zs_lolas_gas_station: A map remake for Garry’s Mod Zombie Survival

What is it?

In mid 2022 a popular Garry’s Mod community ran a small contest in their push to modernize and just generally improve the state of the game. This contest was to remake one of many popular, but problematic, old maps to offer better visuals and improve gameplay. As someone who has played for many years both Garry’s Mod and Counterstrike, there are a few prolific mappers out there that of which you are guaranteed to have played their work if you ever strayed outside the stock maps. One of those is ‘Nipper’. Nipper has produced more beloved maps than I can name, but one came to me immediately that sits amongst my favourites, but suffers from outdated visuals and wasted space despite being an overall very enjoyable experience. That map was zs_gas_station_v2.

And that was my choice to remake. And boy did the remake go in a different direction…

Design and development

For a long time I wanted to make use of a neon palette in a map (that isn’t reliant on extreme darkness for contrast), and gas station gave me the chance to go wild with complete re-imagining zsgasstation while maintaining the same core layout. This meant keeping the core T-Junction concept with 1 house with a basement, upper floor & garage, with gas station out the back.

Beyond that, I stripped everything away and started from scratch; completely changing the setting, rotating and replacing entry points and just generally remove all traces of the grassland-style setting of the original. Gone is the foliage and the dirt displacements, replaced with a sprawling muted blue dusty cityscape in a small neighbourhood overlooked by a freeway.

I do like providing something that is a little more of an experience, or at least offers a little hidden/underlying story. Zombie Survival creates some challenges for this, given the way the game works it’s difficult to produce a story that unfolds during the experience. As such I approached the project with a set of easter eggs that paint a little back-story of Lola and her diner. It turns out that running a little rural diner isn’t all that profitable with Lola being forced to run a basement club underneath her tiny 1-room apartment.

Features

zs_lolas_gas_station is a zs map designed for a potentially unlimited number of player, although it is most balanced for a population of around 80.

Disregarding the map visuals and the dedication to preserving the original inspiration, there are a number of interesting features and Easter eggs in the map:

• The traffic lights along the road and T-Junction all work and are correctly timed to each other
• The fruit machines in the club and the diner are fully working. You can gamble points you’ve earned for a chance to win more points. Statistically speaking you’ll break even over time based on the odds so it’s not quite like a real fruit machine, but it’s a bit of fun to get the big payout.
• The way the parts of the map flow around each other combined with the mementos in Lola’s apartment offer a little glimpse into her life
• The decorations around the diner are little easter eggs to the community that ran the competition.

Screenshots

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Garry’s Mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2234953074