Nat Clayton, level designer

A city doesn’t keep itself 30,000ft aloft without moving some serious cargo – and its depots like HERMES-3 that keep the flow of vital goods and cargo steady all across Olympus

#Blocktober is one of my favourite times of the year, and vowing to take part properly in 2022, I put together two different Source engine maps. Inspired by both WIP posts from Respawn level designers and other designers creating their own concept maps, the first of these was a Team Fortress 2 designed to work for Apex Legends’ 3v3 elimination mode, Arenas.

I chose Team Fortress 2 both for its breadth of character verbs (mobility, recon, defensive tools) and similar mechanics (spawn rooms, pickups, the Arenas mode in TF2 having a near-identical structure). I knew from the outset that I wanted this map to be themed after Apex Legends’ floating city, Olympus, a map I so deeply adore I wrote a love letter to it on my last day at PC Gamer.

Starting with a rough paint sketch, I blocked out an initial layout starting with a mid-section where I imagined most of the action would take place. While many Arenas maps are designed as BR-lite (two distinct POIs with an open field in between), I wanted to pull more from maps like Overflow and Drop-Off — maps that have a more singular “structure” to their overall shape.

Hermes, then, is built around the main facility building. With an open roof and courtyards, this spot is designed to facilitate both more mobile legends and give defenders spots to turtle up. A sloped field surrounds, flowing down towards a more exposed train station with an easily fortified facade complemented by exposed sides and rear.

Iterating on the POIs largely meant opening them up, adding container shipping yards to either side of Shipment to create flanking routes; giving teams a more sheltered approach to Reception with built-up plazas and hallways.

Much of the process of building Hermes was tracked through these Twitter threads. While not perfect, TF2’s bots helped me iterate on objective placement and nail down level elements that really worked (the central tunnel, playing around the “tombstone” pillars), though would ignore the main POIs.

The current version of the map requires a fair bit of visleaf cleanup before any kind of public release, and as a pure proof-of-concept work this has been pushed down my list of priorities in recent months. But the process of creating this level taught me a lot about optimising Source maps and ensured I would go into my second #Blocktober map with that as a core priority from the outset.