More on maps and such
Spent most of last night and this afternoon working on my current map project: Unite the Clans.
UTC is actually an idea I had for a StarCraft map but never got around to making, reapplied for War3. The original plan was for a map called Overmind, where the unity of the Swarm had been broken and you had to 'put down' the other Cerebrates so that the Swarm could be unified and the Overmind reawakened. I was going to toss in some sound clips from the original SC of the Overmind and other characters talking; particularly, at the end the Overmind was going to say "Behold, my long silence is broken, and I am made whole once more," like he does in the campaign after you eradicate Zasz's brood. When I first heard that line I figured it implied the Overmind lacked the ability to communicate, and therefore any sentience or more than basic control, so long as the Swarm was divided into any dissident factions. Hence the whole project.
Once I chose to translate it to War3, though, I had to re-concept the whole setup. There isn't really a race in War3 that functions quite like the Zerg Swarm; Scourge come close, but the Frozen Throne isn't exactly the Overmind. You can't capture it by killing off enemy Undead factions. I mean, sure, I could do the map itself WITHOUT plot... but come on. This is me we're talking about.
Eventually I decided on orcs. Specifically, War2-era orcs. The idea I got was that back in War2, all the orc clans were loosely unified but intensely distrustful of one another, and in fact almost all of them had some form of master plan in varying stages of development for the takeover of the whole Horde out from under Doomhammer's nose. So, applied to my map... you the player could function as an orcish chieftain trying to wrest control of the Horde from other would-be War Chiefs. It's not as literal as Zerg broods restoring the faculties of the Overmind, but it works.
The map itself is laid out in a big square; or actually, four big squares arranged within a larger square. The center of the map is a long cross of water with bridges connecting each player's island with the two adjacent ones. The three interior corners of each island have spawn points for neutral hostile units, which attack in ever-stronger waves every 45 seconds for the first half hour of the game.
The objectives are two-fold: defend your base from these waves of renegade orcish forces, and destroy the bases of your opponents in a typical RTS attack. Aside from slight tech-tree modifications, everybody has access to all five War3 races (including Naga), plus one randomized hero (out of all 20-something possible heroes in a normal game). Heroes have a maximum level of twenty. Gold and lumber can be harvested in the normal way from trees and mines, plus they are looted from slain creeps. The result is a hybrid between the build-and-attack style of RTS map and the Defense map genre of waved creep attacks.
It's giving me some trouble. I have a notebook next to the computer I use to keep track of bugs and other things that need fixing or adding while I am playtesting, so I can go back and fix them after. It's a long list already.
Add colored text to wave announcements
Add a Quest system for the two objectives
Adjust the amount of gold (and lumber?) receives from dead creeps
Either remove option of computer players in player slots, or account for computer behavior
Possibly add more heroes
Select musical queue (War3 has it's own system for doing this! I don't need to import gigantic wav files and play them like sound effects, like I did when I wanted custom music in StarCraft!)
Adjust stats for creep units (heavily)
Fix this problem where every 5th wave spawns at the same time as the wave before it, resulting in a much more powerful creep attack than intended
Figure out why in the hell the map lags so much
Guh. And that's what's left out of a longer list of stuff I wrote down to do. Not that the list is really shrinking; every time I fix something, I see something else that needs doing.
The one good thing about this particular map is that I don't need to chase down people for dialogue. That's because one thing that did carry over from the SC version is the heavy use of existing sound effects. I ripped a handful of wavs from War2! When you first start the map, you hear an orc voice go, "Succeed and command vast armies as they ravage untold worlds. Fail and be slaughtered." And whenever a player is eliminated, you hear, "Do not show surprise, human. Only the strongest survive within the Horde." Both of which are clips from Beyond the Dark Portal. In addition, each wave of mobs has a sound effect from the War2 sound system to accompany it: Skeletons go "I'm alive!", Ogre Magi go "I've got the brain!" "Nuh uh!", and in the final wave, Dragons yell "Do you like fire?"
It rocks, honestly. And not just cause I made it. I'd play this map. It didn't take as long to get this far as I expected, either. I guess because a big part of it is still a traditional build-and-burn level with the default tech tree. If I start an RPG map after this like I want to, that should take a lot longer. So much more to shape and program.
I just wish I could get all the bugs taken care of with this one and move on. It's frustrating to have a map that's really mostly done, and yet still not quite functional.
I've been thinking about what I want to do for my RPG map after this. I have a few ideas I could return to. Dalaran, most notably. I have a lot of work done on that in terms of boss design and unit/object editing already, saved in my old map. I could resurrect it without wasting much in the way of old work. And the physical map has barely been started, so I could make absolutely sure to design it as innovatively and three-dimensionally as possible for the best impression on Blizzard.
Still, if I don't want to do Dalaran, I have other ideas. A VIth act for Diablo II. Another would-be WoW dungeon, whether it's a Naga temple or Grim Batol or what have you. I even had an idea at one point involving using spell-items dropped from bosses to turn into different creatures, either as a 1-time consumable or with repeatable use. The main plan would be that you defeat different creatures to acquire their shape and expand the basic pool of monsters you can morph into. Guess where I got that idea.
Whatever I end up doing, though, I'll need an RPG. Preferably single-player, both because it makes all sorts of things simpler to program (ever tried implementing a quest system in a multi-player map? not pretty) and because playtesting a multi-player RPG without other players would be... well... impossible. Even playtesting a single-player RPG map is going to be a pain in the ass if it's long enough, but at least it's doable. But it has to be an RPG/dungeon crawl, or something similar. I already have Kodo Run, a fairly entertaining mini-game. Soon I'll have finished Unite the Clans, an admittedly cookie-cutter example both of defense maps and melee attack maps. A dungeon crawl map proves to Blizzard I am capable of making one. And let's face it, whether they want me for WoW or some new Diablo project, or even StarCraft II, odds are designing a dungeon will be on my plate somewhere. It will probably be, and should be anyway, the most impressive part of the package I send in to them.
And therefore the most complicated. And the most time-consuming. Worth it, though, if it gets me a job designing levels--any kind of levels--for Blizzard games.
I'm done writing about this for tonight. You guys who volunteered for voice acting, thanks a million; I'll get in touch with you about it as soon as I put the lid on this map. Which should be sometime this week, one way or another.
And if any of you out there are missing me on WoW... well... I promise you'll see me on again. Eventually.
UTC is actually an idea I had for a StarCraft map but never got around to making, reapplied for War3. The original plan was for a map called Overmind, where the unity of the Swarm had been broken and you had to 'put down' the other Cerebrates so that the Swarm could be unified and the Overmind reawakened. I was going to toss in some sound clips from the original SC of the Overmind and other characters talking; particularly, at the end the Overmind was going to say "Behold, my long silence is broken, and I am made whole once more," like he does in the campaign after you eradicate Zasz's brood. When I first heard that line I figured it implied the Overmind lacked the ability to communicate, and therefore any sentience or more than basic control, so long as the Swarm was divided into any dissident factions. Hence the whole project.
Once I chose to translate it to War3, though, I had to re-concept the whole setup. There isn't really a race in War3 that functions quite like the Zerg Swarm; Scourge come close, but the Frozen Throne isn't exactly the Overmind. You can't capture it by killing off enemy Undead factions. I mean, sure, I could do the map itself WITHOUT plot... but come on. This is me we're talking about.
Eventually I decided on orcs. Specifically, War2-era orcs. The idea I got was that back in War2, all the orc clans were loosely unified but intensely distrustful of one another, and in fact almost all of them had some form of master plan in varying stages of development for the takeover of the whole Horde out from under Doomhammer's nose. So, applied to my map... you the player could function as an orcish chieftain trying to wrest control of the Horde from other would-be War Chiefs. It's not as literal as Zerg broods restoring the faculties of the Overmind, but it works.
The map itself is laid out in a big square; or actually, four big squares arranged within a larger square. The center of the map is a long cross of water with bridges connecting each player's island with the two adjacent ones. The three interior corners of each island have spawn points for neutral hostile units, which attack in ever-stronger waves every 45 seconds for the first half hour of the game.
The objectives are two-fold: defend your base from these waves of renegade orcish forces, and destroy the bases of your opponents in a typical RTS attack. Aside from slight tech-tree modifications, everybody has access to all five War3 races (including Naga), plus one randomized hero (out of all 20-something possible heroes in a normal game). Heroes have a maximum level of twenty. Gold and lumber can be harvested in the normal way from trees and mines, plus they are looted from slain creeps. The result is a hybrid between the build-and-attack style of RTS map and the Defense map genre of waved creep attacks.
It's giving me some trouble. I have a notebook next to the computer I use to keep track of bugs and other things that need fixing or adding while I am playtesting, so I can go back and fix them after. It's a long list already.
Add colored text to wave announcements
Add a Quest system for the two objectives
Adjust the amount of gold (and lumber?) receives from dead creeps
Either remove option of computer players in player slots, or account for computer behavior
Possibly add more heroes
Select musical queue (War3 has it's own system for doing this! I don't need to import gigantic wav files and play them like sound effects, like I did when I wanted custom music in StarCraft!)
Adjust stats for creep units (heavily)
Fix this problem where every 5th wave spawns at the same time as the wave before it, resulting in a much more powerful creep attack than intended
Figure out why in the hell the map lags so much
Guh. And that's what's left out of a longer list of stuff I wrote down to do. Not that the list is really shrinking; every time I fix something, I see something else that needs doing.
The one good thing about this particular map is that I don't need to chase down people for dialogue. That's because one thing that did carry over from the SC version is the heavy use of existing sound effects. I ripped a handful of wavs from War2! When you first start the map, you hear an orc voice go, "Succeed and command vast armies as they ravage untold worlds. Fail and be slaughtered." And whenever a player is eliminated, you hear, "Do not show surprise, human. Only the strongest survive within the Horde." Both of which are clips from Beyond the Dark Portal. In addition, each wave of mobs has a sound effect from the War2 sound system to accompany it: Skeletons go "I'm alive!", Ogre Magi go "I've got the brain!" "Nuh uh!", and in the final wave, Dragons yell "Do you like fire?"
It rocks, honestly. And not just cause I made it. I'd play this map. It didn't take as long to get this far as I expected, either. I guess because a big part of it is still a traditional build-and-burn level with the default tech tree. If I start an RPG map after this like I want to, that should take a lot longer. So much more to shape and program.
I just wish I could get all the bugs taken care of with this one and move on. It's frustrating to have a map that's really mostly done, and yet still not quite functional.
I've been thinking about what I want to do for my RPG map after this. I have a few ideas I could return to. Dalaran, most notably. I have a lot of work done on that in terms of boss design and unit/object editing already, saved in my old map. I could resurrect it without wasting much in the way of old work. And the physical map has barely been started, so I could make absolutely sure to design it as innovatively and three-dimensionally as possible for the best impression on Blizzard.
Still, if I don't want to do Dalaran, I have other ideas. A VIth act for Diablo II. Another would-be WoW dungeon, whether it's a Naga temple or Grim Batol or what have you. I even had an idea at one point involving using spell-items dropped from bosses to turn into different creatures, either as a 1-time consumable or with repeatable use. The main plan would be that you defeat different creatures to acquire their shape and expand the basic pool of monsters you can morph into. Guess where I got that idea.
Whatever I end up doing, though, I'll need an RPG. Preferably single-player, both because it makes all sorts of things simpler to program (ever tried implementing a quest system in a multi-player map? not pretty) and because playtesting a multi-player RPG without other players would be... well... impossible. Even playtesting a single-player RPG map is going to be a pain in the ass if it's long enough, but at least it's doable. But it has to be an RPG/dungeon crawl, or something similar. I already have Kodo Run, a fairly entertaining mini-game. Soon I'll have finished Unite the Clans, an admittedly cookie-cutter example both of defense maps and melee attack maps. A dungeon crawl map proves to Blizzard I am capable of making one. And let's face it, whether they want me for WoW or some new Diablo project, or even StarCraft II, odds are designing a dungeon will be on my plate somewhere. It will probably be, and should be anyway, the most impressive part of the package I send in to them.
And therefore the most complicated. And the most time-consuming. Worth it, though, if it gets me a job designing levels--any kind of levels--for Blizzard games.
I'm done writing about this for tonight. You guys who volunteered for voice acting, thanks a million; I'll get in touch with you about it as soon as I put the lid on this map. Which should be sometime this week, one way or another.
And if any of you out there are missing me on WoW... well... I promise you'll see me on again. Eventually.