Retrokinesis - Developer Application (Mapper)

[Retrokinesis]

Developer Application

Byond ID?

Retrokinesis

Age?

26

Gender?

Female

How would you define yourself? (Coder, Mapper, Spriter):

Mapper

If Coder, what languages?

N/A. I have some very basic coding knowledge from reading it, but no formal experience.

Any previous experience developing with SS13?

I've poked around in Dream Maker and worked on some mapping requests, but I've never been part of a dev team.

Proof of any previous or current work:

I have two complete projects that I feel are a good representation of my current mapping progress:

A rebuild of the predator ship I did based on the hull of the crashed ship from Ice Colony

and a replacement for TGMC's medbay with the goals of using space more efficiently and making the operating theaters more easily accessible from the hangar

How well do you know Git?

I'm familiar with it in at least an academic sense and know concepts like rebasing and mapmerge, but I've never used it as part of a formal project.

Your primary job is server development, not policing the server. You may be given Moderator-level of access but you should *not* be invoking any administrative actions unless there are no moderators or Admins online. Do you understand?

Yes

Anything else you'd like to add?

I'm not a super experienced mapper or anything yet, but I feel that I've been developing my skills fairly well so far and am eager to learn more. I don't know coding but am perfectly willing to learn if that would be helpful to the team.

I'd be willing to do whatever mapping work is needed but my primary interest would be in tweaking current maps to improve balance and aesthetics rather than creating entirely new ones. That's not to say I have no ideas for new maps, just that I feel like the existing ones shouldn't be neglected and that they could be given expanded strategic options for both marines and xenos without too much difficulty.

I'm very familiar with the mechanics of the game, the flow of rounds, and strategic and tactical considerations for each of the current maps and would carefully eye any changes or new maps with those in mind. I have ideas for changing up the current maps to make them more fun and interesting, especially ice colony and prison.

I'm more than willing to answer any questions anyone might have for me and can provide additional screenshots of my work if requested, including ones showing my progressive iterations of the predator ship until I arrived at the current version.

On a personal level, I work well with others and feel I would be able to integrate into the dev team with minimal difficulty due to my fondness for the server and community and my current experience as a staff member.

[MattAtlas]

Which types of hallways, corridors or caves favour the Xenos more than marines in your opinion? Do Marines benefit from them more often than Xenos?

Where do you think chokepoints should be placed? Should they be numerous or not?

What are your most outstanding problems with Big Red?

[Retrokinesis]

Which types of hallways, corridors or caves favour the Xenos more than marines in your opinion? Do Marines benefit from them more often than Xenos?

In general, I feel that xenos benefit from tight corridors and blind corners. The design I tend to use as a hivelord is basically an 'L' shape, a wall with an inward-facing alcove on one end to allow xenos to lay in ambush. Marines have significant vision problems compared to xenos from darkness alone and being able to see targets through walls encourages xenos to obstruct line of sight. Sticky resin lets them make a hallway extremely annoying to navigate for minimal effort. Marines are also more dependent on the layout map itself, as their resources are limited and completely locking down an area is expensive in terms of materials. Something like the civ residences hangar on prison is excellent for xenos because a few drones or a hivelord can fill as much of that space as they want with minimal difficulty, while it would be a poor location for marines to defend due to the area providing few natural chokepoints to focus barricade lines around.

It's a good place for marines to attack, however, as open spaces tend to favor them more. Marines tend to have a significant range advantage, so wide open spaces give them more ability to keep the xenos out of melee range and fewer places to be ambushed. For both sides, their greatest danger is each other; friendly fire for marines and bodyblocking for xenos. Very enclosed spaces exacerbate both of these issues, which is why single-width hallways should be avoided in most cases. As a drone or hivelord I tend to favor two-tile wide corridors of resin with no obstructions so crushers can charge and boilers can launch. While a one-tile hallway might seem like it would be excellent for crushers, it would make travel a nightmare as xenos bodyblocked each other constantly.

Where do you think chokepoints should be placed? Should they be numerous or not?

I'd place chokepoints primarily in areas that are intended to be defensive hold locations rather than battlefields. The entrances to possible FOB/hive locations should generally be chokepoints, while the map should be set up in a way that funnels both sides towards more open natural battlefields but allows them to fall back to chokepoints if pushed out. Chokepoints should be numerous enough that there isn't only one obvious defensive position. However, they shouldn't be overused either as they tend to be frustrating to push through and protracted wars of attrition with little progress are annoying for both sides.

Example: LV has heavy chokepoints in the caves and the nexus/LZ1, both intended to be final defensive locations. The natural paths funnel people towards the river, which is a wide-open conflict zone that allows both sides to employ their full arsenals - CAS, the tank, crushers, boilers - and is very difficult to bypass without a fight. Immediately adjacent to the river are hydro and the containers/cave entrance, much narrower spaces that can be locked down. Falling back to one of these gives either side a chance to hold after losing the river/beach fight while requiring the victorious side to force their way through it and expend resources to do so rather than just steamroll all the way to the queen/dropship off the momentum from one skirmish.

What are your most outstanding problems with Big Red?

I've drawn them on the map here:

The red circles are positions where one side or the other is likely to attempt to hold at some point. The green lines are the most common routes through the map. These combine to make the non-cave portion of the map very focused around a few specific locations, while leaving the shaded dark red areas as largely irrelevant and abandoned. There's rarely any reason to go to administration or the office complex, except during initial scouting or if the marines have all but won and are hunting for stragglers. It also needs more possible base locations for both marines and xenos. LZ1 is really the only viable option for marines due to the presence of tcomms, while LZ2 lacks comms access but provides no real advantage to compensate. Meanwhile, xenos will always hive in either eta, lambda, or the SE caves which makes them very vulnerable to metarushes. The podlocks are an attempt to prevent this mechanically, but they're only really semi-effective in most cases. The orange Xs are flanks into LZ1 that are absolutely ruinous to the marine defense if left unfortified but are hidden at roundstart, which means the FOB engineers generally just "coincidentally" build barricades in empty halls or random corners of the hangar because not doing so all but guarantees they'll lose a FOB siege to a flank.

In short: more hive/FOB locations (expanding the caves is a possible solution), more reason to utilize the buildings instead of just the roads, and less need for metadefenses on the LZ and metarushes on the podlocks.

[Cakey]

Hey Retro,
Thanks for applying. I have to say I've been eager to see you apply. Your interest in the work as well as responsiveness to feedback through DMs has been great so far, and I'm interested to see how you do with our mapping test. So to kick things off, here it is. Our next dev meeting will be next Saturday most likely, so I'd advise you complete the test before then for us to discuss over. No promises, though.
Best of luck.

Here's your test

[Retrokinesis]

And here we are! I have a lot of screenshots and a lot of say, so I hope I don't run into character limits or the like. I may have gone slightly overboard and created the skeleton of a full map, but I felt it was necessary for context and also just kind of ran with ideas as I had them.

Please please please note that a lot of these areas are extremely lacking in detail and are there purely as "this part of the map exists" placeholders. I wouldn't leave the walls gapped like that or the caves so completely awful on a working project.


Minimap! Working title is 'Gelid Mountain'. Ignore the fact that the map file is called 'Carp Colony'.
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This is the first overview shot, of the northern third or so of the map. This is a research colony dug into the side of a mountain ala Cheyenne Mountain. Also, it's a volcano. I'm using the deep toxic water for "lava" and blocking off all access to it with unbreakable hulls as to avoid it being the principal threat to both sides. Let's take a closer look at some of this area.
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LZ1 and comms. As in most places, a lot more detail is needed but the key thing to note here is that there are two pipes leading into comms for flanks but they don't connect directly to the interior of the map. You need to come in from the adjacent pipe and exposure yourself to get into the comms pipe. A burrower would be extremely effective at pulling this off because it could bypass the danger zone via burrowing.
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Here's the podlock into the main portion of the map from LZ1. It's quite a chokepoint, but not invincible. There are pipes leading to the small cargo area. They don't connect to the primary pipe network, however, so you have to pop out and force the atmos substation (again, more detail needed) door in order to access the flank. If the marines are paying attention, they'll have a chance to hear you coming even if they don't know about vent travel yet. It's a good location to hold but provides you with very little ability to cause any damage in return without expanding your barricade lines, so it's either an emergency hold or part of a mega FOB strategy.

There are also some minor narrative flairs here: broken glass on the checkpoint, chairs askew, door forced, and blood trails. A good way to set the mood for anyone arriving from LZ1 without giving away much of anything.
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Further south is one of the two ways in from LZ1, which I am calling the shattered foyer due to all of the broken glass. The monorail tunnel occupies a huge chunk of the map and, ideally, there would be a way to repair it and use it to fast travel between the north and south ends of the tunnel. The tunnel itself is wide enough to get the tank down without C4, provided you move some objects. Closing the south podlock and putting cades up to the west can turn this into a very strong defensive position, though the xenos can bypass it via flanking through the colony proper or melting the reinforced walls.

Also note the corporate liason's office, the first thing you pass when you enter the colony itself. It lacks detail for now but the basic skeleton is there.
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If you head east through the checkpoint instead of south through the shattered foyer, you come to engineering. It's a fairly compact area, with the majority of its space being dedicated to a platform of monitoring computers. You'll see what it's monitoring in a moment. For now, note the signs are aligned properly in-game and the tables in the CE's office are flipped as barricades. Given the blood and broken metal, it likely wasn't enough.
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North of engineering is the geothermal core, tapping the heart of the volcano for power. The walls here are all unbreakable hull so no one falls into the "lava" and breaks the illusion of distance. Power is important mechanically, but most of this space is for aesthetic purposes. It's rather poorly lit until the floodlights (hidden beneath the catwalks) come on, most of the light coming from the flickering floor tiles.
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Moving back south, we come to the second overview shot:

The colony's design is very compact, designed for space efficiency whenever possible. The bulk of it is arranged around very long hallway that runs parallel to the monorail tunnel. It's wide enough to get the tank down, but there's not really anywhere you can go with it unless you're willing to C4 walls down.
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Security is one of the largest areas in the colony itself. The officer bunks are to the north, opposite the head of security's quarters. His body will be found here, next to twin .357 revolvers, shell casings and ammo, holes burned in the walls, and sizzling blood. If you've come in from LZ1 and not encountered any xenos yet, this is a clear sign something very very abnormal happened to the colony. The revolvers are fun but not particularly good so I have zero issues making them regularly available, although the tactical shotgun and incendiary slugs in the next room might be too easily-accessible. Moving them to the armory is a definite possibility.

Security is designed around the central panopticon, which can observe all areas of the brig simultaneously and control the processing and holding cell podlocks via buttons. The armory is adjacent to evidence storage and has two sections: riot control and lethals. Although marine players won't see it from this side, there's a cavern right on the other side of the cells. A hastily-arranged and messy jailbreak attempt was never finished here but serves to attract players who might be wandering around the east caves. A boiler can melt through into security very easily, providing a strong flank that likely won't be noticed unless someone is watching security.
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Next up is medbay, which is on the opposite side of the central hallway and arranged vertically. It lacks the raw supply storage of a larger medbay but is mostly fully-featured, and the reinforced walls make it a fairly decent place to setup field surgery if you can spare even a few marines to guard it. The operating room has a full surgical tray and a limb printer, making it very efficient as long as you bring your own supplies.
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Next up are the dorms, which are a bit on the cozy side but fairly well-appointed for a colony. Flimsy barricades are setup at the entrance and some of the doors are forced open. A maintenance tunnel wraps around three sides of the area, opening in the east to a cavern that, though it isn't finished, is intended to serve as the disposals processing area.

An idea I'm uncertain about but am considering is adding vents here, stretching east across the lava and providing another way for the xenos to sneak into the colony itself.
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The next set of vertical rooms is fairly self-explanatory: a bathroom and shower/laundry room, then an indoor garden that provides both food and a place to rest away from the cramped corridors and stifling heat.
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Across the hall is Colony Control, which is extremely early at the moment and will 100% have actual rooms and furnishings and such at some point. It's one of the most secure areas of the colony: reinforced walls all around, dug into a layer of rock to prevent anything from getting near the walls, and a separate air filtration system that only connects to atmospherics. Of course, no location is unassailable. The vent network can be accessed directly from atmospherics, and the walls of the colony leader's quarters aren't reinforced in the maintenance tunnels. My current plans for this area include a command armory with rarer equipment and a proper lockdown function ala the CIC.

The control center and the AI core could potentially make a very interesting hive location; a risky position that could be discovered quickly but is very difficult to assault, especially since xenos don't have the logistical concerns marines do and can get around quicker via the vent system.
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Past the command quarters is the AI core, built into a spire jutting out of a lake of molten rock. It's an extremely defensible area that is likely better suited as a survivor holdout than a marine defensive location due to its total lack of escape routes and extreme distance from essentially everything else.
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Below that is atmospherics, which is also very much not finished yet. It includes a backup power substation and the only entrance to the control center's vent network. A storage room in maintenance provides access to both the command quarters (via melting the wall) and a hidden bar in the cliff side with lovely views of the lava lake.

The large open room to the SW is currently planned to be mining preparation and ore processing and refining, which will provide access to the cave system. The bridge to the east leads to LZ2 and research.
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The canteen and kitchen are at the south end of the hallway opposite mining, arranged vertically again. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary here, although I feel it came out rather cozy-looking and am quite happy with it. The kitchen is linked to hydro directly for easier transfer of produce.
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This is directly south of mining prep. It's beyond bare bones at the moment and will 100% not look anything like this when I'm done. My current thought here is have a large exploratory shaft down the middle with uneven and twisting passages branching off from it at random. If we felt the southern area needed more relevance, it would make sense to add a secondary mine entrance outside as well.
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Another extremely unfinished area that I am very hesitant to show. I'm currently thinking of putting a small cargo area at the south end of the monorail tunnel, and a maintenance area with the system to repair it to full functionality if that is mechanically doable. The southern exterior is mostly aesthetic but includes a dropship crash (well, it's not crashed *yet*) that has some potential for rarer gear and a mock town that is being used for advanced weapons testing. There's a lot of opportunity to add more areas out here, such as if we needed another good hive location. The fog is present to block off the edges of the map and, as such, doesn't lift with time.

(Apparently, there's an image limit. Continued in another post!)

[Retrokinesis]

(Continued from previous post)

East of mining is LZ2. Built entirely out of indestructible hull over the lava lake, an LZ2 FOB or deployment is high risk/reward due to starting you much closer to most of the likely hive locations and extremely far away from comms. Split deployment to both LZs would fix that, but runs the risk of getting one squad wiped quickly and putting the marines at a severe disadvantage. Comms is difficult enough to breach that a fairly small fireteam could deploy to LZ1 and hold it themselves, making an LZ2 deployment a potentially viable strategy on this map. The tank can get out of the LZ both directions, though it can't really go anywhere beyond that without additional support or destroying obstacles.
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Across the bridge from LZ2 is research, putting us on the eastern half of the map proper and out of the colony. Again, this area is barely started yet. It will have both walls and things in it. You can see the start of an aesthetic touch I'm playing with: a long particle accelerator that provides a natural excuse to create a tunnel inside research itself.

The caves around research will be fairly similar to those on Big Red: less cramped and twisting than the mining caves to the SW. It's another likely play for the hive as well.
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Our third cave ecosystem is north of research and the most unusual by far: it's frozen, despite being adjacent to a volcano. This comes from a strange artifact dug up at the heart of the caves, where the terrain turns to actual snow from the unnatural cold. Strange and unknown ruins are also found here, and discovering the connection between them and the frozen artifact is what currently occupies most of the research team's time.

This is another very good hive location due to its remoteness and the presence of the boiler flank into security.
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This is a very very quick mock-up of the heart of the ice caves, showcasing the artifact location and the surrounding ruins. The cult tileset works well enough, although a unique one that better fits CM's style would be interesting as it would allow us to have ruins other than the Yautja sandstone ones for future use, either directly places or inserted randomly via Project Nightmare.

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So that's everything! I discovered there's an 20-image limit on posts today. I know I likely went beyond the strict bounds of the test but I had ideas and decided they would make good window dressing for the actual test environments, if nothing else.

While it was certainly interesting to work on this project alone, it has also reinforced my belief that I would most enjoy working collaboratively with the rest of the team rather than doing my own solo projects. The lack of feedback when you're working alone makes it quite a bit trickier.

I do really hope the rough areas won't be counted against me, since they are 100% not representative of actual work I would consider acceptable and are present purely as "concept sketches" and to fill the map. I'm not sure how to attach a file on the forums but, if you want the .dmm, just let me know and I can send it via Discord or something. I'm also more than willing to answer any more questions anyone might have!

Thank you for considering my application!

[Deanthelis]

Application accepted.