| Fortress started out as a 3rd party map and I got on the dev team through it (amazingly, it was really shitty back when it was 3rd party :P). Fortress was pretty much winging it, it went through a lot of changes and basically I consider it my "first real map" even though I've been mapping since way back in doom with doomED (the duke3d BUILD engine remains one of my favs).
In the original design for it it was a lot more like it's homage - 2fort, with the inside area being much tighter and smaller and basically a carbon copy of 2forts (I originally chose to base it on something I knew to make the learning process a bit easier). I ended up scrapping the entire inside area and redoing it for the public 3rd party releases and then once again for the v1 release.
Undermine was much more thought out and planned and because of that took much less time to make. I still have my notebook full of undermine designs. It still needed a bit of redesign in the end but that's the nature of the beast; for the most part the very first sketch still resembles the actual layout quite a bit.
Given that, planning stuff out is a really huge thing IMO. Especially so for Dystopia since the maps are absurdly complex being both objective-based and the fact you're designing with two worlds in mind (cyberspace). I have a bunch of other maps down on paper and once you sketch it down (and are comfortable with the editor of course) it's a weekend job getting it made in dev textures which is really nice since you can see right away if the map is going to be balanced and such. Which is another big thing I'm sure you know - block the map out first, detail only what you know is good to go. Even a simple mistake like gettinga room's proportion wrong can ruin hours of detail if you're not careful to pace yourself and make sure to check the map out periodically. | 