Need Map Design Advice

1. Using tracing paper for different levels of a map in the final design.
2. Just walk around your map, or drop a vehicle every once in a while to see about movement.
3. Start with whatever depends most on the terrain of whatever you are forging. It's best to start with something that must be in a certain place then base other locations off of that.
4. Try to put some love into both sides of the map. For asymmetrical maps, people all too often make one side a masterpiece, and ignore the other side until later when they just end up rushing to finish the map. Power weapons need to be taken into consideration with the map's design. In invasion, you can just put all your efforts into the defenders base, and give the attackers vehicles and weapons to break through the defenses, but in symmetrical gametypes the terrain needs to be balanced.

 

1. Personally, you don't really need to portray what you want as long as you're getting your raw ideas down on paper. I know my sketches look much more messy than those nice little aesthetic pictures you see around, but it's me working out gameplay ideas instead of saying "this structure looks fun!". Then I'll think about it, try to think about how the design will play out, and keep adjusting till I'm happy enough to move on. That's generally taken around 50 re-sketches until I'm satisfied. I'm by no means the best or anything like that, but I find that approach to work well.

Here's my first sketch of MLG Requiem, haha: http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b150/mooinsanecl/epicmap2b-1.jpg

2. Again, this you can try to figure out from your own gameplay experience what you want. You'll find that the geometry is more of a factor on gameplay than scale, which is just kind of making it bigger or smaller. Once you've worked out a gameplay style you like, it's simple to decide how big to make it, just look at one important area or field of vision and say "I want this to be about _____" long. And then scale everything around that.

3. That's a tough one....

4. Ideally, you don't need to worry about cover, at all. Take Guardian's general layout, and you'll notice that you move from room to room and advantage/disadvantage. That's what makes it a great map. If it was Gears of War, cover is necessary. But since this is Halo, if you can make a game all about pros/cons, various options, and not about the cover, that's the ideal. It's definitely one of the tougher things to do, but it's directly correlated with your design. Once you've thrown down the design and you find people getting trapped without options in a test game, THEN look into putting in cover. Note that getting trapped doesn't mean like someone rushing straight down the middle of Guardian (notice there's no cover there? If there was, it just wouldn't play as well as it did), as that was a clear decision to go for a faster route at the risk of being killed and not having anywhere to escape to.

A while ago, myself and MickRaider wrote a map design theory guide that I think is still relatively relevant, it's more about the mindset of design rather than "information", but hopefully you find it useful. The main thing is not to look at what someone tells you to do and do it, figure out why things are, what works and why, what doesn't work and why, and so on. That lets you develop your own map design style, instead of a mutation of someone else's style.

Good luck!

 

Forgot to mention that that article we wrote is in the Forging 201 section, in the Halo 3 map area. It should still be mostly relevant though.

 

That needs to be moved accross and reachified

 

From the thing in my sig:
"Know what you want to do before you begin, and never ever forget or stray from it. Know where the power positions are and how powerful they are relative to each other and to the rest of the map. Know which positions can challenge the power positions. Know which direction you want to funnel players towards. Know which major lines of sight you want to enable and even more importantly know which you want to block.

You don't have to have a complete design before you begin forging, but the product you're aiming for should be firm in your mind from start to finish. Without that, you end up with just a group of structures or, even worse, some cover distributed in a room. There are hundreds of maps here which were very obviously not planned or even thought about before they were constructed. I can't put into words how to identify such maps easily, but once you've worked with forge a bit and experienced the design process firsthand, you'll know them when you see them. They're everywhere."

You only really need to have the "big idea" stuff planned in advance. The details are what you're going to tweak when testing reveals flaws.

Just gotta trust your feelings on this one I guess. If it helps, Zealot is a circle with radius 13.9 if you wanted to compare to that for scaling purposes.

For a symmetrical map, definitely start from the middle. It makes it easy to maintain symmetry. If your map is floating you can even center your map at a nice easy coordinate like (0,0) for further ease of symmetry. Asymmetric maps you can begin just about anywhere really. Probably the area that is the most complex is where I'd start, and then reference that for all other areas.

Also, just as planning is just the big idea stuff and details can be worked out later, build the big idea stuff first. Get your floors built and your major line of sight killing structures in place before you get bogged down in railings and cover and weapons and spawns and aesthetics.

For geometry instead of just cover as cover, make it big and connected. Your walls should be bulky enough to really give the impression that the two sides of them are distinctly separate spaces. Basically think about the difference between the top towers on MLG Onslaught in Halo 3, which was based on Midship, and the top pink tower on Midship. Pink tower has an actual room there with bulkier cover and a fully enclosed roof. It's still "cover" but the fact that it's all connected and integrated into the geometry of the map makes it structure instead of just cover like the A/B signs on Onslaught.

For a super easy way to mask lazy cover, give your map a roof and connect the cover floor to ceiling. Brace, Larges and Block, 1x1 talls are great objects for connecting like that, and the object looks like it's a functional piece of architecture instead of just something the creator put there to fill space, even if it really is just something you put there to fill space.