My inspiration comes from my layout schemes. I visualize a key central structure and then visiualize the rest of the map before I place my first box.
I always base my ideas around something like a song, or a name or word. Sometimes a map or level from an old game (yet I never make "remakes"). Also, when I'm in the shower a certain building plan might pop into my head.
base a map on a song? i could understand making a map about stairway to heaven or long road to ruin or highway to hell, but could you please explain how this works?
Take a song you really like..take the name or favorite lyrics from the song...than visualize it..try to landscape it and then do what you can with it for forge. Not my best example but my band name for RB was a default one in the game called Deathpit Warbear. So I made a map around it. The very highest level was at max foundry height (you could still jump) and was kinda like a giant bridge almost with a huge 3 story pit in the middle. Deathpit. The underneath was a large expense with two chunked in open sections I called warbear. I filled in other stuff from there. You can see, I'm imaginative and it's easier to see and do than explain.
This is going to sound strange, but I use Excel and set the row height to 50. This give perfect squares which I use to lay out a map. Each square represents a single box. I then plan my map on the spreadsheet using my own imagination. When it comes time to create the forge, I know exactly how many blocks to lay out and where they should be. It works pretty darned good for me.
so i'm not strange! i should try using that excel thing, sketchup takes too much effort, but how do you know whether to interlock them?
Lol Microsoft Office hates me and deletes itself of my computer so I no longer have excel...but I do the same thing on paper lol.
Excel has drawing tools as well. I use the drawing tools when I'm creating an odd shape. I use the horizonal and vertical shading lines to represent staircases. I use different colors to represent open or closed boxes. Open is light gray. Closed is dark gray. Brown represents a bridge. There are all sorts of things you can do.
i enjoy playing other games multiplayer or playing halo 2 campaign for inspiration. i'm actually still building a map like the last room in the level "Regret"
Dude, Ivory, I do the exact same thing. I live out in the 'burbs but I go to highschool downtown, so I have an hour train ride each morning. I turn on some metal, think about forging, and start to get sleepy. Right when I fall asleep I come up with the best idea ever. Then the train conductor bangs on the wall to wake me up and get my ticket and makes me lose my train of thought. Hate that guy... As for my latest map, I really wanted to start forging something, so I just started interlocking stuff in pretty ways in the middle of Foundry. (Is it just me or does anyone else just like interlocking stuff? It's satisfying.) It's evolved into something that looks really promising and I'm sure will be quite epic. This one was basically a fluke. My past ones I have all just thought of on the train. Behemoth was an enlarged version of the trench in the middle of Hang 'em high, and Carcass was supposed to be like two bridges of ships staring each other down, but I tweaked that one to be something else.
My first 'decent' map was me trying to remake Lockout, so yeah, remakes, whatever. My second 'decent' map came into my head after seeing the winner of the Shell-Shocked contest, I wanted to include a trench, so I made one and branched out from there. My third 'decent' map was Infection on Blackout. Not really too much inspiration, just kinda popped in my head. It's really just the darkest combo you can make with some minor alterations to the map, for a dark zombie map. My fourth 'decent' map isn't finished yet, but I really like how it's coming along. _________ I kinda agree with the guy that said to take the best aspects from another map and link them to another idea. But I usually use a general idea from the map, not a remake of a certain area on that map, like the trench, it's different, it's not a copy of the one where I got the idea. Also, just looking at random words can give inspiration. If you see a word that sounds cool and means something, you can base your map off what the meaning is.