NEW GROUNDS MAPPING CONTEST
Killing Floor 2
The Killing Floor series has always been one of my favorites. When I was younger, I used to play Killing Floor 1 with friends for hours, trying to earn every achievement. When Killing Floor 2 was released, it was a huge change, and I was immediately interested in creating my own maps and uploading them to the Steam Workshop. I made several maps (very basic ones at first), but one of the larger ones was “Factory“: a small map with two versions: survival and objective mode.
In Factory’s objective mode, you had to recover a toolbox to repair a broken electrical panel. To do this, you needed to leave your “base” or “factory” and fight off waves of ZEDs. Visually, the map was quite basic and didn’t stand out much. Aside from building the environment, it also required a fairly complex Kismet setup.
When Tripwire announced the NEW GROUNDS mapping competition, I decided to go all-in and use everything I had learned from making maps for the game. I used Factory as a base but couldn’t submit it as it was, so I reimagined the entire environment and built something completely new. That’s when District-VII was born.
For District-VII, I used existing game assets, but since many things changed, the Kismet logic had to be heavily modified. I decided to replace the toolbox objective (which no longer felt interesting) with a newer objective type that Tripwire had recently released: escorting an object. In my version, that object was a robot, which fit the theme much better.
Developing the map took me three months (working only in my free time), but it was worth it. I won 4th place in the NEW GROUNDS competition.