I just wanna talk about maps and map design without having anyone insult each other. Unfortunately, some people seem to take harsh criticism of their maps as personal attacks. *shrugs *
And I would like to help any way I can! Here's a pitch..... Built Fur War. An arena FPS about Furries slaying eachother.
I'm living the bachelor life for the next month, which means more forge time. I may get about 4 days to forge instead of the usual 2. I'm hoping I can at least get all of my blockouts setup for playtests. I'm pretty happy with Avalon. Just needs some minor adjustments and maybe one or two more playtests and it should be good to go. I saw Brusky did a 4v4 test on Gallows the other day. It seemed to hold 8 players pretty well. That's not at all what I intended, and doesn't really fit the design, so I'm working on rescaling/redesigning it. I've completed some changes to my 2 base sym, so I'll be putting down spawns and getting that playable soon. I have a few other maps I haven't touched in a while that I plan to spend a bit of time on as well. The scaling needed in this game is still baffling to me.
Nah. My girlfriend is visiting her home country for the next month. I can pretty much do whatever I want, aside from the 70 or so hours of work I do each week. So I figure I can at least double my forging time.
Can't be bothered to read the past ~30 pages of pure stupidity, so I dunno if anyone has mentioned it recently - but I've been playing Dark Souls 3 again. The new expansion is actually really nice looking, manages to be bleak like the rest of the game but at the same time it is colorful and awesome. I'll try and take some non-spoilery screenshots.
Maybe it's just a hunch, but I feel like you might run into some problems by calling one of your games """Oblivion""".
Why waste your time loading it up...just tell me right now, lol. On a serious note, one of the things I always struggle with is accepting imperfections on my maps. I spend so much time on them that very often all I see are the flaws. I suppose an argument could be made that we shouldn't accept imperfections, but I guess I see the perfect map as something that simply doesn't and won't exist. So my challenge is to see the imperfections, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of times what I do is to, in combination with working out the biggest flaws, focus on what makes the map unique, and what makes it work. And a flawed map can definitely work in the right scenarios, sometimes exceptionally well. Lockout Oddball is a perfect example of this. I'm not really sure why I brought this up. It's just something that's been on my mind lately. I spend so much of my time revisiting my maps. Some of them have played relatively well, despite obvious flaws in the designs. I typically go into those projects focused on fixing the flaws, but then I realize that there's definitely something right with the map also, or it wouldn't work at all and wouldn't be worth revisiting. I've kind of learned to place just as much importance on finding what's special about a map as I do on finding what's wrong with a map. I think overall we have a tendency to obsess over flaws, and it results in us overlooking the 'good' parts of our maps.
Ew. Something I've found that helps is to time-box my map development. This can be calendar time or more of an hour count, but the time limit will stop me from the endless perfection circle where I cut everything that played well. Then, let my map "cool off" for a month or two before I come back for edits. It's a bit like writing, I guess. If I come back and it's utter crap, then it's easy to drop. But if it is bearable to play, taking that break to work on other projects helps me more easily find the "what's special about the map" that you are talking about.