- SkyTag Jumpmstr
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- Noble Member
I found the Forge Lessons PDF to not be very helpful. There are several useful tips, but they're buried in 42 pages of stuff, most of which I didn't find helpful (my perspective) for a number of reasons.
- There are 275 questions in the document. I understand the value of getting the reader to think through his map design, but being inundated with an average of 6.5 questions per page seems a bit much.
- It feels as if too much of the document is spent convincing the reader that what you're trying to teach him is worth learning. Maybe that's reasonable given how many of your readers are at ages where people are known for knowing everything. ;-) For me that stuff just gets in the way. I go into a document like this with the assumption you have good reasons for taking the time to explain something, and that you have some experience and credentials. In any case, when you think it's worth explaining why something is important, just explain it. I wouldn't preface an explanation with "Why is X important?" (<-- Note: punctuation goes inside quotation marks.)
- Some of it just doesn't feel helpful at all, such as Chapter 30. Nothing in the chapter is wrong, but nothing in it seemed overly helpful either. The fact that you don't know for sure if something will work well on a map until you try it is hardly a revelation worthy of four paragraphs. This lesson contains the following:
"Sometimes you never know that something is going to work until you try it."
"You never know exactly what is going to happen until you try something yourself."
"Sometimes you never know until you try."
And then there are several examples of things you can't know until you try them. Okay, I think I got the message, but I got it the first time you said it.
Chapter 42 is Polish. If you're going to invest the time and effort (which you obviously have) to produce a document you're going to publish for public consumption, you should have someone edit it for grammar and writing practices. (That's how you polish written works. ;-)
Now, as someone who feels inadequate as a map designer (that's why I read your lessons ;-), but as someone who has looked at a fair number of maps and has a fair bit of life experience (I'm 55), I offer the following food for thought:
You talk about experimenting and trying things that are different, but you also rightly point out that it's important to understand the reasons standard practices are standard. I've looked at a fair number of maps, and a common problem with a lot of them is that they're just weird. In an effort to be distinctive and cool, the designer has gotten "creative" and created a map I can't imagine wanting to use for any type of game.
If being distinctive becomes the main goal, a designer can lose sight of the real goal of creating a great map that's fun to play. For example, Grifball is a fairly popular game, and Grifball maps are about as simple as any map could be. There are no paths, no weapons on the map, and few spawn points. But it's really fun. It's a fun game facilitated by the simplest of all possible maps.
I've always thought that while the rules can be broken to great effect sometimes, that's best left to people who understand them well and are experienced and talented enough to know when they can break them and get away with it. When novices break them, the results are usually disappointing, and usually end up showing why the rules are there. Different is not always better. Sometimes it's just weird or uncomfortable.
My point here, in case it isn't obvious, is that people starting out in map design should start out building a good, solid, fun map or two using fairly standard practices. If you can't get the basics of traffic flow, spawning, path manipulation, immersion and so on working on a fairly simple, normal map, deviating from standard practices is only likely to add to the problems, not solve them. If your map isn't fun, putting it under water isn't going to help.
In my experience it's best to give beginners (and I have to assume you're talking to beginners if you feel the need to present your audience with ten variations of "you never know until you try" ;-) pretty clear guidance and encourage people to experiment more after they've had some successes with the basics. If you teach people to walk, they'll figure out how to run on their own.
It's for this reason I think your lessons would be more useful if they included more specific guidelines people could use to build good, relatively simple, straightforward maps to help them learn the principles. Once they have that conceptual knowledge under their belts they'll be better prepared to go off the beaten path.
An example of something specific would be what kinds of weapons are better for what kinds of maps and game types. You mention the sniper rifle 20 times, but sniper rifles are pretty much useless in FFA Krazy King, Oddball and Headhunter. In fact, it shouldn't even be on maps for those games in my opinion because in my experience the people most likely to use it are jerks who want to camp somewhere boosting their K/D ratio instead of playing the game everyone they're killing is playing.
After weapon suggestions, how densely should they be placed be on a map? Should there be weapons every ten feet so you effectively have infinite ammo, or should they be spaced out far enough that people with preferred weapons run out of ammo and can only use them for a short time? What's a good rule for deciding how many sniper rifles to put on a map? Is there a good rule of thumb for deciding when weapons should be put out in the open where they can't possibly be missed, such as in the middle of a main path, or in a more obscure location? For example, in Reach's Powerhouse map, some weapons are placed right in your path, while others, such as the rocket launcher, and even more so, the grenade launcher, are not in obvious places.
Now, you can correctly say this is all up the map designer and that you don't want to limit his creativity, but guidelines don't limit creativity. Nothing you say can prevent someone from putting a fuel rod gun every ten feet on his map. But based on what I've seen, a lot of "creativity" in forged maps is really just the result of not understanding good design principles and the result is a lot of bad maps where people tried something that wasn't a good idea.
Map design is an art, a form of creativity. In involves skill, but it also requires talent, and like pretty much every art form, most people won't have the necessary talent to create great maps. It's just a sad reality of life that the overwhelming majority of us will never be great composers, authors, sculptors, or game map designers. But with the proper guidance in the basics, a lot of people who can never be great can be good, or at least decent, and create maps that can be played and enjoyed.
Anyway, that's just my $0.02. Or maybe $0.03. I'm not good at building maps or even a very good player, but my observations seem to apply to a lot of other areas in life and I see no reason they wouldn't apply here as well.