UAT Student Blog

Welcome back to another entry within this series. Let’s just jump right into it. As with any form of game development, we would need documentation to keep track of concepts, current work in progress, what is needed, etc. At the moment, you already created a piece of documentation - the papermap. This will help you envision your project and give you a reference for how you want your map to look like in the end. However, we need more. Now, we have to create the design document: This document is one of the most important things that you would have for your map. It outlines the theme of the map, the assets that the map will use, and an idea on how the map will be completed. Due to the flexibility of the design document and the project at hand, you can say that you can not fully complete a design document. However, to get a document that is useful for development, you should flesh out the following pieces of it.

For my Advanced Level Design class, I decided that I would create a map for one of my favorite games - Portal 2. I have played the game multiple times, struggling through all of the main story’s puzzles and the community-made puzzles that can be found in the Steam Workshop. I wanted to see what developing these maps were like, so I jumped right into the Hammer editor and got myself started. It was a long and rather exhausting process, but I believe that learning about how maps within Team Fortress, Portal, and Left 4 Dead are made is a fun skill to have, as it would allow me and other people to join Source modding communities and create cool content that would keep these old games alive. So today, I am going to tell you the process that you need to go through to create a decent looking map and some tips about using the Hammer editor. Keep in mind, I am going to talk about Hammer from the perspective of developing a map for Portal 2, but most of the content within this post should be usable across all Source games. 

Today, I had to face a total of 5 tours happening within not even a 5 hour time span. It was a lot that I had to handle after a week of being sick, but it wasn’t like I haven’t dealt with harder tasks before. But, when these things happen, it really shows the harder sides of being a Student Ambassador.

The earliest memories that I have of First Person Shooters would be sitting down and watching my dad play Medal of Honor: European Assault on his PlayStation 2. I bet the only reason that I became such a Medal of Honor fan was due to the time that I spent watching my father take down enemies. Even while I did not play the game, I still felt like I was there, fighting in World War 2 and fighting with my allies. I actually felt immersed in the game.

Maxwell has been a resident of the quad for about two years now. Believe it or not, last month was the anniversary of Maxwell’s first appearance on campus!

I loved many of the classes that I took here. The teachers are extremely sociable and the lessons are always made to be interesting! I gained something new from each class that I took, making my experiences in these classes to be amazing. So imagine how hard it was for me to have to choose one to be considered my favorite class! The first thing that came to mind was Introduction to Game Tools, since I was allowed to learn about the tools relevant to my industry and even create something unique in them. That is definitely up there on my list of favorite classes, but then I thought about how much I loved Composition, due to my love for writing and research. I had a lot of choices and it was a hard to choose one.In the end, the class that I choose to be my favorite ended up being Nathan Eskue’s TCH115 - Thinking Strategies!

Consider this scenario; You are in the middle of your college semester, and your classes are starting to get harder. The number of assignments that you need to complete has grown, while your time to complete them has shrunk. On top of that, these assignments make up a large portion of your grade, so skipping them or doing poorly on them is not an option. If you were ever in this situation, What did you end up feeling? What did you do during these instances?

“The only thing a person can ever really do is keep moving forward. Take that big leap forward without hesitation, without once looking back. Simply forget the past and forge toward the future.” – Alyson Noel

It was a day that I will never forget. I had been preparing for a week, having cleared my drawer of all of my clothes and determining what toiletries I would need to pack into my bag. The time had come; it was time for me leave my small childhood home and start my long journey as a college student.