don’t actively use it and will instead always take the long way around.
It also looks very ugly, that texture isn’t even fit to the brush…
So why was the map called Sppoku? No special story about that one, just me somehow managing to utterly mangle the spelling of the word “Spooky”. Your guess is as good as mine as to how I managed such a weird corruption.
As for the map itself, the verdict?
Bad. Like really borked.
Though at least it taught me the basics of using Hammer.
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