I spent a lot of time as a teenager designing levels for Half-Life 1, and I’ve been uploading some old screenshots to Flickr recently.

These screenshots chart my progress as I learnt Half-Life’s map editor and engine, and show the gradually more complicated architecutre, lighting and texturing I created with each obsessive re-design.

This is most clearly demonstrated in the ever changing corridor from my aborted Sven Co-Op map, which starts looking like this:

And finishes looking like this:

There are many more horrible examples of arbitrary architecture below, and I’ve written a little about what I remember from each map. Also, as a treat: scans of scribbly ideas scribbled on crumpled paper.