I'll start this blog with some introduction. For those of you who know who I am, you know that I am a mapmaker famous for maps like Fighting Spirit in the beta, Neo Enigma in the ESL cups and Ithaca in the ESV Korean Weeklies amongst other things. About six months ago I was getting very burned out. Making maps, commentating, watching the same shit play on the same shit maps, etc. I was frustrated and becoming increasingly strapped for time and my priorities needed changing. After awhile I came to the conclusion to retire from mapmaking, take a break from SC2 as a whole and maybe try commentating again a little later.Fast forward to about two months ago. OverKlocked is a LAN center in Edmonton that had finally opened up and it's first event was (you guessed it) a StarCraft 2 tournament that I was invited to commentate. The day went very well, I became acquainted with a lot of people and had a great time. As the weeks passed, more and more SC2 events happened in the community. MLG viewings at Overklocked, tournaments, group practice sessions, barcraft, etc - my love for the game and that spark for lack of a less cheesy term was starting to come back.One of the people I met in the community is Jacqueline "Versailles" Geller. You might recognize the name from one of the billions of eSports pieces she writes. She had asked me to teach her how to make maps and I can't say no to a pretty face~ Every time her and I met she would ask me the same thing - teach me how to make maps. This proceeded for a few weeks and during that period I found myself spending more and more time looking at and analyzing maps and becoming more and more inspired.Eventually, I caved (hence why I'm writing this TL blog now) - I agreed to teach Jacq how to make maps which we turned into an educational show for not only her but the viewers as well called "MapCraft - State of the Terrain" (4th episode this sunday! :D ) and I began working on my first original design since my retirement (not counting the 2v2 maps I was contracted to make for the Prodigy Team Starleague).I spent at least a dozen hours trying to find the right way to execute the concept I had in mind - a map with a relatively ambiguous expansion path and a backdoor leading to the main base that is somewhat out of the way, similar to Crossfire/Peaks of Beakdu. I axed design after design, sketch after sketch and I recently finally hit a personal milestone: I'm finally content with the design and started working on aesthetics. (Huge shoutout to Monitor and the rest of the ESV Mapmaking team for helping me out a TON with this - mapmaking without more than one brain is not possible IMO as well as Lokgar for the man cuddling and emotional support)I wanted to share with everyone the progress I made. Unfortunately I don't have screenshots of every single design I made between then and now but I'll post everything I do have. I hope you enjoy and maybe even learn somethingI know I did