Lamont World Arena

December 16, 2025Eric YockeyLevel Design

Deathmatch, 2 to 6 players

“There’s a riot going down at the Skid Row Lamont L. Lamont Supermax Prison.
There’s no visitation, and my buddy Lenny says they do fucked-up experiments in there.”

This began with the floorplan from the Marathon 1 map Waldo World Arena and transformed into a bizarre multi-level supermax prison built around a giant vat of toxic waste and a stage hazard crusher.

Waldo World Arena (Marathon 1)

Lamont World Arena (Kingpin)

Players spawn into the 4 corner rooms and either walk to the arena’s center for a shotgun or zip to the upper level overlooking the arena for light armor and the rocket launcher. In the center of the arena is a belligerent Lamont swimming in a vat of toxic waste with a grenade launcher, and above the vat is a lid that continually opens, malfunctions, and drops shut with a crash, each time depositing fresh heavy armor and a full heal. Staying in the center of the arena gives you the best stuff, but you have to avoid the stage hazard and are completely exposed in a large area with 8 entrances.

Original floorplan exported from Marathon 1 with Weland, exported from OBJ to MAP in Blender with io_export_qmap, map designed in Trenchbroom 2025.3 as a Valve 220 map for Kingpin, exported with ericw-tools alpha 10.

I wanted to make a simple deathmatch map with nice visuals that uses only stock Kingpin textures. This beta should be feature-complete, but if it ends up being popular, I intend to add more decoration to the spawn rooms. Most of the spawn rooms in Marathon had alcoves with teleporters to the upper level, but in keeping with Kingpin’s theme, I instead went with a fast-travel sequence that quickly brings the player through the prison backrooms and deposits them at the top behind a locked door.

.MAP file included so you can see how the various tricks were done.

Special tricks and features

Projected textures

The arena is mostly lit by floodlights that shine through the fenced flooring, achieved with ericw texture projection. The projection is a custom texture of the fenced flooring inverted, but this is written directly to the lightmap instead of needing the texture.

4 skies

The spawn rooms are mostly lit by outdoor skylights that shine through the windows, color-coding the rooms so it’s easier for players to tell where they are (colorblind players can also observe the number printed in the lit sign). Each of the 4 rooms uses top-hemisphere skylights (sun2), but is configured with a light object to be color-coded and only shine through specific textures, allowing for multiple different skylights.

Crowbar start

All spawns coincide with a crowbar with its model set to null. The effect is that everyone starts with the crowbar.

Floating weapon

The grenade launcher sits at the top of the vat of toxic waste but doesn’t fall into the water because it begins on a 1-unit func_wall (deleted shortly after the level loads), and is held in place by a 1-unit trigger_gravity brush below that with its gravity set to 0.

Zip teleport

When entering the spawn room alcove, doors open, zip the player through the backrooms, and deposit them at the top behind a locked door. This one-way trip is done with a series of trigger_push objects at 90-degree angles and various clip ramps. The doors are func_door_rotating set to mist for the visual, and a full-alpha func_door that slides out and back in for the collision to avoid issues with players blocking rotating doors. A 3rd func_door set to mist and unlock -1 sits at the top to create the “locked door” sound when players try to head back down the one-way passage.

Swimming NPC

MH mod (and other mods that support multiplayer NPCs) players can see Lamont swim around in the toxic waste. He is a cast_bum with 2x scale and Lamont’s skin values from the map sr2 set, riding a func_rotating under the water level.

Slamming lid

The lid is a teamed pair of func_train_rotating brushes, one of the few brush entities in Kingpin that can directly damage players and not be blocked. It follows a path with 4 nodes—up, down, and a quick up/down bounce—and uses path_targets to trigger sounds and effects, so that the sequence is still timed correctly even if the lid is delayed for a moment by crushing a player or item. The sound effects use trigger_relays for the echo effect and target_splash for sparks and smoke effects.

Manual respawn armor and health

Heavy armor and health spawn on the vat lid every time it’s dropped from the ceiling. This involves some moving parts:

The lid reaches the ceiling and any players/items under it are crushed between the func_train_rotating and the func_door. The func_door then moves upward to allow space for the new item spawns. This is hidden behind an identical brush set to content:mist so items can pass through it. Then, 4 target_spawners create the armor and adrenaline. The lid delays briefly for items to land on its surface, then the lid drops while the func_door in the ceiling drops back into position.

Items in Kingpin are not removed from the world until they are destroyed, and picking up an item only hides it for a brief period, so target_spawner is generally unused by mappers because it will lead to an infinite amount of items. Even if items are picked up, they respawn 30 seconds later in the same position they were picked up, and if they are no longer on solid ground, they will instead appear on the nearest solid surface under the item’s center coordinate.

In this map, items on the moving lid that are picked up will respawn 30 seconds later somewhere in the air and zip to the floor deep inside the vat before they reappear, inside a pocket separated by an areaportal brush. This areaportal hides any visuals or sounds caused by the items exploding when a small func_door moves back and forth to destroy any items that fall down there (items explode when they collide with solid entities).

If the items were instead not picked up, they remain on the lid and are removed by crushing when the lid raises.