Level Designing for Team Fortress 2

This week is my week off between Game Design Summer Camps, and I took a bit of a break from applying to jobs to try to learn some new tech. 

I got back into Team Fortress 2 last week and wanted to give a stab at making my own level. As the Hammer editor was downloading from Steam, I banged out this mock-up of a level in Maya:

The whole level sketching process took about 2 hours, and I was reasonably happy with the result. The map style is Capture the Flag, so I only bothered fleshing out one half of the map, as they're symmetrical.

After downloading Hammer, I tried my hand at creating the level with the assistance of a ton of well-written guides on how to use Hammer. It was much slower-going, and after putting in about 12 hours, the many errors of an un-experienced Hammer editor began to surface. I'll list off what I did wrong, but first I'd like to show off my first attempt at creating a level for Team Fortress 2:

Similar view to the mock-up

View from the Sniper's Perch

Flag room, with a drop-down platform for enemy access.

It definitely doesn't look terrific, but this is where I started to get hung up. Hammer doesn't allow you to resize any of the pre-made props that exist in the editor, so levels tend to be at the mercy of the preloaded props, which my level was not. This was at the center of my frustration with making this map a reality, as I wasn't familiar with the scale nor the props of a typical level. I began by roughly sketching out most of the platforms of the level, only to find that they were too big. Scaling the entire level down worked for a while after I created all the major pieces in-line with each other, but I again ran into the problem of mis-fitting props in the level.

I did learn a lot, though, and consider it a relatively successful first learning attempt. Now that I know what kinds of things Hammer is and is not good at, I'm going to start over on a more humble map with many of these restrictions in mind.