While this was a popular sentiment across all of TTT, Llama and I wanted to avoid making a symmetrical map even though symmetry would guarantee equality with the teams. At least in my opinion, pure symmetry can get boring pretty quickly. Instead, we opted to provide both teams with different but valuable resources-- light has immediate access to a low-cost power weapon and varied routes across the map, but wily gets very fast access to mid and the high ground, as well as a sight line to the big health. I personally wanted to place a big focus on varied sight lines and flanking routes, which led to decisions like the long sight line leading from ruins into falls and the glass flanking the big health in mid.
This is one of my favorite item layouts I've ever placed, by the way-- in testing, playing around that middle big health led to a lot of fun skirmishes. The weapons also feel just right, with Magic Card being my personal favorite fit. You can do some pretty nutty stuff with that weapon here due to how interlaced our routes are. I also put down the Chill Spike/Water Shield combo pretty much entirely for myself, as I think that's pretty fun to play with. I was very happy to see that the judges responded well to my choice of weapons, and that going lower on the amount of weapons was the right call to make.
Something I tried to focus on was avoiding spawncamps. The TTT ruleset is a team deathmatch setting with team spawns on, so in vanilla, that's a very real threat. In smaller maps it can be difficult to avoid putting team spawns in sight lines, but there is definitely some geometry here that pretty much only exists to stop mid from having a shot on the spawns. Each team also spawns with a powerful weapon to give them a fighting chance if they're pushed that far back.
If anyone is wondering why there's such a drought for health and ammo, by the way, this is actually reactive to a conversation I had with King Dumb around the time v6 dropped. He had mentioned that due to the increased efficacy of health and the way you need less ammo to kill now, it would be more important than ever to keep the pickups for both lower than usual. I tend to agree with that sentiment, and especially with how low our unit scale is on this map, I wanted to keep our pickups spread out while still having something to grab in each room.
On to the visuals, which is something I was happy to see we got high marks for. Before we even had a concept for the layout, we were planning our callouts. Our singular focus with this map's visual design was to give every room its own visual identity, and we did such a good job with this (if I do say so myself) that I was inclined to look into adding a SECTINFO lump. For the uninitiated, SECTINFO assigns a name to sectors you specify, which allows $location in chat and the locations in coop info to actually work. This is not a feature that GZDB/UDB support, and I had to ask Russel for the method he used when making his jam maps that use it. I would up needing to code my own console application to support that workflow, and I'm proud to have joined the single digit number of 8BDM maps that use this feature. Don't expect this to be a common thing, though-- SECTINFO isn't really scalable at all, and it's a really specific method to set it up.
Llama is entirely responsible for demaking all of the sprites and tiles, and he set up all of the cosmetic actors. He absolutely knocked it out of the park with these-- our ambitious idea to bring these Super Metroid areas to life paid off so well that we've been spitballing even crazier ideas for our joint pack, REAL. My personal favorite detail is Phantoon himself-- little fun fact, he has a small chance to just pop in without fading like he does in the game.
Fun fact about me: I hate Decorate. This map really rubbed that in. The amount of hours I spent de-janking those Kzans... *shudder* For eagle-eyed Slade Spelunkers, you may notice an obituary in the Kzan's code. They originally did do damage, but while summoning the elder gods to try and make them actually take a frag, we realized that them dealing damage really didn't add anything. At most, they'd annoy people in mid. They are what gave me the original idea for putting Chill Spike on the map, since freezing people under the Kzans sounded pretty silly at the time; in retrospect, I'm glad this situation didn't actually make it into the map.
While two of our target game types involved classes, this map's construction actually didn't place too much focus on it. Like Llama said in his dev notes for his CMCP map, good maps made for vanilla tend to stay good for other modes. Personally, the stuff I built for this map was entirely focused on vanilla, and any considerations made for classes were more of a flourish on top of that design mentality than any real focus. And really, the only change we made to explicitly accommodate classes was an adjustment to our sight line breaks in mid so flying classes could move around easier.
I'm sure I'm forgetting something, we spent a LOT of time on this map. From day 2 of this competition starting we would just spend hours and hours and hours pouring all the love we could into this map, and it's great that it paid off! Our finishing a few days early was not a result of it being a quick dev cycle-- we had just hit a point where there was nothing else we could think of to do.