I wanted a challenge. Most of my work with Hammer has been focused on Half-Life 2, and with that, my maps employ bleak industrial environments and slow-paced singleplayer combat. Arcada was my answer. Here, stark, cement corridors and moody twilight landscapes are replaced by sun-soaked avenues and palatial courtyards in an imagined Catalonian city. I wanted to push my knowledge of Hammer to the limit by creating a complex multiplayer map for Counter Strike’s Defusal game mode. This allowed me to experiment with far more ambitious layouts and geometry, including nonorthogonal avenues and complex archways. The map also features a ton of verticality - while this is common in most multiplayer maps, Counter Strike tends towards flat, even spaces. One of the major challenges in the map’s design was balancing this verticality while ensuring that the map was still incredibly readable.

Creating spaces like this grassy lawn was particularly challenging, and I found myself iterating on this area the most. I needed to create a space where the Terrorist team could hole up and protect their planted bomb, without creating too defensible a space. I had to carefully consider every possible sightline and adjust props and brushes to create the perfect balance of vulnerability and map domination.

For Objective B, I wanted to contrast the openness of the grassy lawn shown above, with a claustrophobic construction zone, with numerous props and models that players can use for cover. This area also has many more entrances and exits that force players to stay on their toes.

Narrow alleys like these were instrumental in defining the feel of the map. I wanted to create spaces that forced the attacking team to make a difficult decision: whether to take the more open and indefensible pathway or risk getting bottlenecked in these tight corridors that spiderweb through the map.

These archways were a common theme I noticed in many of my reference photos. I loved the idea of a stealthy platter climbing up there to get a better shot at the enemy team!