Thursday, February 3, 2011

New map project: Rocky Road

With the (A)Symmetry map contest going on, I felt like I had to get a map going since I didn't win the Art pass contest.

My entry is a symmetrical 5CP map and the main feature is a road running from one side of the map to the other with the central bridge as the most obvious focal point.

This is what the central cap currently looks like; I'm doing too big changes to the first two points for there to be much point in posting those yet but if you want to check out my progress, go to my tf2maps.net thread.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Now for something different

For my third video I'm not doing the Team Fortress 2 map theory. Instead this one focuses on Super Meat Boy and showcases a Photoshop file that I've created and how I use that to prototype level designs before the actual editor is released.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Designing with optimization

I really liked the video format so here's my second video in the map theory series (I will make different styles of videos). This one focuses on how to design your maps on a macro scale to make them easier to optimize and run well on all sorts of computers.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Trying out a new format

Instead of my standard posts for blogging, I've tried to make a sort of video lecture or tutorial where I'm talking while drawing over example images. It is harder than most people would believe to consistently say interesting things while doing something.

The film itself is embedded below, any and all feedback is great. In case you want a regular post as well I think I'll put it up tomorrow or something, I've got all the images and most of the text already.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Advantage analysis: breaking a map down

In this post I will try to explain a method of analysis that can be applied to a map, finished or in development. The different types of advantages in this post were things that I came across as motivations for why an area looked a certain way while trying to analyze one of my own maps but I will try to apply it to another map just to see if it holds water. While I'm sure that much of this will sound obvious to an experienced gamer, this is a more detailed approach. Starting with a more limited FPS with no classes would make the discussion simpler but I will still base my discussion around Team Fortress 2 since it's the game that I'm most familiar with.

Since this discussion will also be very theoretical I feel a bit limited in my vocabulary but in this post I will use "path" as an one-dimensional object between areas, generally not allowing travel between separate paths except in the case of one-way travel. Due to the sticky/rocketjumps available in Team Fortress 2, paths that you can switch between via special jumping are defined as 1½-way.

The basics of the method is to take a certain number of advantages and then rate a path or an area of the map and rate it according to those advantages. You can also start from the other way around and design the purpose of an area first and what type of classes you want to take that path and then design the advantages around it. Either way is fine, as long as you have a thought process for why you're doing one thing or the other and not just building and then seeing what comes out.

Let's get to it.

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Sunday, October 17, 2010

Design layers: from the ground up

The most interesting part of mapmaking has for me always been the early stages of prototyping. It's where you get to start seeing the world that only used to exist inside your head and it's also where you get to make the big rough changes to everything that didn't work, because quite frankly, doing designs only in your head doesn't work for an entire map.

Unfortunately I've yet to find a work flow that I'm quite happy with and I've tried several approaches.

Failiure #1: starting out doing a two-layered design in photoshop did, not unexpectedly result in a map that was extremely flat with only one upper level, much like ctf_2fort but without the underground tunnels.

Failiure #2: making sketches of the art style and theme of the map first and then trying to build good gameplay around it. Starting out with a big valley on one side with a river at the bottom, I managed to make a fairly good first point of a CP map but when I wanted the players to run across bridges to the second point I ran into huge optimization issues. While it's possible to pull off, I would recommend putting the scenic things in the 3D skybox and leave it there.

Failiure #3: jumping straight into Hammer and trying to use big world brushes as a sort of Lego prototype. This seems to be the best of the three, creating a fairly interesting map. Unfortunately it also looked a lot like mix-and-match of selected parts of Dustbowl and Goldrush and was on the whole rather uninspired.

A major benefit of working with large brushes is that you'll virtually never end up with the thin wall problem where you want to make one area bigger or place a big prop where you can't because there is another area on the other side of the wall.

After so many failiures it would be a shame if I didn't learn anything. My latest version of prototyping works is taking a more basic approach, trying to start out with gameplay and the reason of why an area looks in one way instead of another.
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Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Artpass contest finished

So Valve's art pass contest is over (though not yet decided) and I've taken some time off because I didn't want to look at my entry for a while but here it is as I turned it in. Unfortunately I seem to have turned it in with a few glaring (to me) errors but it's nothing that can't be fixed. The embedded youtube link below is me flying through the map, exactly as it was turned in on the day before the contest ended. For pictures in higher resolution than 720p, click the screenshots after the jump or visit my Dropbox gallery here.



As a reference, the original fly-through of the euneditedmap can be found here.

Warning: massive amounts of pictures after the jump.

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Monday, August 16, 2010

At a crossroad

As usual, I haven't been posting much but right now that's a good thing because I have been working on my art pass map instead. While I've seen some great entries that are likely to beat mine, I also manage to get pleasantly surprised by how the map looks in-game. That is indeed a rare thing since I'm usually my own worst critic.

The problem I've run into though is the texturing. Since my planning phase I've been using a mostly blue industrial theme with the high-contrast light maps. My first plan was to have the blue attack their own base after it has been overrun by the red team. The problem with this was that the red capture points clashed a lot with the generally blue theme of the areas around them. It made the points themselves stand out more but since I don't think anyone would really be interested in the backstory, people would just wonder why the red points were there but never look around to try and find out.

After that, I thought about switching the teams around, having blue quite naturally defend the blue base. Apparently this is a bad idea. Story-wise, it would make sense for the read team to attack every once in a while and on 5 capture point, king of the hill or capture the flag type maps they do attack. But there is no attack/defend map where the red team is attacking and several of the users seemed to think it was a bad idea to send one in for the contest.

I'd still really like to go with the blue textures for the main occluder building between blue spawn and capture point B just because they look awesome with my lighting setup but I can agree with everyone's opinion that it might "feel weird" to attack as red. Playing on a new map is in itself so confusing and most players play both attackers and defenders on any given map anyway so I think it would be possible to get away with it.

Am I just reluctant to kill my own darlings or will the Red eventually get an attacking map, who knows? For now I'll likely stick with the blue-neutral-red transition though. Even though it's unlikely to win, it's a bit more likely, I can always make a 5cp or Koth map later with one end using my original theme.

Click the link below for images.
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Saturday, July 24, 2010

So many contests, so little time

Summer is here and both Valve and Blizzard has released a fan contest and I want to win them both. The only slight flaw here is that I'm quite busy with work and probably won't have time to do great in both of them (and the odds of winning are astronomical).

I have the feeling that it's easier to reach your maximum potential faster in the novel contest, mapping takes a really long time. Mapping also happens to be a thing I really enjoy so I suppose I'll focus on that on my days off and then try to write the novel on the days that I'm working and only have a couple of hours to spare.

The good part about the novel is that I've already planned a single-player campaign for Starcraft 2 and thus had the story and characters mostly done. The hard work with writing only starts after you have all of the story down though and you have to revise your own words (or have other people do it). Reading something you wrote yourself for the n+50th time is likely to make you go insane.

I've made some progress on the art pass map as well, screenshots included after the jump. If you want to you can check out my tf2maps.net thread and post any comments there.

For anyone interested I've also enabled comments as well as subscription since my updates are currently quite unpredictable. If someone knows of a widget that allows you to put permanent links on the side, that would be excellent for my mapping projects.

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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Game design and the sunk-cost effect

The sunk cost-effect or the sunk cost dilemma is a theory of economics and game theory. The basics of the problem is that as projects keep going, it's more and more expensive to change your current implementation but you keep on working on it instead of starting over because of all the time already spent. Since most game developers seem to be working iteratively, all the fast iterations are in the beginning of a project and that's when most of the big scrapping of design happens. Most of the testing in a development cycle still happens near the end though, after all the modelling, animations and sound effects are already close to finished. After that, only minor details are changed to fix things like game balance and timing.

This is where I feel the cost-effect really start kicking in. Starcraft 2 is nearing it's development cycle now with beta phase 2 launched and only two weeks until full release. Blizzard's MO has always been (officially) to only release a game "when it's done". But is it really done?

In my own humble opinion, there are still several units that could use a change. It's just not going to happen. I expect the game to release mostly as it is now, with only one or maybe two minor balance patches. I had high hopes for the patch between the two phases of beta but it didn't really do much.

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