"Lake Lodger Reservoir" level blueprint

Much of my teenage years were spent building "Marathon" maps, which involved plentiful experiments designed to exploit the game's innovative water systems. In particular, I enjoyed flooding a previously explored area, essentially recasting an old setpiece with new atmosphere and different challenges. Several attempts were made at an outdoor dam level, all of them feeling a little stale thanks to the game's low visibility range and polygonal building blocks.

The above map was an attempt to bring that same concept into the less limited unity engine. Starting at the bottom right, the player winds through a forested valley past the central dam, sneaking or fighting through the hostile office complex on the left. Climbing the narrow ravine behind the building leads to the reservoir on the upper right, where the dam's gates can be opened, raising the water in the lower half of the map. I had planned on the switch being thrown in a room isolated from the main area, to avoid the necessity of a costly and complicated dam-bursting effect, but in retrospect I think that's only one of the technical pitfalls this map would have to deal with.

I can now recognize that getting a map like this to work as intended would require an extremely efficient water system. It does have a better flow than some of the earlier designs, if still a bit linear. At any rate, this is around the end of my time with these elaborate blueprints - more experience has led me to realize that this sort of intense pre-planning is usually wasted effort.