During the early days of Counter-Strike I began creating levels in various engines both to develop an understanding of level design and to create personalised maps for a collection of friends to enjoy. As with most, I expect, the majority of work completed would be scraped to start a new idea or to make use of new techniques learnt over the course of a level - resulting in little material to fill this page. This process however of iterative development is exactly why I love to toy around with making levels or simply penning a few out.

Named fittingly for a learning level SimpleLevel is my hopeful return to full level development and also a look into the UDK, which unfortunately isn't very welcoming thanks to its hefty requirement on external models. The tools at hand are beautiful, but the lack of assets limits what can be done which means a regrettable return to Source thanks to Valves kind asset sharing.

I stopped mapping shortly after the Counter-Strike era had died down, but tried to pick it up once again when the Source engine landed with the latest version of Counter-Strike. Aim_Tropic was created for fun between a few friends and was one of the only Source engine maps I managed to get to a state I'd be happy to call finished.

I've always adored maps which are based around estates or large homes, mostly due to the familiarity they can have with your own surroundings (although rarely making for the best multiplayer environment). Fy_Wo3Gaf is a rough shell of a housed environment but remains a mere unfinished shell.

After having played around with the tools for a while Fy_Wo33er was the first map that I could call finished, having had lengthy investment of my free time (whilst it might not look it) at a young age. It's a very small environment missing a lot of detail, but I recall being immensely proud of it at the time and frequently playing on it with a small group.

The very start, the first map which I had made and opened to public playing on Counter-Strike. There is little to no room for actual gameplay and it's quite embarrassing in all its blandness and use of Simpson's textures. It also took me quite a few map iterations before I managed to solve the full bright lighting situation in the Half Life engine.