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Shootmania: Combo 15 Mar, 2014
 basbaas (2 comments, 4756 views) 
ShootMania: Combo

I'm writing this to inform every about a Shootmania gamemode I love, Combo. This gamemode was released by Nadeo somewhere last year along with the new blocks. It contained something very awesome, and in my eyes very revolutionary new aspects for Shootmania in general. Unfortunually even up to this date quite a lot of people don't even know about it.. This could have happened due to it being a standalone titlepack, which wasn't installed by defau...

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The awesomeness of brown blocks 17 Apr, 2013
 BLiNNeMaNS (8 comments, 4266 views) 
Brown blocks ftw!

The new brown blocks have everything you need to add that extra oomph to your maps.

Stamina jump
On a full stamina bar, the top surface is useful as it allows you to reach slightly further with your jumps.
This is useful to make those special sniper platforms hard, but not impossible, to reach
(and they won't launch the player way to hig...

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1000 Maps 09 Aug, 2012
 MX Moderators (10 comments, 4839 views) 
Shoot Mania Exchange is now hosting 1000 maps, so we thought maybe now is a good moment to take a look at what has been uploaded.

Below is a list of how many maps there are for each game mode...

    MapType HowMany
    RoyalArena 311
    BattleArena 218
    MeleeArena 169
    EliteArena 75
    JoustArena 46
    JailbreakArena 45
    SiegeArena 41
    TimeAttackArena 37
    He...


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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 - Architecture & Design 24 Jul, 2012
 dreadofmondays (2 comments, 2476 views) 
This post is inspired by Lexino's excellent posts on this subject (which you can read here). However, it is about something that he has yet to touch on - the role of architecture and traditional design in mapping. 50% of the work mapping is done in design, and there are important things to keep in mind, because a badly designed map can be very confusing or disorienting for players, and they can become very...

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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, 2278 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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