Contamination came about mid-pandemic when a group of friends decided we wanted to go back and play classic Half-Life: DeathMatch. Naturally after a night or two of playing, I immediately wanted to build a level for it. I mean, what else could we do during this point in the pandemic? At first I was a bit dubious about going back to the original WorldCraft, but I learned that a new community lead editor J.A.C.K. had tons of quality of life updates making it fair friendly to Level Designers... well that settled it, I was in!

The level itself started off with a simple premise. Quickly build a small 4-8 player DeathMatch level, have a blast with interesting Half-Life architecture, and start playing with it with friends as soon as possible.

 

Contamination's layout features two core arenas with a loose two floor figure eight. Simple, and perfectly sized for the amount of players we had. The level holds to particular power weapons that players can fight for, but both come with some amount of risk reward. The central point in the level houses the RPG in a tight corridor surrounded by toxic slime. Players can quickly use this path to traverse between the arenas while picking up the RPG, but they have sprint through close quarters before they can make proper use of their new found power weapon.

The tower in the back of level houses the Gluon power weapon. Players must work their way to the back of the level, ascend to the second floor, and then drop down into a radiation filled room to grab the Gluon Gun and escape. Players take a small amount of radiation damage in order to grab the power weapon before they can wreak havoc throughout the map.

 
The level came together quickly, and we ended up having a blast spending many nights deathmatching and laughing into the ungodly hours of the morning.