Blocked

So, now that my brief winter break is over, it's time to get back on the grind...

We're back on Blocked! This project was started last year for the TF2Maps Stack the Deck contest, which we ultimately abandoned because we didn't want to rush it, and we've put a ton of testing into it, but Pear and I were just feeling like things weren't playing quite how we wanted them to, so it was time to do a very massive overhaul to the map.

Pear took the reins a bit on the gameplay side to change things up. He had already did the opening area awhile back, which we've been testing, but this time he took a look at the rest of the map and we went full spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. I'm always an advocate for not getting too attached to anything in a map, especially during the alpha stages, so I'm excited to see how these changes play out.

The opening area is still mostly the same from the previous tests, but things get pretty different as soon as you enter the building. We've opened it up a ton, removing the tunnel that the cart burrowed through before in favor of pushing that dynamic element back further and creating a new path on the outside of the elevator gameplay space, which should give blu a little bit more height coming out of it and into what is usually a pretty fish-in-a-barrel situation.

The cart will be losing the drill aspect after it goes through the wall, converting to a more traditional cart after its job is done, which should make the elevator itself feel a bit less cramped when you try to push up it.

Next, the elevator area itself has seen a massive redo around it. There's too many changes to list, but it's going to really shake things up and hopefully simplify the fighting around it, and make things a bit more interesting for both teams. There are some areas I'm going to watch out for in testing, but I think it's promising.

After the elevator space, the narrow hallway leading to last has been widened and opened up a bit more to make it less claustrophobic, but still pretty similar to the previous version, gameplay-wise.

Last (heh), last has been completely redone, removing the massive tower (I know, I know) and changing up the gameplay to a more traditional drop-the-cart-in-a-pit style, after winding up a loop through the area. This is a pretty huge change, but should fix the weird difficulty curve we had before, where last was easier to take than the elevator space.

Overall, I think I'm entering a new era of simplifying my maps a bit, the last couple years I've been going pretty crazy with my layouts, so I think it's time to scale back a bit and keep it simple!

I'm super stoked to see how all these big changes play out! We'll hopefully be testing it this upcoming Friday (if I can get it ready in time) during our weekly playtest, so make sure you're in the discord server to join, if you aren't already!

 https://discord.gg/Ghc44d9mBg