La Brea is a collaborative effort for Team Fortress 2 between me and Squishy (friend, main level designer for cp_hardwood, an official Team Fortress 2 and long-time collaborator for Jam events) created for the TF2Maps 2021 72-Hour Jam. The original intent of the map was to recreate one of Squishy’s older maps, pl_tarpit, but with a twist of turning the first point of the map into a capture point for BLU before unlocking the payload cart for them to push the rest of the map.

I was responsible for the latter half of La Brea; however, I did give input to Squishy as to how we join our two halves of the map up. I asked Squishy to create a large downward ramp in their section and then I went on to build the geometry around that ramp.

The idea was to give BLU a massive height advantage after capturing A point to ensure that they can wipe out the RED team defense around A and hoping that RED has enough time to regroup and defend B point with the given height advantage over BLU.

However, this had the adverse effect where the massive high ground was letting BLU wipe RED’s defenses from a huge distance away, and RED was unable to regroup quick enough for a new line of defense, resulting in BLU overpowering in RED entirely.

This is also in part due to the design for the area around B. The point itself is innocuous enough, with inspirations from Valve’s pl_upward. The main issue came from having to squeeze routes at a tight space and a drastic height difference in consideration for the ramp, which results in RED having a tough time scaling back up to their frontline of defense while allowing BLU to easily spam damage upon them from above.

For any future iterations I have ideas including making the ramp more gradual in its descent and providing more varied gameplay spaces so that the dynamic between the team fights isn’t as one-sided.

The area between B point and the finale point was the first area that was worked on. Mostly inspired by pl_frontier, pl_borneo and Valve’s pl_badwater, the hopes of the area were for engagements on it to be fun for both teams as the cart meanders through a long winding path.

Unfortunately, issues were discovered during playtesting where both teams are spawning too far away from the area and from each other, resulting in less engagements from either side, leading the area to be unutilised. A potential fix for this would require the spawns to be much closer to each other, as well as either shortening the path or add on to it more with an extra capture point.

The concept for the finale was inspired by Squishy’s other map pl_tarpit. It was an attempt to recreate it with my own observations on how to improve it.

An issue I felt that was present in Tarpit was that once BLU pushes through the final choke point between the battlement and the finale point area, there’s not a lot of grounds for RED to defend near the cart.

The attempt to improve upon was to implement a design inspired by Upward and give RED more defending high ground near the cart path.

However, there still wasn’t enough defending ground for RED. Compounding with the long walk distance between BLU forward spawn and the finale point it meant that there’s fewer engagements happening between the opposing teams, and playtest sentiment was not positive.

Overall La Brea was a learning experience, there were design goals that fell short but it was one of the first times that I have attempted to design areas with player interactions in mind, which I have continued to do more of in the future.