In their heyday in the early 2000s, WW2 themed FPS shooters were extremely popular and I was heavily into games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Medal of Honor, and the original Call of Duty/Call of Duty: United Offensive. When I was a tester at EA (after Relic layoffs had hit when Homeworld 2 didn’t sell well) I spent a lot of my spare time working on my own custom maps in order to keep my design skills sharp. I was also part of a Call of Duty clan at the time and they encouraged me to go all out and make a map for people to play in. So, I took what I learned in my experimentation and created my first specifically multiplayer map. It was quite a fun experience and I did not have much trouble learning that early version of Radiant (thank goodness for Quake for being so popular!). I learned about scale, metrics, the importance of line of sight blocking (both for gameplay and for rendering purposes lol), map flow, and the greatest lesson of all: give hints of a “story” on the map and let the player fill in the gaps themselves - if they do the heavy lifting, the player remembers the map better.

The map had the features of a typical “ruined WW2 French town”: a ruined church (complete with belltower), a town hall (which contained objectives depending on the gameplay mode), ruined houses and alleyways to fight in, 3 main routes to advance along, and two default spawn points for the factions (a tank garage for the Germans, and a hotel for the Allies).

Through the mapping community, I held “betas” and the feedback from them provided information for iterative improvements. The map has since been well received and I’ve received fan mail thanking me for the map. Looking at one of the sites I put my map up on, it appears that my map has been downloaded at least 10,800 times over the course of the 19 years it’s been on that site. The link to it is here.

What I think is absolutely amazing is that people are still playing the map years after I’ve made it. Check out the 3 Youtube links provided here or in the gallery:

• Someone made a walkthrough of my map for some reason

• As recently as 2 years ago, someone recorded people playing TDM mode on my map on a CoD:UO server.

• I’ve also been told people have taken my map and ported it over to CoD4, and I’ve found some videos of people playing my map that way and I’ve linked to one of them here.