Player-made Map Time! Let's get an early start

Hiyo, This is Shockfrost, a resident mapmaking nut.
It's a solid two weeks or so after the great announcement "Starcraft 2 is officially coming"

And what's a Blizzard RTS without a map editor?
You know it's on the way.

Here, we'll get together the community of map painters, engineers and designers.
Storyboarders and campaign designers are welcome too..
as well as anyone who wants the latest dig on Starcraft 2 UMS/custom map news!

To kick things off, let's start getting the demand pool under wraps...
list off your fave Starcraft (1 and brood war) UMS,

and why you liked it. We'll all recount the good ones and start getting ideas for the next generation.

Cheers...


(Oh, and we all know Coalescence wants to see DotA and TD or stuff of similar quality) Moving on.)

 

Heeeey, what's wrong with Dota and TD maps ??? ??? I love em ;D

but I'd like to see the starcraft community come out with something really special, like an entire campaing and story seperate from the real starcraft story but using the great engine Blizzard gives us. We could have full voice overs and everything...

but it'll probably be a bit too ambitious. Very hard to co-ordinate..

 

I only mentioned that like once ??? :

 

Survival games are fun xD

 

I rather enjoyed the custom campaign that was bundled with SCI. I'd like to see more of those.

 

It looks like a lot of community wants to see a special, player-made CAMPAIGN,
Which is awesome!

Now we're still kind of limited on the specs of the campaign, due mainly to the GAME isn't out ... LOL...
but there's still quite a lot we can do.

We need some things to get started on the Player Campaign Project.


1. What should the difficulty level be?

We have some options here:
- A. Let's make it easy, we have a story to tell, and everyone deserves to hear it
- B. Let's make it HARD, the starcraft community deserves a REAL challenge
- C. Let's make the difficulty sloping, so it starts easy and it gets harder.
- D. I have a good idea (Insert idea here)


2. Should this be a Multiplayer Campaign?
- A. YES, absolutely!
- B. Of course!
- C. That's a GREAT idea!
- D. Single player only


3. How many players do we want the campaign to be for?
- A. 2-4 player Co-Op is about right for me and my friends
- B. 2-4 player Versus, so you can play for or against the heroes!
- C. 2-4 player Competition, everyone tries to finish the story seperately
- D. 4 player Competition, teams of 2 try to win seperately
- E. 2-8 player Co-Op would be awesome!
- F. 2-8 player Versus, everyone competes to be the winner!
- G. 2-8 player Versus, good guys vs. bad guys!
- H. 4-8 player only, make it too hard to finish alone.
- I. 4-8 player Versus only, the bad guys are always player controlled!
- J. 8 player Co-Op required, everyone works together or you don't win!
- K. I have an even better idea (insert idea here)



4. What should the theme of the Campaign be?
- A. The Terran have a run-in with the Zerg...
- B. The Terran have a confrontation with the Protoss...
- C. The Zerg have an encounter with the Terrans...
- D. The Zerg have to handle the Protoss...
- E. The Protoss are assaulted by the Terran....
- F. The Protoss have an uprising by the Zerg...
- G. No no no, like this ... (insert idea here)


5. Should specific heroes be a strong part of the game?
- A. Absolutely, heroes are totally part of every good plot.
- B. Didn't you get enough of that in Warcraft 3? One army against the world!


Those five questions should give us a good start on the player campaign!
Fill em' out, and once we have an idea on the structure we'll start on a storyboard.

----
Also, I too am a fan of survival games, but a really good survival map needs you to know all kinds of surviving tricks... we will have to play Starcraft 2 more in-depth to discover those, so we can't do a whole ton of planning. But I plan to do at least one!

 

Damn! Fucking great that we would be thinking of a story as we wait for starcraft 2 and after that there will be a fucking starcraftforum campaign. Maybe good members on the forum have a hero unit ;D
But if you/we are gonna make this, don't rush it when the editor comes out, first get gosu editing skills ;D

1. What should the difficulty level be?

1.
- B. Let's make it HARD, the starcraft community deserves a REAL challenge
- C. Let's make the difficulty sloping, so it starts easy and it gets harder.
So: so start with kind of hard and then make it really hard ;D

2.
- D. Single player only
- Better stuff for the story I guess. But if you can implend it well it always could get mplay imo

3.
See 2nd idea above. In that case 2-3 Co-op

4.
Story = later worries.

5: Multi heroes

 

Hmm I have some experience in the map making world.. and I think this is much too early to start something like you are.. it's good to start thinking about it.. but at first when i read this post.. I thought you were talking about making a map for Starcraft 1..

cmon.. the game isn't out yet..

I don't think this is going to work..

but what you could try is to make a Starcraft 1 campaign first.. and then.. when Sc2 is out.. the same team can start the SC2 campaign project.. Planning a whole campaign isnt easy and if the team doesn't work perfeclty together it just won't work.. (I suppose this is a team project because.. it's a shitload of work you know??)

If you want to start something for SC1 I offer my services for triggering, testing and balancing..

I sure would appreciate to help much more.. but I don't think I have enough time for everything.. and I know some hate to do every triggers.. because it can be sooo long.. and.. since I'm pretty fast at it.. I could do this.

 

That's groovy and all, but I've done starcraft 1 maps before... did a Smash TV map, a couple survivals, Snowblind...

I plan to go back thru SC1 and polish my tiling and layout skills back to top form again, nobody wants to play an ugly campaign, but I'm very well aware we're looking at over 6 months to plan out a story arc... it is FAR from impossible... and as more and more details become available, it will be more and more possible... the earlier you start, the more likely you will have the time you need to be the first success.

If we want to have the first and the greatest, and put our marks on it, there's no time to start planning like the present. Blizzard spent since 2002 working on Starcraft 2. When it releases in 2008 it will have been nearly 6 years of work.
And you're afraid of spending 6 little months planning? PLz.

Get hardcore, and let's make some incredible stuff.

 

Now, it's been utter years since some of us last touched StarEdit. (Or SCXE, etc.)


In case any of you are feeling rusty about this sort of thing (I know I am) we might as well do a re-hash!
Some of you never QUITE got the steps right... (You KNOW who you are, so don't bother hiding your half-finished projects and scribbled pipe-dreams from me) but it's been long enough that even the vets probably wouldn't mind a review. Those of us who would rather watch can see me hack at the bit instead and get good concepts, and those who want to limber up their muscles and REALLY get ready for the launch, feel free.

Now, as you know since patch 1.15 a lot of the old Starcraft UMS just aren't working anymore... The best thing we can do, is probably start from scratch.

We'll take a simple UMS idea and nurture it up to a full fledged map.

To start with, we need to have a Theme.


The rather lame Theme I choose for the demo map is:
Collectible miniatures that are used to play set-piece battles against one another!

Ridiculous yes, but the theme of a UMS can be anything you can imagine.
You want to spend between one day and one week just playing the game, absorbing ideas for the project, and "building a good head of steam".

For me, I'm a pretty quick worker, so I should be fired up in a little over a day.

 

Now that we have a pretty clear mental picture how we can play the game.
We can build the outer structure of this thing.

We don't need to paint the whole terrain, or set all the triggers at once... we want to put down key features and we'll polish in stages.

In this case, we'll make a couple switchboxes, and set up locations for various forces to get dumped at.

This map will be really simple. A few triggers to control the addition of the set piece armies and we're done; the entire arena will be a free-for-all with the chosen units.

Many of the logic issues can be handled once we have a decent framework.

 

It would be hard to lay out a plot right now without knowing the story of SC2. Wouldn't want to really overlap anything. At least that's my view. You could def. set up what kinds of maps you want. I would love to see an epic user-made campaign!

 

If any plans are made for a player-made campaign around here, give me a call and Id enjoy being a map designer.

 

I'd love to help you out with ideas if you need them. I've made lots of map for StarCraft and WarCraft 3, some better then others... I'm ok with triggers and unit design, but since I'm not that good with terrain someone else will have to do that.