Gasworks - Behind the Scenes

Making maps was something I wished to learn and be good at since my I was a little teenager. I always thought myself to be very creative and ambitious when comes to make virtual environments and places and back then, I was obsessed with Valve games like Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. Back then, modding was something I discovered after beating all Half-Life games and I was amazed by its community and content to a point that I wanted to make something by my own.

In 2017, I wanted to learn how to make Team Fortress 2 maps. I followed a tutorial playlist from a huge level designer called UEAKCrash and started to understand the basics of Hammer Editor and Source Engine itself. After finishing the playlist, I was committed to make a map by myself and that’s the beginning of 4-year long journey to release my remake of Gasworks.

To be fair, Gasworks was not my initial plan to port or remake into Team Fortress 2 or Open Fortress. I wanted to make something original for Team Fortress 2 and something simples as well. So, I started to make a King of the Hill map, which is a game mode with a single control point each team must capture and defend until the end of the round. This map was heavily inspired by a map called Badlands.

This first map is simple in terms of layout and while I liked the idea of this map, I concluded that the scale and the layout are not good because it’s a sniper heaven and because it’s big and long for players to walk in. I decided to scrap this map out and make another one.

One of the maps that stuck with me since my childhood was a community made one called Sandbowl from Team Fortress Classic. It was a nice alternative version of an official Valve map Dustbowl and I had alot of fun back then. So, I decided to adapt this special map into Team Fortress 2.

Unfortunately, the layout I was working on didn’t work out and I eventually moved into something simpler.

In 2019, I discovered a Team Fortress 2 modification called Open Fortress which is basically an Arena First Person Shooter with Team Fortress 2 art style and universe. I planned to make an industrial themed map with a simple layout with collaboration of a sound designer and musician called Tiga Diax (https://tigadiax.artstation.com/ , https://www.instagram.com/tigadiax/ , https://open.spotify.com/artist/25RwcbWxXJF3hfhBwCZJK4 , https://soundcloud.com/tigadiax). He made two custom music’s for this map and I took care of the rest of this small project. Here is the results.

Nowadays, I look at this map and I see it a as joke and a reminder of how far I have come to in level design. This map was awful in terms of optimizations, layout, main rooms/locations, replayability, everything. These pictures are my final version of this interesting attempt of map creation. But thankfully I wasn’t done yet with improving myself and taking level designer more seriously and then the development of Gasworks remake begins.

At first, I focused myself to make 1:1 copy for testing purposes. I wanted to see what changes I would need to make, what works with this original layout, what doesn’t work and how I am going to implement Open Fortress mechanics, weapons, pickups, etc... After finishing the blocking and placing weapons, pickups and teleporters, I shared an improved version of this alpha version in Open Fortress Discord server and the feedback/playtesting I got back was mixed and yet, interesting and useful.

After reading the feedback, I started to make small improvements before moving my map to Beta stage. I decreased the number of railguns, replaced the nailgun from the secret room to a super shotgun, added more health pickups, improved underwater visibility and other small changes.

Once I got to the Beta stage of this map, I started working on the environment around the playable area and inside of it. More changes were made to the gameplay aspect, but I had come to conclusion that I needed to make some assets for this map of my own. Back then, I was too scared to model anything on 3Ds Max and on Blender. It was stressful to make something simple for a newbie I was at that time, but I didn’t give up and forced myself to leave that comfort zone of mine.

These pictures are the first and last beta version of my Gasworks remake, this project was no longer a 1:1 port but my own version and vision of Gasworks for Team Fortress 2 universe. Those chimneys above were used as templates and placeholders for my 3 models I was about to make on Blender and 3Ds Max.

I first started to model on Blender, but it turned out to be a mess. Exporting models to Source Engine games is painful, I had to create individual files for mesh, colisions and a text file which contains properties of a single model. I was getting tons of errors and because of that, I moved to 3Ds Max since that software has an extension far more friendly and easier to export models to Source Engine.

After successfully importing my models into my map, I started to improve the 3D Skybox, textures and weapon, pickups, spawn points and explosive barrels placements. 3D Skybox suffered tons of changes to make it feel natural and real, but I am happy with the current results. Here's how it looked like before final release.

Then I worked on final touches to release the final version of the map. Placed more teleporters, added more rooms, added a special outside platform for the power up and a suspended inside platform for the BFG, the ultimate weapon, and added a small story of this map. That huge metal building was inspired from a game called Black Mesa.

These are my final screenshots.

Overall, I am happy with my results. Some issues persisted like ladders height and speed, scale and not being appropriate for low player count while playing. I feel I managed to change the artistic aspect of the original to Team Fortress 2 style and making it feel right and natural. It was a tough development that took many years and retries, but I managed to overcome all these problems.

I hope you enjoyed my reading and this behind the scenes post. Have a good one!