Calavera (de_calavera)

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A small, fast-paced, colourful Wingman map set during Day of the Dead in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

What I did

Calavera was a two-person effort together with Dieter "Squink" Stassen. We originally designed it for the 2020 Source Engine Discord Wingman contest, where it placed third. This was before any Wingman map had ever been added to the game officially, and we weren't sure Valve was even considering it, but it was ultimately added in the second ever Wingman map rotation. To this day you see people on Twitter, and sometimes even in real life, with fond memories of Calavera, so it clearly seems to be a community favourite. In terms of layout it is a fairly simple map, only made for 2v2, but it was important to me to make something extremely fast-paced, as those seem to be the more popular Wingman maps: time to engagement is about three seconds at its fastest from spawn. It is simple but has a lot of depth. There are boosting opportunities where both players can boost through a window to open a new angle, there are trick jumps, a ladder and doors, and everything is very well interconnected and close together, so no option is ever off the table. Players can move around freely and even create interesting post-plant scenarios that other Wingman maps didn't really offer. It is also a unique theme: there has never been a modern Mexican map added to Counter-Strike, only ever Mexican Aztec ruins. I am very proud of it and learned a lot, and I am really happy to see that people all these years later still ask for it to be returned and remade for Counter-Strike 2.

Credits

Links