Let me elaborate a bit more. I never really forged before H5 and was pretty overwhelmed with all the options available. The first 3 maps I've made were just to get a hang of the controls and that's exactly when I realized that map design is a lot harder than I thought. You have to understand Halo in general, pacing, movement, spawning, weapons, scaling, too many abilities to deal with etc. the list goes on and on. I knew after some testing how bad I was and in need of some guidance and information. Enter Forgehub. I just started sharing everything I finished but I soon realized there was some real knowledge here. I have learned so many things by just reading it's insane but when I started sharing my maps I knew that because of my timezone I would never reach my potential. Lobbies/Twitch are handy but I wanted to participate as well. I could and should be a way better forger than I am today. And H5 became so dull so fast so that didn't help either. But forging was awesome. I used to draw a lot, I was a chef, I played some guitar, I make photographs, I'm just a little more creative than an average person I would say. And forging for me is just another creative outlet. I forge like I draw, I have no idea what I'm gonna make so after throwing some stuff together and think "hey, this could become a...." and then a theme hits me. I know of every map I made how and where I started doodling and how It came to what it is today. A weird way probably but it is what it is. So I gave up on design way to soon but maybe if H6 is fun I try again. I still love to check out maps but themes, atmosphere and piece usage is the first and only thing I care about. My latest wip PURE is probably mindnumbingly boring, maybe well segmented and scaled properly but I don't even have a player count. Gives you an idea of how bad I am.
I like playing the maps we make, sometimes its not even the maps that are the most fun, but the conversations and things people say. That's why stupid and offensive maps are so fun to me, the whole lobby just doesn't stop cracking jokes and smiling, there have been times where I cant breath because I am laughing so hard at the **** the lobbies say. It's all about fun to me, if you don't have fun on the map its a waste of time to me, there have been times where we re-purpose whole maps because we just get bored of them. Also because we are not huge fans of Halo 5 its fun to create games that feel nothing like Halo 5 so we DO like it. I also have a lot of fun forging by itself, I get bored of a large majority of FPS games pretty easily so its one of the few things I can do that I don't feel incredibly bored with, and its kind of relaxing (unless there are heavy and complex scripts involved). Sometimes its fun to open up random forge maps that aren't yours and judge the **** out of them, because its really fun and you can learn quite a bit.
Ummmmmmmmmm, Pokemon is great, first off. Second off, it was clear they already screwed up the song, so there was no more danger of serious thread derailment. Third off, I was trying to spread a little positivity, so if something like the Pokemon song is highly inappropriate to you, I don't know why you're on the Internet. EACH POKEMON, TO UNDERSTAND, THE FORGER THAT'S INSIIIIIIIDE
Talking about pokemon is clearly "on-topic" considering it relates to forge... In regards to why I forge, the feeling mainly encompasses the same saying shown in the pic above. I like to "Get the Fun Out", meaning I first and foremost enjoy creating fun maps (no matter how ridiculous) that 1) wow people, 2) let both sweaty and casual gamers have a good time, and 3) hopefully incite other forgers to think outside of the box when they create their own maps. It relaxes me for the most part and I love a creative outlet considering I have to use the technical side of my brain during the rest of the work day. As A 3 legged goat mentioned, I aim to create environments that make people forget they are playing in forged halo map. P.S. I also can't deny the thrill of seeing a video of someone playing one of my creations
I realized I wrote a ****-ton of stuff so if it's TLDR my main reason is below in blue. Spoiler: My Unnecessarily Long Forging Backstory Back in Reach when THFE was getting popular and was well...still a thing, I remember wanting so badly to have one of my maps be featured by them. Reach was technically my first Halo game and being quite the noob, my maps were actual garbage. But every map THFE featured and every crappy map I made inspired me to get there one day learning from the flaws in my old maps and the unique creativity from other maps. My maps were still really bad but I remember one of them, it was a mix of the game armor walkers and nom nom (if you remember them) and it actually played really well and was fun. My friends would always ask me to put it on in a lobby so we could play it together and that made me really happy to see them having fun on something I created. Sadly, none of my maps including that one were never featured because Halo 4 was peeking around the corner and all the focus was on that game. Instead of being sad though, I took the time to brainstorm what I could create in Halo 4 that would be feature worthy but when the time came..still nothing was good enough. One notable map I made that was pretty decent was a **** Zombie map for the gamemode that THFE were trying to popularize. It played fine when I tested it with people and people enjoyed it. Sadly again though, it never got recognition and I was starting to lose hope. Fast forward to Halo 5, and after the blunder of MCC and the lackuster launch of Halo 5, all my friends that used to play with me moved on from Halo leaving me to play by myself. (Insert Forever Alone face here) When Halo 5's forge launched I was so overwhelmed with all its fancy new gadgets and it honestly scared me cause I didn't know what to do. After a few failed attempts, I took a stab at a gamemode that was for some reason ignored towards the start of Halo 5's forge life and that was linear infection. Shipment was born after almost 4 months and even though it sucked I wanted it to get better. Then after looking through Halo youtube videos Forgehub was mentioned and I've heard of it before but never bothered to look at it. But when I did, it opened me up to a community that I didn't even know existed for the longest time. Then I saw there were weekly testing lobbies being held that would gurantee my map be played so hesitant at first, I put Shipment into Max's Forged Friday and was really nervous thinking they'd hate on my map but it was quite the opposite. They ended up loving it and having fun (despite the map looking really bad aesthetically). It reminded me of when my friends would have fun playing my maps. I realized then that the main reason I continued to forge wasn't because I wanted to get featured by some halo youtuber, (although it is a nice feeling to get recognition ) but because I enjoyed seeing other people enjoy my creations and that's still true to this day. I look forward to the testing lobbies every week and seeing people not just playing my maps, but playing other people's maps who have a passion for forging like I do.
I would say it very satisfying to finish something you have worked on and to have other people enjoy it too. I agree with WeedCough. It's the fastest way for me to turn my ideas into something ... "Real". It's also the fact that I like to challenge myself. How accurate can I get this remake. How make something original and fun. Having to overcome budget issues with being clever with object choice and placement. I also love this community.
I fire up Forge because I want to help people learn how to play Halo. My mutiny themed maps are more or less a political statement about the community during each game’s “era” so to speak. To me, Halo is the ocean. And the ships represent this, and the islands represent that, blah blah blah. More to the point, I feel that starting with the same theme every time a new game comes out is not a bad way to measure my progress as a Forger. For more practical purposes, mutiny is a very “hype friendly” theme. I’m not great at doing “fun” stuff so I let the theme do the work for me. My goal is to create a Spartan Company full of gamers that are equally good at all the Halo games. And yet the gameplay experiences between the different games is so varied, so it makes sense to have maps with an “unHaloish” and “hype friendly” theme to play in custom games.
Well, my arguably scientific analysis seems to indicate that at least two primary motivators for actually firing up Forge is validation on some level, and recognition on some level. That's a very simplistic conclusion not meant to imply any of it is good or bad. We want recognition that we have done something, and validation that it was good. Nothing wrong with that from where I sit. My next question might be how can 343 and the community help us get what we would like? Perhaps a topic for another thread.
I started forging because I just was excited to make a map in forge and I use to think they were the sh*t until I found forgehub. I would see some maps and think I wanna do that. I've learned a lot since then but now I keep doing it because it's more fun than actually playing other games. I love to create things and I really strive to make unique content now that I have a handle in design.
While many of us dont' admit it, I think you've hit the nail on the head. While what I said before is still true, I must admit that part of what I'm doing is creating stuff and putting it out there so that I can refine my practice of building something and having it truly "published" and guaging the reaction from recipients and hoping to find ways to maximize that reaction. This is in preparation for getting more serious about recording music, which shares many aspects of this exercise.