Stay on the Track (1) Introduction

Hello,
in my first real blog entry, I want to tell you something about a map I have created for an Application for a university of applied science where I applied for a Games Creation course of studies.
I will write more than one post for this because I want you to get a bit more detailed look at the whole progress I have made through the creation of this map and show you a few more pictures for that, and this would just blast a single post.

The theme for the Application was "track". What exactly we have to do was our own choice as an applicant, it just had to be something about Games and should have a location and time.
So I decided to create a map because this is where I have the most experience. The time to learn mapping on the Unreal Engine or Cryengine was a bit short and I wanted to have something more in my portfolio than just the maps I have created for The Stargate Mod so I decided to create my level with a newer version of the Source Engine. Because in Source I have the most experiences.
My final decision was Counter-Strike Source because it has one of the newest Engine versions and a big amount of useful models and textures for my project that would be useful if I have not the time to create everything on my own (looking back that was a good decision :>).

 The first thing to do was to get an idea about the setting of the map.
In the beginning, I had a few ideas about what I could create based on the theme track,

• A long journey, with a mountain or Forest setting?

• Industrialization, the first railroad in Europe?

• Space, a spaceship on a long journey through space

• Stay on the Track, railroad, USA, mid 19th century

After a lot of thinking and searching the web, I decided to use the Stay on the Track idea would be the best choice. So I started to detail the idea and bring more background information's into it to create a deeper story and to show my progress and what I thought at the time with Mind maps again.

To get useful ideas and background information's I "googled" a lot but my main source of information's for a useful background idea I took from Wikipedia and the website from the Karl May foundation. And all these information and ideas I collected by searching and thinking I put together again in two new Mind maps.

I hoped that this planning would get paid later in the creation of the map because I got a more clear idea about what exactly I want to create and that this will also help the guys who watch my final map to understand what exactly I have tried to create. And by the way, it seems that this idea was a good one because after I sent them my application with this map I was invited for an interview ;)

But that's it for now. I will show you the next progress stage in another blog post soon.