Originally posted by geach3d
This is a brawl playlist map, so it serves for FFA, TDM, SKM and yes, the ranked modes. As well as duel maps for the community. On top of that, it serves as a small-scale test for future rain maps, which I assume you wouldn't mind. It did not take long, I assure you.
To piggyback off of this - a huge bulk of dev time goes into art stuff (creating assets, ie buildings, props) as well as getting the structure of the map just right for the big modes. With Cortile, Geach already had the assets from Castello, and the structure of the map for Cortile is "rectangle". It took him like two weeks to whip this up, and then he spent a little while longer doing rain stuff (prep for future maps).
The reason it took so long to release isn't because of the actual dev time required, but the timing. It was almost ready for the Halloween patch, but we pushed it back so it wouldnt be rushed or delay the last patch.
Also, dev work on this map started a while back and IIRC Geach switched over to Noria to help out (as well as the whole Castello rework), so the time spent on this wasn't continuous.
Tldr; lil brawl maps like this have virtually no effect on big map progress