My work

DR_Stardust

The above video is a video of me talking about the map in the hammer editor.

Deathrun Stardust wasn't my first map, but it was the largest and most ambitious one I had ever made, and likely will ever make. Started around 2019, it is a JoJo's Bizzare Adventure's (Part 3) themed map.

The timing of when I made the map was the only reason it ever got finished, as I couldn't manage being a student and making this absolutely colossal map! The COVID lockdowns in 2020 gave me way more time to work on this map than I'd have had otherwise.

Unfortunately after finishing about 75% of the map, most inspiration and passion for the project had been lost so the final 2 area's in the map look crap and out of place. However, on release people enjoyed the map. Overall it took a year and a half to make, with an extra year on top updating a part of the map.

The most recognisable parts of the map are the mid-map spinner, a "window strafe" that is way harder than I thought it would be, and the "Evangelion" secret, which is a huge secret people always aim for every time they play the map.

The reception for the map was 50/50, with 50% of people loving it and the theme, and 50% of them hating it because of the theme or the difficulty. After spending so long on this map already, I have no plans to work on the map again except to fix bugs, but as far as I know, the map is doing just fine nowadays.

DR_CorPsyPas

The name isn't too clean and easy to pronounce or remember, as it was a placeholder I had just made up when I was watching an anime called "Psycho Pass". CorPsyPas is therefore short for Corona's Psycho Pass.

Around the time of making this, there were a lot of pretty awful gimmick, meme, and low effort maps being made for Deathrun in TF2 and I was getting sick of seeing maps where having skill or map knowledge was next to useless. Taking inspiration from my favourite Deathrun map, DR_Steamworks_Extreme, I set out to make traps that require some thought and skill to get past, rather than random chance. It was also in this map I made my first surf ramp, this will be important later.

The earliest version of the map was only ever tested and never properly released, where all of the traps were just in a straight line, no real order for difficulty scaling, and it was just a floating course in the sky. It had no proper lighting, but for a proof of concept the testing was well received. The second version pieced all the traps together and added lighting, but the difficulty scaling was atrocious and everything was still dev texture. This one was released however, so despite being the 2nd version, it was named "V1". The version we're on today (third version, named "V2") has had the trap order organised so that the easy traps are at the start and the really hard ones at the end, the whole map has had textures added, there's a minigame, a music room, and special particles here and there.

The reception for the map has never been great since the theme is near non-existent. I however have no plans to change that.

DR_Chop_suey

So the note at the top said I was going to only list good maps. Here's the exception.

After CorPsyPas, while looking at the crap meme maps, I figured "If you can't beat them, join them". I looked at the biggest meme map at the time, DR_Bazinga, where there's a few sound effects, the same texture, awful lighting, boring traps... Truly the worst map at the time, as it was (for some reason) inspiring other people to make utter crap too. I thought to myself "How could I take a simple joke and take it to the absolute extreme?"

Slight diversion: "Chop Suey!" is a song by the band "System Of A Down". In the song, there's a line "Why'd you leave the keys upon the table". This table lyric has become the go-to joke for the song. Back to the map, I figured I'd take this joke as far as I could.

The entire map is made out of table props. All player models are replaced with tables. Every sound in the game gets replaced with the sound of the singer saying "TABLE". It's insufferable, only funny for the first 30 seconds, and honestly the stupidest thing I possibly could've made in response to meme maps. Weirdly however, server's I'd never even heard of before started running the map (albeit only for April fools).

Any popularity the map gained was already way more than I ever expected, so I decided to make it more of a running joke for myself. I've made a dodgeball map with the same setting, I've made an MvM mission named "Table Tantrum", and made a 2nd version of the map.

Who knows what else I'll do with the table theme from here? With any luck, hopefully nothing.

DR_Spinner

Most Deathrun maps have a minigame at the end of it. A common one is "spinner" where you jump over a spinning beam that will kill you if you touch it. It's an easy minigame to make and not interesting at all. So with the same cynicism as Chop suey and meme maps, I set out to show how crap spinners were with this map.

Every trap is a spinner. It's not as extreme of a joke as Chop suey was, but it's still fairly bad. However, it has become one of my most popular maps ever...

I started off with the idea of just spinner traps, in a large circular course that has a giant spinner that spans the entire course that runners always have to keep an eye out for, but after "Alexrox360" helped make the 2nd half of the map, it was decided that was a pretty awful idea and so some height and variation was added. The map doesn't have a great amount of detail, but it doesn't look terrible either.

I'll be fair with you, it's not easy, but it's not impossible either. As long as you're not playing on a server on the other side of the world, with enough thought and skill you could consistently make it to the end with no real problems.

V1 was pretty well received, but the difficulty was always the biggest complaint. I updated it (V1a) to give it a "respawn coin" (an object you take to the end with you to respawn dead players at the end), but also to compensate, added an "automode", which when activated, will make traps active themselves, sometimes behaving differently, therefore making some rounds a bit harder. A few updates later, "Berke" made a boss for the map. I have no clue why people still play this map, but they do, and they like it.

SURF_Frus

After all of these Deathrun maps, I took a bit of a break from serious mapping. Here and there I'd tried small maps for less popular gamemodes (such as dodgeball) but not another large project, as most draft deathrun maps I started never amounted to anything fun or interesting to play. It was around this time however, I learned to surf. I got pretty good at it too and began to really enjoy it, so I figured that now was a good time to try making a new map for (what is to me) a new gamemode.

I remembered the surf ramp I made in DR_CorPsyPas and used that as a reference point for the ramps used in this map. I'll be fair, the map name is pretty obviously terrible, just like CorPsyPas. I had no real name so just took the word "surf" and reversed it.

I had set off initially wanting to make a really hard map, even one that I struggled with, but over time I had figured that doing something like that wasn't really fun, or at least not fun for me. I toned down the difficulty of a fair few spots a number of times. I had also stopped working on the project for a few months at one point, but came back after just feeling an itch since I hadn't done anything interesting for some time.

The map is filled with elements that I like in surf maps, such as large jumps, an easy spin, the ability to skip certain parts of the map if you're skilled enough, anti-gravity, just stuff I thought would work well. By the end of development, the name "frus" was quite appropriate, as you finish right next to the point of the map you started at.

The map doesn't look too fancy, the ramps are honestly steeper than what is typical for the average surf map, and there's evidence in the route finding that this was indeed my first map, but overall I've been told as a first attempt, it's not bad. Some say it's actually quite fun trying to improve their times for beating the map. However, timing your run is a "skillsurf" feature, and this map was initially made for "combat surf" The main difference is that combat surf has a "jail" that players are thrown into if they fail (or purposely jump into if they don't want to surf), where they can fight and kill each other. Skillsurf times how long you take to beat the map, and the lower your time, the better. For the average surfer, Frus takes about 90 seconds. With skillful surfing and skips, closer to 80 or even 75. The map is generally seen as a Tier 3 (surf tiers range from 1 to 8, with 1 being the easiest and 8 being near impossible), but depending on if you do some of the skips people have found, closer to T4 or T5.

In the combat surf version of the map, there's a music room secret, and a room filled with images of a 3D model I added in the map (of the anime character "Atago" from "Azur Lane"), with the option of going to either the bonus surf courses when you beat the map, or gain a significant health boost and enter the jail. Skillsurf, you can just go straight to the bonuses whenever you want, and if you beat "Bonus 1", that's how you get to the music room. Bonus 1 is about T3/4 while Bonus 2, made by another surf mapper named "not_a_zombie" is T6.

The map was made for Team Fortres 2, but I ported it over to Counter Strike Source, as the surf community there is far bigger.

SURF_R-ne