TR Complex is a fan made practice / tutorial map for Team Fortress 2
The TR prefix in TF2 is reserved for 'training' or 'tutorial' maps, with the base game having 2 training maps, tr_target and tr_dustbowl. The later is a modified version of cp_dustbowl, with added game logic to show players the basics of round setup, capturing points, engaging with medics and engineer buildings. While giving new players a chance to play the game with no stakes is good, the scope is very limited. The game forces you to play as soldier, you can only join offense and you cannot use un-lockable weapons. The former focuses on learning the basics of controls and has explanations for more niche mechanics, but it is still lacking. As the name suggests, it is themed after a target range, complete with pop-up wood targets. The map follows a very linear scripted sequence, waiting for the player to complete a basic task before prompting them to move on. Initially you can only play it as soldier, where you learn the basics of movement and using you weapons. Once completed, re-entry as demoman is enabled. This version of the map starts you at the shooting range, an primarly focuses on demo's most important weapon, the sticky bomb launcher. Once completed you can play it again as spy, arguably the most complicated class. This teaches you the basics of cloaking, sapping, disguising and backstabbing. Because of spy's steath based gameplay, every player needs to be aware of what a spy could be doing, regardless of if they know there is one or not. Lastly there is the engineer tutorial. Engineer can place buildings that assist their team, and this tutorial walks through the basics of all 4 builds, and how you can interact with them.
Over all, the existing tutorial maps are decent, but they are easy to criticize. Especially when their lack of scope is compared to the seemingly unlimited skill ceiling of TF2, and the great lengths other valve titles go to avoid players even noticing they are in the tutorial. I think a major factor for why it ended up this way was because the TF2 developers were making a tutorial for only their game. These maps where released with the Mac Update which, as the title suggests, was an update adding official support for TF2 on Apple's MacOS operating system. This gave many more players access to one of the first FPS (First person shoot), nearly exactly one year before the game became free. Though now, as free FPS games common place, many still play TF2. Now the game doesn't act as a easy introduction to the genre, but instead as home for many players who have spent most of the over 15 year life span perfecting their skills. For a new player, joining a match can be too chaotic of an experience to learn the skills needed to make it to the objectives, much less be successful. That why I started working on TR Complex, a new training map that doesn't replace the older maps functionality, but instead attempts to organically teach new players what it is like to play TF2 at their own pace.
The central thesis of the map is 'How can a tutorail for a game as complicated as TF2, be kept as organic as a portal or halflife game'. The concept I came up with was to give the player a broad task (Reach this location / kill these bots) and then give them a quantifiable, yet vague, metric for how they did. By designing the map around the objective with specific mechanics in mind, an player who experiments would naturally discover new mechanics and concepts. I settled on a rank system (similar to the casual ranks), with a score for each class in each objective. The objectives I decided to use to represent the entire game were: Basic Weapon Use, 1v1 Skirmish, Roll outs (reaching the objective from spawn), Defending from Attackers, Pushing an Objective and Supporting Teamates. By having the system be tiered, new players can aim for a basic threshold in all categories, while advanced players can try to optimize every detail.
The basic weapon use objective is found closest to the spawn room, and consists of a shooting range (much like tr_target) to practice aim, reaction speed and ammo management. Unlike tr_target, this room won't focus on explaining the mechanics of each weapon, but instead will adapt to the class the player is using, and give objective that focus on both the strength and weaknesses of the class. For example sniper, a long range class, would have distant targets, interspersed with occasional targets that punish tunnel vision. Overall the score would be based on accuracy percentage and time to kill.
The 1v1 skirmish area is found near the basic weapon use area, and is a fenced off area on the roof of the complex. As the name suggests, a single bot can be found there, and your goal is to kill them, before they kill you. One round of 1v1 has you face the 5 classic skirmish classes (Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demo and Heavy), and ranks you on total damage taken, the time it took to kill them and how many times you died.
The rollouts course takes up by far the most space of any objective, spanning from a large room at the bottom of the complex, to a small area at the top. A flank route the goes outside the complex also exists. Players must travel from a spawn room in the bottom area to the top as fast as possible, while preserving health and ammo. Dying resets the rollout. Instead of directly scoring the player on their stats, upon arriving at the object a wave of bots is spawned. The score is based on how many of the bots could be delt with, how fast the bots were killed, and how fast the player reached the end. This more complicated system appropriatly punishes weapons that are great for rollout, but harm a players ability to fight, such as gunboats, the GRU and other mobility aids. To enforce more creativity, there is a bottleneck along the path in the form of a gate on the main path that only opens after a certain amount of time. However, this can be avoided by utilizing the geometry or a better choice of weapons.
This objective is heavily inspired by the existing community made map tr_walkway. This map sends wave after wave of bots down the titular walkway, allowing for the player to practice aim on more complicated targets. To focus the objective more on defense, the bots will use pathfinding similar to Mann vs Machine, the PVE gamemode in TF2. The score would be TODO