Ive already improved my man, thanks to forge. Now I want a forge with more options to go steps further. I dont care about aesthetics, I'll wait till forge improves so even a dummy can make a decent looking map. Im not sure what your deal is with me. Thats all I have to say here. Dm me if you want to to keep talking.
Making tons of minigames and customs has tought me a lot about balance and has gotten me to look at balance more deeply in even other games. I often find myself able to identify a problem before playing the map (abuseable spots, unfair weaponry,etc.). People often just brush customs or think they are easy but they can be a total ***** to balance just like core maps depending on the game. I learned about how some concepts sound fun but in practice really suck, and it has gotten me to think more deeply about certain ideas. For instance digging through rubble while being chased by infected sounded fun, but in practice really sucked and everyone died most of the time without making much progress. I never even thought about scale for the longest time until the obects list started growing, and I saw someone make a human scaled house for the first time. Forge taught me what advice to listen to when testing something, it is important to be able to distinguish malicious advice, good advice, and advice that strays from the concept of the map and how repetition of a complaint is by far the most important thing to listen for. I learned that great customs maps don't matter if you don't have the gameplay settings and customization options to back it up. Despite being a giant mess, scripting has tought me a whole lot as well. Before forge I litterally never created anything and I discovered how much I like to create stuff, I was always discouraged because I suck ass at drawing, something that is often crucial in many things visually created. I learned that drawing is not absolutely as crucial as I thought and it opened a huge gate for me. hopefully learning photoshop will surprise me too. I hope I actually like playing Halo 6 core games, I always hold a rule to myself that I will never create something I don't like playing on or have fun creating.
If anything, I've learnt which kind of forger I am. In the past I would just have a go at anything, but now I tend to stick at what I'm good at. Aesthetics. And also finishing maps... I don't have a good track record with that...
I used to be one of the people that just built whatever came to mind and didn't put much thought into how each area of a map interacted with one another or how to design with certain weapons/vehicles in mind. This "design process" carried over into my first few H5 maps, but I slowly progressed to the point where I actually think about how I want the layout and player interactions to work before I build the map. My BTB map Echoes is a good example of my growth as a map designer. At the start, it was one of the maps where I just built it without any real direction (which is obvious in the video below), but over time as it went through months of playtesting, I developed a much better sense of how to design pathing, sightlines, player interactions, etc. to the point where I was able to get Echoes up to matchmaking standards. My end goal is, of course, to be able to design maps professionally. I'm not quite at a level where I feel comfortable doing that just yet, but I've gotten much closer to that point since H5's release, and that's mostly thanks to all of the great people in the forge community that helped me progress to this point.