Topic says it all! I want to learn how to do all this stuff and I see that people are doing some amazing things with SC2 editor, but don't know where to start. I got ideas and eventually I want to start a software company. Anyone have any suggestions? Should I start with the SC2 editor? Should I learn off the editor with the basic version of pro tools?
Long story short, I played tons of wc3 maps. Get a key into sc2 beta and the rest is here.
I would recommend you try with the editor. Many people has said that they have this idea and such and such, but idea never make a game. You will have to experience the design process yourself to make sure you have the ability and most importantly, like the process of designing.
Any tools will be vastly different, if you are still undecisive, try thing with a small scale.
I definitely will! I've tried before but got busy with life (like losing a job) so I never actually got in it very deep. Does the editor give some good experience though? Can I take what I learned here and move it to a different platform?
Funny for me it started because I wanted to make a Dota clone (which I did for wc3), but quickly got over it 'cause it didnt feel original. Considering how I spent whole months in mapmaking back then, the editor had became simple to me O_o. That said, I stopped mapmaking then for 2 years. Then SC2 comes out with an even better editor.... talk about rekindling an old flame =P
I started back on Starcraft 1 in 98'. My first map was a simple bunker wars game. I then spent a few months working on an RPG that I never got to release because my computer's hard drive took a crap on me. It would have been great too!
I started back on Starcraft 1 in 98'. My first map was a simple bunker wars game. I then spent a few months working on an RPG that I never got to release because my computer's hard drive took a crap on me. It would have been great too!
Ah.... I've always been into game development. As in ALWAYS. Like, when I was 5, I would draw and plan out entire games on these huge stacks of these GIANT sheets of paper, dreaming that one day I would be able to actually develop them. ;) Pathetic, I know. Then I found Game Maker 8, which I would highly recommend if you are interested in developing outside of sc2 but don't have much experience. You don't have to use code but can if you would like to. Then I found Wc3, and then Sc2. :D
Anyways, sc2 does have skills you can bring into "legit" game development. The trigger system is basically just C plus plus but with a nice GUI interface. Meaning that even if you can't code, using triggers will teach you the format and organization of code & logic in scripts. Other than that it can also teach good game design concepts (IE what's fun and what's not).
I got hooked by the first pc game I owned - Anno 1602. The expansion pack for it had this small scenario editor, which fascinated me. So for each subsequent new game I played, I searched for an editor. These included Age of Empires 2, C&C Red Alert 2, Starcraft 1 and finally Warcraft 3. The SC1 and WC3 editors got me with their amazing possibilities and WC3 especially with the huge community around mapping. SC2 was the next logical step.
Ahaha zeldarules28, would you believe I was doing exactly the same thing? Creating games on paper!... :)
Then I discovered Duke3D and Warcraft 2 map editing, along with my early passion for software programming ( at 12 years old or so? ). I'm now 28, I'm still occasionally doing game map design while working as a software programmer (not in the gaming industry, doing physics and computational fluid dynamics).
rot1npieces, to answer your question, I think it's very likely the logic, creative and programming skills you'll learn from SC2 will be useful in other contexts.
I believe my first experience with mapping was with Warcraft 2.
Me and my brother made maps just for ourselves to play, as well as modded the game for our own purposes. We replaced sprites from the game with sprites from other games, like Seiken Densetsu 3. Good times.
Never done anything professionally though, at least not yet. Currently working on an indie game in UDK for my college program.
I started off back in Warcraft 2, I think. Even then I liked terraining (which in that case meant making cliffs and putting down units) more than triggering, and I tried to create myself some really plain/simple campaign maps. Because I never really bothered with triggering I just came up with the story as I went on, myself. Did more or less the same for Starcraft 1, though I dabbled in a tiny bit of triggering there. In Warcraft 3 I first came up with some actual playable maps and created a fully functional and completed DOTA clone (called Fight For Destiny). After that I went into terraining until I ended up leaving Warcraft 3 for years of WoW. Then I got back in SC2 and figured I still liked terraining, so that's where I am now...
I just wish I had spend time in Java instead of editor...but I suppose its kinda cool to be able to do stuff in the editor since you see the results so fast :E
I've been mapping since the old days of Warcraft 2 and Duke Nukem 3D (Duke's Build editor killed my childhood). And like a couple others mentioned above, drawing out levels on paper since even before that.
Over the years I've dabbled fairly heavily in the editors for SC1, WC3, Unreal Tournament (Classic, 2004 and 3),with some limited forays into other editors that I never really got into. I got pretty heavily into triggering in SC1 and it naturally evolved through WC3 and SC2, but I've always been best with visual work.
In all my years I've only ever released one map (a single player RPG I made for SC1 when I was about 12 - I actually never even play-tested through the whole thing, and only the first half or so was fully developed.) I just enjoy the process of creating things, even if they never go anywhere. I rarely have a plan or a vision for anything I make, I just start a blank project and wing it - tweak until I'm happy with the result (or get bored with it), then start another one and never look back.
My friends always make jokes about me spending 5 hours on the character customization of any game that has one - due to the same obsession with the process of making and tweaking, then starting over and making a new one.
I'll line up with StragusMapster, Telthalion, and Zeldarules here... I'm in the video game industry since 2007 and my background story is pretty much like theirs. I was around 10-12 years old when I first tweaked with game mechanics. Actually my brother did, he's older than me and he was into programming (now he's programming humanoid robots, just to give you an idea). He was replacing sprites from the game Fury of the Furries to make spikes look like coins, and he played a trick on me with this. I realized at that time you could actually do your own levels thanks to this, so I searched for a suitable editor to make my first steps. I think my very first attempt was on Warcraft 2, or Dune2000 maybe, I spent days and days making maps in the level editor... lots of them, each time as crappy... Then, when games from all genres begun having their own level editor, I spent a lot of time experimenting any kind of tool I had my hands on. Then came 3D, with editors like the Hammer Tool for Half-Life, the Quake editor, etc... It was a huge step forward to make, because 2D and 3D maps are completely different in every aspect, lots of rules of 2D design don't apply anymore in 3D (and vice versa).
I also recommend being always on the lookout for new technologies, not only things related to video games. For example, let's say some students in a random university in the world develop a brain waves recognition device or whatever (I actually know it's being worked on, for real)... Could be used as a controller, so you can design an entire game based on this, where you won't have anything but a helmet on your head to be able to play. My point being: keep experimenting. Using SC2 editor and UDK is cool, but they're the top of the top of level editors. You need to try random game or level design tools, because if you work in video games, you'll have to face another reality that hurts (like bugs and crashes every second if you don't do things in the right order). I kind of disagree on one point about what StragusMapster had to say, it's not all about logic AND programming AND design. I'm more of an artist, I really suck at coding, and 3 months ago I had an interview with a game designer at Ubisoft (Montreal) where the guy talked about 2 or 3 different career choices I have if I ever join Ubisoft, none of them involving programming... These jobs were basically entirely level design jobs (world building, to be precise). So it's entirely up to you and what you want to be, there is room for various profiles and you don't have to be a "multi-task tool" of some sort.
You just have to choose what suits best to you: if you think the video game industry is not what will pay your rent, go for some programming background. You'll have plenty of job opportunities, in completely different fields, and these profiles are wanted everywhere. If you're more of an artist, it's a completely different matter. Many guys were already here before you, lots of them with diplomas (and by diplomas I mean 3 of them, all in artistic fields and/or game and level design), and they have experience. You will have to prove you're good at what you do, and that you like it too. And, more importantly, you need to show you're able to work fast. Very, VERY fast. 5 guys, 3 months, 1 game. That's the kind of challenge you'll have to face. And it's effing hard, trust me... You'll have pretty much no social life beside this, but it pays well. Whether you're a programmer or an artist, you'll have to cope with pressure anyway. My last interview in France was made of 5 pages filled with questions about programming and design (including AI programming, maps to draw, logic problems to solve, etc.), and I had only 24 hours to send it back. That's how hard it is, and basically I just failed miserably to get this job.
One thing you should know though: DON'T, EVER, design maps (or code anything) as you please. You need to be very organized, you always plan ahead, you don't go wild and random. The boring side of these jobs is you don't do as you please, and you do repetitive tasks all day long. You follow schedules, plans, you have brainstorming sessions very often, you write milestone documents every month, and such... Writing the concept on a piece of paper (oh FFS, we're in the 21th century... use a word processor! :P ) is mandatory but you also need to be able to focus on your task, even after months... If you drop ideas and never get back to them, you're basically screwed in this industry. You work as a team, and everything in the game industry is a group decision. You have to be ready to be just another pawn on the chessboard. Keep your ego for the little projects/prototypes you'll make on your own during your spare time... Or make your own games alone, it works too (Minecraft FTW, even though he's not alone anymore). If you are in the industry, just forget about the good old days where you were adding stuff as it comes, because "oh well, I felt like adding a cow on a bike with lasers would be pretty cool here, so why not...". The video game industry became the #1 entertainment in the world (the movie industry is #2). It involves hard work, lots of responsibilities, and pretty much no social life in the last months of each project.
Modding/editing/cracking games is something I try to do ever since I played X-Com on my Pentium 133. I'd say sometimes I want to edit a game more than I actually want to play it. So X-Com, SC1 and BW, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 and now SC2 are the ones I spent most of my time editing or just leraning how the game works.
I don't plan to become a pro so I can't give you good directions.
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Topic says it all! I want to learn how to do all this stuff and I see that people are doing some amazing things with SC2 editor, but don't know where to start. I got ideas and eventually I want to start a software company. Anyone have any suggestions? Should I start with the SC2 editor? Should I learn off the editor with the basic version of pro tools?
What is your story? How did you get started?
Long story short, I played tons of wc3 maps. Get a key into sc2 beta and the rest is here.
I would recommend you try with the editor. Many people has said that they have this idea and such and such, but idea never make a game. You will have to experience the design process yourself to make sure you have the ability and most importantly, like the process of designing.
Any tools will be vastly different, if you are still undecisive, try thing with a small scale.
I definitely will! I've tried before but got busy with life (like losing a job) so I never actually got in it very deep. Does the editor give some good experience though? Can I take what I learned here and move it to a different platform?
Well. If you want this job, then learning the editor will be useful. :)
LOL that's so true! Glad you dug that up! I was just looking at jobs at Blizzard today but for the QA department.
How did you get started Grenegg?
Wc3 golden era of maps!
I see you around this forum a lot! Lots of tutorials and stuff.. do you do this professionally?
Ah.. yes.. the ""Dota"" era.. =P
Funny for me it started because I wanted to make a Dota clone (which I did for wc3), but quickly got over it 'cause it didnt feel original. Considering how I spent whole months in mapmaking back then, the editor had became simple to me O_o. That said, I stopped mapmaking then for 2 years. Then SC2 comes out with an even better editor.... talk about rekindling an old flame =P
And now here I am doing SC2 maps.
I started back on Starcraft 1 in 98'. My first map was a simple bunker wars game. I then spent a few months working on an RPG that I never got to release because my computer's hard drive took a crap on me. It would have been great too!
What was your RPG?
Ah.... I've always been into game development. As in ALWAYS. Like, when I was 5, I would draw and plan out entire games on these huge stacks of these GIANT sheets of paper, dreaming that one day I would be able to actually develop them. ;) Pathetic, I know. Then I found Game Maker 8, which I would highly recommend if you are interested in developing outside of sc2 but don't have much experience. You don't have to use code but can if you would like to. Then I found Wc3, and then Sc2. :D
Anyways, sc2 does have skills you can bring into "legit" game development. The trigger system is basically just C plus plus but with a nice GUI interface. Meaning that even if you can't code, using triggers will teach you the format and organization of code & logic in scripts. Other than that it can also teach good game design concepts (IE what's fun and what's not).
I got hooked by the first pc game I owned - Anno 1602. The expansion pack for it had this small scenario editor, which fascinated me. So for each subsequent new game I played, I searched for an editor. These included Age of Empires 2, C&C Red Alert 2, Starcraft 1 and finally Warcraft 3. The SC1 and WC3 editors got me with their amazing possibilities and WC3 especially with the huge community around mapping. SC2 was the next logical step.
Ahaha zeldarules28, would you believe I was doing exactly the same thing? Creating games on paper!... :)
Then I discovered Duke3D and Warcraft 2 map editing, along with my early passion for software programming ( at 12 years old or so? ). I'm now 28, I'm still occasionally doing game map design while working as a software programmer (not in the gaming industry, doing physics and computational fluid dynamics).
rot1npieces, to answer your question, I think it's very likely the logic, creative and programming skills you'll learn from SC2 will be useful in other contexts.
I believe my first experience with mapping was with Warcraft 2. Me and my brother made maps just for ourselves to play, as well as modded the game for our own purposes. We replaced sprites from the game with sprites from other games, like Seiken Densetsu 3. Good times.
Never done anything professionally though, at least not yet. Currently working on an indie game in UDK for my college program.
I wish... well money will pour in once the map arcade becomes the next app store. The good news is we have a jump on it...
I started off back in Warcraft 2, I think. Even then I liked terraining (which in that case meant making cliffs and putting down units) more than triggering, and I tried to create myself some really plain/simple campaign maps. Because I never really bothered with triggering I just came up with the story as I went on, myself. Did more or less the same for Starcraft 1, though I dabbled in a tiny bit of triggering there. In Warcraft 3 I first came up with some actual playable maps and created a fully functional and completed DOTA clone (called Fight For Destiny). After that I went into terraining until I ended up leaving Warcraft 3 for years of WoW. Then I got back in SC2 and figured I still liked terraining, so that's where I am now...
I just wish I had spend time in Java instead of editor...but I suppose its kinda cool to be able to do stuff in the editor since you see the results so fast :E
I've been mapping since the old days of Warcraft 2 and Duke Nukem 3D (Duke's Build editor killed my childhood). And like a couple others mentioned above, drawing out levels on paper since even before that.
Over the years I've dabbled fairly heavily in the editors for SC1, WC3, Unreal Tournament (Classic, 2004 and 3),with some limited forays into other editors that I never really got into. I got pretty heavily into triggering in SC1 and it naturally evolved through WC3 and SC2, but I've always been best with visual work.
In all my years I've only ever released one map (a single player RPG I made for SC1 when I was about 12 - I actually never even play-tested through the whole thing, and only the first half or so was fully developed.) I just enjoy the process of creating things, even if they never go anywhere. I rarely have a plan or a vision for anything I make, I just start a blank project and wing it - tweak until I'm happy with the result (or get bored with it), then start another one and never look back.
My friends always make jokes about me spending 5 hours on the character customization of any game that has one - due to the same obsession with the process of making and tweaking, then starting over and making a new one.
I'll line up with StragusMapster, Telthalion, and Zeldarules here... I'm in the video game industry since 2007 and my background story is pretty much like theirs. I was around 10-12 years old when I first tweaked with game mechanics. Actually my brother did, he's older than me and he was into programming (now he's programming humanoid robots, just to give you an idea). He was replacing sprites from the game Fury of the Furries to make spikes look like coins, and he played a trick on me with this. I realized at that time you could actually do your own levels thanks to this, so I searched for a suitable editor to make my first steps. I think my very first attempt was on Warcraft 2, or Dune2000 maybe, I spent days and days making maps in the level editor... lots of them, each time as crappy... Then, when games from all genres begun having their own level editor, I spent a lot of time experimenting any kind of tool I had my hands on. Then came 3D, with editors like the Hammer Tool for Half-Life, the Quake editor, etc... It was a huge step forward to make, because 2D and 3D maps are completely different in every aspect, lots of rules of 2D design don't apply anymore in 3D (and vice versa).
I also recommend being always on the lookout for new technologies, not only things related to video games. For example, let's say some students in a random university in the world develop a brain waves recognition device or whatever (I actually know it's being worked on, for real)... Could be used as a controller, so you can design an entire game based on this, where you won't have anything but a helmet on your head to be able to play. My point being: keep experimenting. Using SC2 editor and UDK is cool, but they're the top of the top of level editors. You need to try random game or level design tools, because if you work in video games, you'll have to face another reality that hurts (like bugs and crashes every second if you don't do things in the right order). I kind of disagree on one point about what StragusMapster had to say, it's not all about logic AND programming AND design. I'm more of an artist, I really suck at coding, and 3 months ago I had an interview with a game designer at Ubisoft (Montreal) where the guy talked about 2 or 3 different career choices I have if I ever join Ubisoft, none of them involving programming... These jobs were basically entirely level design jobs (world building, to be precise). So it's entirely up to you and what you want to be, there is room for various profiles and you don't have to be a "multi-task tool" of some sort.
You just have to choose what suits best to you: if you think the video game industry is not what will pay your rent, go for some programming background. You'll have plenty of job opportunities, in completely different fields, and these profiles are wanted everywhere. If you're more of an artist, it's a completely different matter. Many guys were already here before you, lots of them with diplomas (and by diplomas I mean 3 of them, all in artistic fields and/or game and level design), and they have experience. You will have to prove you're good at what you do, and that you like it too. And, more importantly, you need to show you're able to work fast. Very, VERY fast. 5 guys, 3 months, 1 game. That's the kind of challenge you'll have to face. And it's effing hard, trust me... You'll have pretty much no social life beside this, but it pays well. Whether you're a programmer or an artist, you'll have to cope with pressure anyway. My last interview in France was made of 5 pages filled with questions about programming and design (including AI programming, maps to draw, logic problems to solve, etc.), and I had only 24 hours to send it back. That's how hard it is, and basically I just failed miserably to get this job.
One thing you should know though: DON'T, EVER, design maps (or code anything) as you please. You need to be very organized, you always plan ahead, you don't go wild and random. The boring side of these jobs is you don't do as you please, and you do repetitive tasks all day long. You follow schedules, plans, you have brainstorming sessions very often, you write milestone documents every month, and such... Writing the concept on a piece of paper (oh FFS, we're in the 21th century... use a word processor! :P ) is mandatory but you also need to be able to focus on your task, even after months... If you drop ideas and never get back to them, you're basically screwed in this industry. You work as a team, and everything in the game industry is a group decision. You have to be ready to be just another pawn on the chessboard. Keep your ego for the little projects/prototypes you'll make on your own during your spare time... Or make your own games alone, it works too (Minecraft FTW, even though he's not alone anymore). If you are in the industry, just forget about the good old days where you were adding stuff as it comes, because "oh well, I felt like adding a cow on a bike with lasers would be pretty cool here, so why not...". The video game industry became the #1 entertainment in the world (the movie industry is #2). It involves hard work, lots of responsibilities, and pretty much no social life in the last months of each project.
And now is time to end my wall of text. :D
Modding/editing/cracking games is something I try to do ever since I played X-Com on my Pentium 133. I'd say sometimes I want to edit a game more than I actually want to play it. So X-Com, SC1 and BW, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 and now SC2 are the ones I spent most of my time editing or just leraning how the game works.
I don't plan to become a pro so I can't give you good directions.