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#Map designer studio plus
We have a really active Discord with civil in-depth discussion of games, plus a lot of silliness on the side, come join in: CategoriesĬelia Alexis Wagar on Sekiro is not a Souls-lik… Please check About and Best Posts if you’re new. Welcome to Celia Wagar’s Game Design Theory blog. Join my discord to discuss this and other game design related topics:
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When you encounter a good map, think about how games tend to play out on it, and whether the layout of the map contributes to fun sessions or not.
#Map designer studio how to
This blog post has further elaboration and its own ideas for how to design FPS maps. Other effective paradigms and tricks are out there too, such as in classic maps like Halo’s Blood Gulch, which has a curving hilly landscape to obscure far-off combatants, and high-up side-paths that people can try to sneak along. This is why the 3 circles pattern tends to work pretty well in CS. Stealth games rely on this principle of loops too, you can’t have stealth in a single hallway.Īnd on the opposite extreme, if you offer too many paths, then you end up with maps that the Quake community call, “Guess maps” where someone could pop up from any angle and there’s too many options to reasonably predict any particular one. A trend to notice with popular Counter Strike maps is, they’re usually 3 big circular loops overlaid on each other, with a few smaller loops inbetween. Given how important positioning is in FPS games, it’s important to give the player many different possible paths they can take through the level. Good maps are very conscious of how they control line of sight, and how they allow players to move through the level, as well as where they offer cover. This has loops too, but they’re much smaller, and more detached from one another, the middle area of the map is more like a chokepoint, while dust2 doesn’t have any absolute chokepoints. Only one path crosses over another path on the Z-axis, and it tastefully adds another way to access Draw a line along all the central paths through the level.
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Take a look at de_dust2, the best known FPS map of all time. To make a level where both people can choose to move around one another and position effectively versus one another, you need to introduce loops. In a hallway, you don’t have many options for approaching an opponent, there’s only one line of sight. In this way, use of cover is like blocking or dodging in a fighting game, so the ability to block or dodge enemy shots is dependent on level design. Line of sight is a connection to other people, a capability to attack them. In FPS, your position determines your line of sight to other people. Here’s a picture from Robert Yang, which I think is a good depiction of FPS level design in a nutshell.Īpart from that, a big concept in FPS level design is “Loops”. That’s not totally my forte, but I’ll give it a shot. What do you think constitues good map design in a multiplayer Fps game? I hear the term “this is a good map” but very few people go in depth as to what that actually means.
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