“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”
Mark Twain
“Dew knot trussed yore spell chequer two fined awl yore mistakes.”
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The planning stage for Nexus spanned over two weeks. I was taking some rather dry classes, which gave me ample quiet time to spend doodling concepts, paths, layout comparisons, everything. The numerous planning aspects of Nexus fit into many of the other categories, but in this section I will explain one specific planning detail: Consistency.
I wanted a consistent map. Far too many amateur mappers seem to either forget about the subconscious impact of a consistent map (and get lost in focusing on gameplay or visuals), or simply deem it unworthy of much effort. For Nexus, I tried to create a consistently deep atmosphere, along with a consistent layout and purpose.
The first example of this is found in the Railgun armament of this ship. To the far right of the map is the Railgun Weapons Systems room, which sports a conveyor belt with a huge Slug (bullet) at its end, ready
to be loaded into a large tube, being the barrel of the railgun. Around the room there are technical images that appear to be the railgun's inner workings, and the warheads are placed up by the resource node.
This room in itself adds to the overall concept of a space ship, as one would expect it to be armed with at least one weapon. But I decided 
to further the concept by adding in the Mag Pump room as well as the Slug Room. Real-world railguns work by giving aligned magnetic coils a huge amount of power, to speed up the projectile placed within the coils. I decided a feasible futuristic method of 'powering up' for each shot would be a series of magnetic 'pumps' that would cycle to prepare for each shot. Furthermore, the Slug Room shows how the slugs are brought from storage and then placed onto the conveyor belt, via the robotic arm.
Practically every spaceship concept ever made has a forward or centered bridge, and aft thrusters. I used this same absract idea as the basis for my layout, with Bridge being the Marine Start, and the two engines as Hive Locations. This would force players to necessarily go from one of end of the ship to the other at least once every game. View the overview map for the visualization.
Another classic spaceship area is Engineering. The original Nexus plan had a much more convoluted Engineering Halls area, but this was eventually ripped out entirely (800 brushes) and replaced by the current, more open-concept Engineering room. Placed directly between the two bottom Thrusters, it makes perfect sense for consistency, and borrows a lot from the famed Enterprise room of the same name, at least in visuals. Of course, this is a much darker, but more alien-friendly version, as this area of the map was to be of the dark-and-ominous nature, opposed to the bright-and-stale marine-friendly areas.
A method used in Nexus to further the consistent feel was the addition of a full vent system, touching almost every room in the map. This is explained in more detail further on in the Vent System area.
One last tool used to maintain consistency was the use of visual reminders of this being a ship floating in space. This is explained in more detail further on in the Special Visuals area.
One very important aspect of Nexus that sets it completely apart from any other NS map is its layout. As explained in detail in the Short Summary of NS Gameplay and Level Design, there are four main Critical Locations (C.L.s): Marine Start, and three Hive rooms. Every official map in NS, totalling 17 sprawling designs, uses the Diamond Layout. This layout is exactly as the name suggests; the four critical locations form the corners of a diamond or square.
This layout format is accompanied by a very serious problem:
There is a center hive. This hive becomes far more strategically important than the outside hives. Generally, if the aliens start in the middle hive, they are in the best starting position, as they can access either outside hive. But if they begin with one of the outside hives, they generally must drop the middle hive. As such, marine teams can blitz to the middle hive early on and gain a huge advantage.
Also, due to the nature of a diamond, the middle hive is usually a farther distance from Marine Start than the other hives. Runtimes are an important balancing tool in NS, and generally, the middle hive is about 5-10 seconds farther than the others; this is an increase of 16% and 33% in distance.
There is also a smaller concern: there are very defined 'middle areas' to the map. This is a debatable point, but basically, when there are middle areas between all four C.L.s, controlling certain access points can create huge advantages for a team. Marines, with their siege ability, can sometimes lock down a middle area and be able to siege 4+ resource nodes from one location, as seen in Ns_Lucid.
It was when I began considering the layout for Nexus that I realized the overuse of the Diamond layout and its innate flaws. It was not long before I decided to attempt the Pyramid layout; the real issue was getting it all to work.
There was one map before mine that made a similar attempt; Ns_Enceladus (non-official map) had used a Triangle Layout. It has two key differences from the Pyramid Layout: (1) it is flat, and (2) Marine Start is in the middle of all three hives. These two points together create its own array of issues, such as short runtimes from MS to hives, longer runtimes from hive to hives, unnecessarily complicated routes about the center, and overpowered siege areas.
And so, I devised the Pyramid Layout. This image shows the top-down view of the layout; for any other layout type, this is all that is necessary. But due to the three dimensional nature of a pyramid, the front and side views are necessary for full visualization.
By having one of the hives in the very middle, yet much higher, the pyramid becomes completed; all 4 corners become equal distance from each other, in runtimes. Furthermore, since there is a triangle in itself between all three hives, any other hive is a suitable second hive, regardless of which hive the aliens begin with.
Of course, this radical new layout type was fraught with its own issues, which were resolved after testing. This included being able to siege the middle hive from below, and an advantage being gained from the aliens starting with the middle hive. The former was solved through tinkering the hive height, while the latter was solved by eventually ripping out an entire room (what is now Keystone) and smaller adjustments.
The only other known NS map to attempt a non-diamond layout is Enceladus, which itself is fraught with problems. Due to the (eventually) excellent implementation of the Pyramid layout, Nexus has perhaps the most balanced layout of Critical Locations in all of Natural Selection.
Next Page: Specific Layout Design,
Inspiration and Execution
