Malevolence

Malevolence

Similar to Houndstooth, I'd intended for this to be a lot more horizontal, but it's...really vertical. I'd also wanted a lot more cave structure to take after the stock CM Labyrinth, but going with the flow makes stuff like this one. Could be interesting for MP, so I've exported a version that divides it into red and blue sides -- probably good for duos/trios, but a quiet 1v1 might be fun if everyone brings some patience. There are no red/blue spawns because I think those can all be learned and camped, so coloration is more for callouts than holding things down. If we ever get CTF (fingers crossed on a moonshot), I'll double back on this to support that for sure.

I playtested this during production the most out of any level I've ever made -- quite by accident. Something about this is fun to me...lots of vertical motion is neat to play around with. It just feels fast and just the right size for what it is. Emissive lava means more chunks! ~20 here but it runs pretty well even after the patch.

Three versions are included: no suffix is the regular map and probably the most playable, -D removes all lighting except for the lava, and -M is the aforementioned multiplayer version and is based on the standard cm map.

I had some insanely sharp shadows going from the central grating to the bottom floor, but I didn't like how the grating got really bright too. wishing there was a light that only cast shadows -- maybe setting the spot-shadow brightness to zero and making them really intense might've done it, now that I think about it.

in any case, it's fun to keep flipping over the central shafts a bunch -- lots of vertical play in this one. grating doesn't seem to be affecting AI too much but I did most testing on trainee just to get a feel for things.

Although I spent about a half hour manually marking non-traversable segments in Houndstooth as no-nav, there are zero(!) no-navs in Malevolence -- if you see a robot outside the level, you know what's up!

As per usual, happy to take feedback or technique sug