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Map Design Advice - Lighting 27 Jul, 2012
 Lexino (2 comments, 3089 views) 
Lighting

This is about visibility and communication by using lights.

Visibility
As you know, there are 4 moods, Sunrise, Day, Sunset and Night, they all have different levels of lighting. Day is the brightest, and light comes from above, so not much shadows. Sunrise and Sunrise are less brighter, and light comes from either west or east, so big casting shadows. Night is dark, and is lighted up by the moon.

So bear in mind when you choose a mood...

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Map Design Advice - Height 24 Jul, 2012
 Lexino (5 comments, 2792 views) 
Height
also known as Z-Axis (actually Y-Axis in the SM (and TM1/2) editor, don't ask me why its Y instead of Z)

Making a map with lots of height variations would be much more fun for the player than a flat map. There are more distance that the player can go than he could on a flat map. For example I make a flat map, a 10x10 map, that's 100 blocks of distance you can travel, but if you use height, you are making a map thats more than 100 blocks of distance in a map ...

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Map Design Advice - Risk vs Reward 23 Jul, 2012
 Lexino (1 comments, 2552 views) 
Risk vs Reward

CliffyB (Epic Games game designer) famously said "Put desirable things in a dangerous or exposed spot"

I am going to use my melee map Agamemnon as an example. In that map I placed 4 railgun platforms in hard to reach spots, and they're quite exposed. So a player would risk to get to those platforms and also risk himself from incoming rockets. Thats risk vs reward, you would risk yourself to get a lot of kills from railgun, the reward from...

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Map Design Advice - Balance 23 Jul, 2012
 Lexino (0 comments, 2279 views) 
Balance

This is most important of all things I listed in the introduction in my opinion, so I'm posting this first.

Keep balance in the mind when you are building, you do want to give equal opportunities to each team (in team modes) or each player (in free for all modes).

How to make a map balanced? Find how each player can achieve their objective (may that be capturing poles or eliminating others, etc), do they have equal distances, time, special bloc...

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Map Design Advice - Introduction 23 Jul, 2012
 Lexino (4 comments, 2415 views) 
This blog is about making a great map, well designed and thought out. I did some reading and found what makes a great map.

Things that makes a map great are


Theme - What the map presents to the player?
Style - How the map presents to the player?
Balance - Do the map has equal opportunities for each player?
Variation - Is the map varied enough so the player is always unfamilar with the map?
Layout - The shape of map, its routes, ...

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