Maul's aesthetic is an amalgamation of different malls I've been to over the years as well as the atrium from the L4d2 campaign Dead Center. When some of the assets for turbine_center where publicly released and the VSH game mode was added to the game, it got me thinking that a mall santa version of Saxton Hale could be funny and that a VSH map could be an interesting challenge to figure out as I had never made anything for the mode before. It was the perfect timing for it as well as pd_galleria had started its creation by that point. I knew many of the people on that project and felt that any assets they would allow me to use from what they were creating would fit in well with what I had in mind. The layout played pretty well from the outset and I did what I could at the time for the maps detailing, even though I was never fully happy with it. I’d had it in the back of my mind to get back to it eventually as I didn’t feel the version I submitted to the workshop was as good as the map could be and never expected valve to have any interest in it. But, when they decided to pick it up this year, that gave me an excuse to really whip the map into shape as well as bring in all the other contributors to finalize it as its own unique setting.

Corruption wasn’t my project but instead lead by Billo. While playtesting their map, pl_eruption, I joked about a Halloween version called Corruption as it rhymed and they asked me if I would be interested in helping out with creating that version of it. The finale went through a few iterations before we fully landed on what we wanted to do with it but a big inspiration for the map was the film Shutter Island and the game Outlast. We wanted to go the route of an old mental institution/hospital as it hadn’t really been done before, at least not officially, while the island angle not only fit the island design of pl_eruption, but a mental institution on an island was the setting for Shutter Island as well.

I mainly worked on the finale area both inside and outside of the main building. My original idea was that the overall goal of the map would be to destroy a machine capturing spirits haunting the island and converting them to some kind of energy, but we were never able to figure out what said machine would look like nor who would make it, so instead we went a different route as other people on the project started to help out with the design of the building’s interior.

When it comes to Farmageddon, That project went through a few iterations as well. Blaholtzen came to me with an idea for a pd map where a space ship carrying Vladimir Bananas (TF2’s soviet equivalent to Poopy Joe) crash landed into a barn with Vlad, mutated by radiation, would stalk an underground cave full of toxic waste. Players would need to avoid him while scoring their points after jumping down a hole under the ship. While it took me a while to figure out a solid layout for this idea, it was decided that such an idea would require too much in the way of custom assets to do properly and could be difficult to fully match with TF2’s design. Plus there was some concern on how Vladimir would work as this was in the days before vscript where the most we could do was reskin an already existing boss. I’d already worked with Blaholtzen on Sinthetic and we knew we could do something similar to what we did for the toastmaster, though we really wanted to do something more unique. Once the decision was made to pivot, however, it took a little while to land on a solid idea. Stuff like werewolves where thrown around before I suggested a giant mutated pumpkin monster kind of like the bread monster from expiration date. Everyone on the project liked that idea and it would fit in well with TF2’s farm them. We still wanted to do some kind of new “boss” or “npc enemy” so we came up with the scarecrows since they would fit in easily as a reskin of tf2’s skeletons. There wasn’t a lot we could do at the time to make them unique instead of a pure reskin so I set up logic to change their health from the default, stop them from spawning 3 smaller skeletons and had them drop extra point flags when killed.

 After a few more iterations of the layout and a total rethink where I started it over from scratch, we had a fun playing map and a final goal we felt was attainable. The layout itself isn’t based on anywhere particular but there are a few bits here and there inspired by specific things, such as the chicken houses being inspired by their design in the film Chicken Run and the pumpkin’s design being influenced by the Harlequin Demon from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Taken directly from: https://mega.nz/file/cwZTlKQD#lMSvUwaqV7XdtFRIPQLbYuEAul4-ec8mqYVw79QWOsU