Tips for making a deathrun map for garrysmod?

[boj]

I'm thinking of making a Deathrun map and I was wondering if there are any tips for making one or anything to stay away from.

For example, around how many traps does a good map have and what sort of stuff makes a map fun?

Any tips would be appreciated.

Also which game is a good one to use for making it in (I'm making it in counter-strike at the moment and then i'll move it over to gmod)

And yes i know to stay away from generic traps like swinging hammers and that crap.

[jgoodroad]

It's been awhile since I made a deathrun map, but here's what I picked up from the experience.

There are ultimately three kinds of traps.

Skill based, Random, and Sacrificial.

They are pretty self-explanatory, but ultimately break down into what traps equal a 1-1 press-to-death ratio. The sacrificial ones are the cheapest, both in terms of complexity and gameplay. The tactics players have for these is either to sacrifice someone (hence the name) or try to fake out the enemy into pressing the trap prematurely or postmaturely (if that's a word). You can have these in your map, but make sure that the maximum number of spawns is at least one greater than the number of sacrifical traps. This way at least one person has a shot at survival, even if they lost one team-member per trap.

Skill-based traps tend to involve the victim surmounting an obstacle. Once trapped, they either need to dodge or figure their way out of their predicament. I am particularly fond of these, because it gives the runner an extra chance at survival if they get caught by a trap. You can have as many of these as you want, so long as they do not lead to optimization issues, or prolonged gameplay length (the later is more a holistic condition, not dependent only on the number of traps, but on the quality of the traps, as well as the order and pathing of said traps. Hence testing is needed on a case-by-case instance.

I don't have much to say on random traps, other than the fact that they are really common and often really boring. Good filler if you run out of ideas, I guess. But I didn't find myself using them.

As for the general number of traps, it depends on the length of each trap, but I find the minimum should be just enough that in a full server, if one person dies on every trap, there is still one person remaining. This means the trapper(s) need to kill two people with one trap at some point, as well as get consecutive kills with every trap. Adds a bit of challenge to the trapping side of things.