Hi, today’s post will be a little different as I wanted to document and showcase a piece of level design that was lost to time. Without further ado, let’s get into it.

The year was 2023, the game was Team Fortress 2 and the map was called koth_trinity. It was a small arena designed for King of the Hill game mode, inspired by classics such as the original Nuketown from Call of Duty: Black Ops, Doom Town from Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and to lesser extent my favourite map from TF2 – koth_harvest. The name was a reference to first detonation of nuclear bomb in 1945.

_{Overview of the map’s layout}

Originally I was torn between designing the map around King of the Hill and potentially Capture the Flag, but ended up sticking with the former as it felt like the layout was going to compliment it a little bit more. The work started in the middle part where a tower with a nuke hanging from the very top was located, with the main capture zone right underneath it.

_{View of the main street area}

Trucks and fencing provided cover around the center, though housing located on both sides could be entered and climbed for high ground advantage. The main idea was that the more offensive classes such as Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman and Heavy would have enough of a ground to battle in the middle, while support classes such as Engineer and Sniper could set up their posts a little bit further away from the chaos. There were also some flanking opportunities, such as the fence between the two houses to the right which you can see on the screenshot above, which could be rocket jumped over by either a Soldier or Demoman to surprise the enemy from the side.

_{Mid areas of the map set between the center and the spawn bases}

Classes such as Spy had enough of a room on the outskirts to sneak past into the mid zones where some of the resources such as health and ammo pickups could be found, aswell as flanking routes leading toward the enemy spawns. Spawn bases were located underground inside nuclear shelters.

_{Main path leading from the spawn areas to the capture zone}

The map was in development for a few months between very late 2023 and early 2024 before I decided to discontinue it due to release of Megaton, which is now an official koth map in the game made by a bunch of talented artists with a very similar setting of a nuclear testing site. While it was blocked out, obviously it wasn’t too far into the development for me to feel like it would be a great loss, though it would be fun to see how it played out in the final version. Some of the assets and ideas were taken and adopted into a different map that I’m working on now, and which is likely not going to see the light of day until 2025.

As the cards fell, Trinity will remain a fond memory of re-treading the old ground and finding nostalgia in form of a nod to early 2010s when my hype for Team Fortress 2 and Nuketown were at their highest point. Thank you for reading, and till next time!