Turns out, I'm going to be making an RPG and actually finishing it this time. I'm halfway done with the terrain and almost done figuring out the scope of skills/progression/inventory systems.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 11 2024, 10:14 pm by Dungeon-Master.

My first thought is, should you really be pushing your wife who is already suffering from carpal tunnel (I imagine from work) to be using a mouse and keyboard more during her free time to play a 25 year old game that she probably won't care that much about? Particularly for a one player map that you wouldn't even get to enjoy with her? Doesn't seem like the best idea to me. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably be trying to focus on building more meaningful experiences together. Maybe playing board games, like my gf and I just recently got into Carcassonne and Kingdoms of Burgundy, both of which have been quite a bit of fun. Pandemic is pretty good too, and it's cooperative. Or there's all sorts of other date ideas that allow you to actually do something together. Even making a map, I don't get why you'd make it single player, like why not make it so you can both play as a team?

All that being said, defense maps tend to require less mousing and keyboarding than more normal SC type maps. And they can easily be team based maps, if you do want to ditch the single player idea.

That's a very astute assessment, but she's the one who asked me to make her a BW map, because I was talking about how I remembered fondly the times when I was mapping as a kid. She doesn't work, she takes care of the home and she's a more hardcore gamer than I am, and a huge SC/WC3 fan to boot, she just has a hard time with micro-intensive gameplay.

I'll try to dream up a defense maps. Are there any information dumps that can help me start somewhere balance-wise?

Ah fair enough.

I'd say your best bet would be to play some defense maps and see how they've done it. Bunker D is definitely worth checking out. There's tons of versions, not sure the one I linked is the best, but it's fairly recent so it shouldn't be broken by some of the changes in Remastered. There's also Turret D's, Sunken D's, Cannon D's and all sorts of other random types. I always thought it would be kinda cool to make a base builder defense map where you built a base normal SC style and had to defend against ongoing waves. Not a lot of those in existence AFAIK.

Check out the It Takes Two game and see if you can translate any of those levels into SC maps. Seems like an easy win to me.

If you really only care about playing with your wife, you could make a single player map where one person has to control the mouse and the other the keyboard.

Playing off this idea, you could make one of the macro/micro maps where one player controls the base and production while the other controls the army. Pretty straightforward to create.

That sounds amazing. I'll start working on prototype ideas.


That one too. Might be more easily applicable for the rustbucket I've become when it comes to mapping.

I think a survival map might be pretty low-APM, like Raccoon City, Volcano Run, Dawn of the Dead, or Zombie Hotel. Or a basic RPG like A Day At School or Crash RPG

Yeah after toying with the idea for a while I decided to go with an RPG with different classes, including a few that allow for lower APM. I do want to go all out with different systems though. I'll be using inventory and skills using both factory building and dropship systems.

What's the best way to upload pictures nowadays? Imgur is giving me sass for using adblock and that's making me sad. Although I might as well whitelist it since the service provided is pretty useful.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jan 11 2024, 10:39 pm by Dungeon-Master.

Imgur is my favorite way to upload images. Maybe you could just disable your adblocker for Imgur? Can't say that I've ever even noticed any ads. If you're really opposed to that, then drive.google.com could be a good free alternative. It's 15GB of free space per account. I use that for hosting my projects since SEN's DLDB doesn't like my maps for whatever reason.

Regarding the RPG control systems, I'd highly recommend avoiding the dropship system as it isn't a very user friendly system. Having to move your mouse over the units to drop to decide what to do feels very interruptive if you're in the midst of combat. Factory buildings are much better since they allow you to do all the controls via hotkeys. I'd also suggest that you consider EUD enhancing your map so you can make your factory systems have custom hotkeys and text. If you're really going to go all out with it, then you may as well use all the modern functionality that allows your map to look and feel as polished as possible. Personally I find EUD Editor 2 much more intuitive to use than EUD Editor 3 (don't bother with EE1, it's defunct at this point), but a lot of people like EE3 so if I were you, I'd check out both and see which one feels better to you. I like EE2 because it looks a lot like DatEdit and FireGraft from back in the day (it even uses those names for the sections), so if you ever used those, there's not a huge learning curve. There's also a lot of help available in the eud-discussion group on SEN's Discord, but of course you'll also have to do some solo learning and testing to get it right. It's really not that hard though and you'll be amazed at the abilities it unlocks for you if you do try.

Edit: Also this tutorial by SkywinDragoon explains how you can add custom buttons to units so you wouldn't even have to have a factory control system. It makes for a very elegant system. BTW, his EE2 is in Korean because he is Korean, but there is an English version available too, so don't be freaked out about the Korean text.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jan 13 2024, 8:13 pm by Ultraviolet.