This remake started out late december 2010. I had been playing a lot of UT3 singleplayer (which contains several really well designed DM maps) and with that had also played a lot of rounds on Epics 2007 remake of ctf_face2. The 2007 version didn't take place in space like the original and had been relocated to a mountain scenery, which made it feel a lot less epic. Having noticed that, I wanted to see if I could create my own version.
I had mapped out a simple concept and felt pretty satisfied already. Knowing that I could hypothetically finish the project was enough for me, so I almost ended up throwing the map onto the mighty mountain of abandoned projects that is my mapsrc directory - if it hadn't been for the original versions' rotating sky. I was seconds away from closing Hammer and getting a midnight pizza ordered when I suddenly wanted to know uncanningly badly if rotating skyboxes were possible in TF2. The next thing I knew I heard church bells ringing 7AM and I had a rotating skybox with planets before me.
With newly found ambition to make something out of this project, I released the first playable version december 30th on gamebanana and tf2maps and continued to add detail, tweaking lighting and skybox and fixing problems in accordance to player feedback (e.g removing every single rotating stone that you can see in the video on the right since they crashed every server). Players seemed to be enjoying the map very much and I even received some messages thanking me for developing it (which had never happened before [and has never happened since]), motivating me to make it extra super good.
So, having used winter break to enhance, tweak and balance some more, the first finished version was released on january 14th. At around 60MB, it was horrendously large, featuring 6 .wav songs and being textured all over with 8 inch lightmap cells. Despite of that, visits to my homepage peaked at around 1200 that month and I received a few emails asking me to put up server IPs.
Fast forward half a year it's june 2011 and I'm bored out of my mind. CSPromods development was stagnating and the two maps I had created for it didn't surface on any servers while TF2 had become so immensely cluttered with items and color noise that I even ended up playing an MMO for a short while.
Remembering the map though, watching the trailer on the left and skimming through some comments on gamebanana made me think the map looked unprofessional. Like the rotating skybox had initially made me want to explore the possibilities of the engine, I now wanted to know what gave the map its curious look and immense filesize.
So, after I had played some video games one evening I once more suddenly found myself sitting in front of a well crafted project at seven in the morning (you really don't get what your project looks like while you're busy brushing around detail areas in hammer so compiling and walking through a map sometimes blows me away).
And thus was finished the final version with optimized light map grid, reduced sounds, several fixed bugs, rehauled item placement and a proper, dark orangeish-red color scheme in both map and skybox. I think leaving the project at 60MB in january was the best thing that could have happened. It made me come back after having forgotten all the work I put into it and made me see the january version for what it was.
Thanks to everyone who gave feedback, discovered and reported bugs, wrote nice messages and hosted the map.
Special thanks to Phrakture for remixing Foregone Destruction and with that reanimating the map, thanks to GrejnoM for creating the teleporter particles and offering me "any game you want out of the steam store" (which in retrospect I shouldn't have declined), thanks to Why.j2 for supporting me, giving advice and submitting bugs, thanks to the PgT clan for being the first to host the map.
Finally, a hot-air balloon sized thank you to Cedric Fiorentino and the UT99 team for creating the original.