Saturday, February 20, 2010
Crevice: Map is Done
The map is done as far as I'm concerned. At least I'm 95% sure. I still haven't had a chance to test the final build with people. It's kind of tough to publicly entice people to try a new map. I'll just have to round up a few friends at the same time.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Crevice: It's a Bad Map
About a week ago, I had a 'not so decaf' decaf americano in the evening and could not fall asleep for the life of me. To make the best of it, I started sketching out plans for a map much like Crevice. Basically, it was Crevice with all the ideas I thought of while making Crevice, but felt were too late to apply. While thinking out the player flow and location of points of interest on the new map, it dawned on me that Crevice is a poor map.
When initially designing Crevice, I wanted to make a building that actually felt like a building and not a string of random corridors like many other maps out there. To that end, I achieved my goal. Crevice is an easy map to figure out and the forts' rooms, stairs and hallways don't feel too arbritrary. Sadly, this very same philosophy made Crevice a poor map in terms of game flow. For example, the spawn point and the main escape from the intel room are too close together. A respawning player gets no downtime before being thrust into the action of the map.
While lots of action may seem like a good thing, a bit of downtime plays to the peaks and troughs of intesity. Too much constant intensity leads to anxiety and frustration. The attempt to make a building like building also lead to other issues including claustrophic hallways and too many escape route options.
All of these initial flaws combined have lead me to believe that Crevice is not going to be a map worthy of a major release. I know this sounds negative, but a big part of making this map was to give myself the opportunity to become comfortable with the tools and make myself less nervous about some of the processes in map making. That has been extremely succesful. I plan to take the learned lessons and apply them to a new map. I will still mostly finish Crevice, but I'll probably keep it's release fairly quiet.
When initially designing Crevice, I wanted to make a building that actually felt like a building and not a string of random corridors like many other maps out there. To that end, I achieved my goal. Crevice is an easy map to figure out and the forts' rooms, stairs and hallways don't feel too arbritrary. Sadly, this very same philosophy made Crevice a poor map in terms of game flow. For example, the spawn point and the main escape from the intel room are too close together. A respawning player gets no downtime before being thrust into the action of the map.
While lots of action may seem like a good thing, a bit of downtime plays to the peaks and troughs of intesity. Too much constant intensity leads to anxiety and frustration. The attempt to make a building like building also lead to other issues including claustrophic hallways and too many escape route options.
All of these initial flaws combined have lead me to believe that Crevice is not going to be a map worthy of a major release. I know this sounds negative, but a big part of making this map was to give myself the opportunity to become comfortable with the tools and make myself less nervous about some of the processes in map making. That has been extremely succesful. I plan to take the learned lessons and apply them to a new map. I will still mostly finish Crevice, but I'll probably keep it's release fairly quiet.
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