Chaos Canyon is an asymmetrical control point map for Team Fortress 2 where teams start with a randomly assigned base. To win teams must hold a majority of control points on the map or take control of the enemy team's base.
My idea for this map was to have the points be situated in a circle, with each point having an attacking advantage on the other. Basically, something like the graph below.
A can attack both the B and C points, but it has an overall advantage while attacking B. My idea being that teams wouldn't have to split themselves between the two fronts, as a few players can defend while the rest focus on attacking.
Rather than sketch out a layout on paper I just went into editor and started blocking out spaces until I felt they were interesting enough to navigate and play on. The first iteration of the map looked like this.
The main issues of this early version had was awkward point design of A and routing between points, the basic layout was there but it needed refinement. The focus of the second update was redesigning A to make it more defendable as well as make it overall less weird to play on.
I also focused on making some of the routes between points more interesting. Height was added between A and B by having snaking cliffs reaching through the route, and a route that reached into a high ground area for A players to attack B from.
An issue that I was having with the map at this point was long stalemates, most of which stemmed from B point being really easy to hold. To fix this I completely redesigned B and the routes leading into it. Overall it was an improvement, visually it looked better and gameplay was more interesting.
Between these versions I also did some re-theming of the map from a desert environment to alpine.
Finally having A and B in states where the gameplay felt good, I turned my attention to C point. C point never really played badly, and I thought the valley it was built in was interesting, however it caused a lot of flow issues. Players spawning at C tended to only attack A, as the A route was immediately evident while leaving spawn.
The only solution I could find to this flow issue was completely redesigning the entire point.
After some more playtesting and iteration I finally got the map into a final state where I felt the gameplay worked. Most of the changes between the previous versions and this were related to overall scale of the spaces and streamlining pathing between areas.
