Hi everyone,
I've been interested in StarCraft 1 Use Map Settings (UMS) maps lately and wanted to learn more about creating custom scenarios that are both fun and well balanced.
One thing I'm curious about is how experienced mapmakers organize their triggers when a map has several objectives, timed events, and different victory or defeat conditions. As a map becomes more complex, it seems easy for triggers to overlap or cause unexpected behavior.
I'm also interested in balancing custom maps. For example, how do you decide the right amount of starting resources, enemy units, and time limits without making the scenario either too easy or frustrating for players?
I'd appreciate any advice, tutorials, or examples from people who have worked on these kinds of maps. I'm especially interested in practical techniques for debugging triggers and testing multiplayer scenarios.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Looking forward to learning from the community!
space waves is a fast-paced arcade game where you steer an arrow through tight obstacles, dodge hazards, and test your reflexes across challenging levels.
One thing I'm curious about is how experienced mapmakers organize their triggers when a map has several objectives, timed events, and different victory or defeat conditions. As a map becomes more complex, it seems easy for triggers to overlap or cause unexpected behavior.
If you're talking about classic triggers, something I used to do would be to make everything in "sections" and put a big obvious comment action at the top of the section, and then the rest of the triggers following it with no comment. This is so its obvious where a section of triggers starts and ends. Also creating things in such a way so that at the beginning of a section of triggers you check if its even relevant to have any of the triggers in that section run at all, so for example you check if the player has a certain unit at the beginning of the section, if it does then you set a switch, all of the triggers in that section ask if the switch is set. So if the switch is clear then the whole section is not relevant and you skip all of them in a super cheap way.
But realistically I would strongly recommend going the EPS code route for triggers.
I'm also interested in balancing custom maps. For example, how do you decide the right amount of starting resources, enemy units, and time limits without making the scenario either too easy or frustrating for players?
You should start with a baseline of numbers based on your intuition, and then playtest and adjust the numbers for things that are obvious. Then you just do that over and over in increasingly small ways.
Overall I think you should trust your own intuition for what is fun. Actually honestly ask yourself if you're having fun while playtesting your map. Also, getting your map to a point where its fun to playtest is extremely motivating.
Good luck.
https://discord.gg/nwWszumzb
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