Recently i just started a project (A New Order). I would like to get some feedback on my maps, good or bad.
Currently there is only one mission telling the story of the Delta team as they are fight the Borne Mercenaries to stop them from delivering cargo to their contact and allies. To Much Of a Cliche Game Play :(
Hey lolzguy, I gave your map a try, all the feedback is based on the "hard" difficulty setting. I normally play brutal difficulty in the campaign with no issues for reference.
The left refinery in the starting base has a small gap behind it with no way out, this results in the first SCV being spit out into that spot and being stuck there until the nearby mineral patch is mined out. Place a doodad back there or a no pathing area to prevent this.
There are a lot of problems with the dialog and introductory text, tense issues (the word has is used where the word have should be quite a few times.) If you're not a native English speaker and you want to release the map in English consider having someone edit the script for you.
That's it as far as verification testing, but I have a lot of validation feedback on the actual gameplay, it's all sort of stream of consciousness but I'll try to bullet it out for you and include some suggestions.
Problem: The player is largely unaware of most of the challenges in the level until they're right on top of them. This includes things like the attack waves, drops in your base, siege tanks positioned all over the cliffs near the road and even the APC (more on that in a moment.) This forces the player to take the trial and error approach to gameplay. They have to fail in order to succeed.
Solution: Make your challenges visible. The player should have some idea that the first attack wave is coming, and what sort of units to expect so that they can prepare for it. There are a lot of ways you can do this, through a short vignette or even just by temporarily revealing the attack and pinging the mini-map. You want to reveal that there are going to be cloaked units in this attack too, or remove the cloak at that point in the level. The player is just trying to establish their base and are likely going to have to build a missile turret during battle in order to counter it, which stacked with the fact that the player starts with no medics and not enough time to produce very many, is going to result in their force being largely wiped out immediately before the APC shows up. Giving the player a few medics to start and making the cloak upgrade for the enemy player occur later in the level could go a long way in balancing out the early game.
Problem: The APC starts its path very far away from the player, down a road that is largely in the range of enemy siege tank fire. The player also has no idea how far along the APC is once it starts, and is also busy defending against enemy attacks.
Solution: Raise visibility again here, reveal the road or use pings to track the location of the APC (as in mission THanson01.) You also have to do a crapload of damage to the APC in a very small window of time that you can actually attack it after it comes out of siege tank range. Either move the tanks, or allow concussive shells to slow the APC, or give the player more opportunities to attack early on. The difficulty of destroying the APC should ramp up, but shouldn't start quite as difficult.
Thanks for your comment designerdougn, I will take your words anyday. The map is now in it's current state where it is very hard to fix the problems. I was thus forced to redo my entire map (This is gonna go on Fail.com) fixing the problems.
I have removed the difficulty selection dialogue as it makes my map more difficult to make and to balance out. I am going to find a shorter and better way to select difficulties.
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Hi Guys
Recently i just started a project (A New Order). I would like to get some feedback on my maps, good or bad. Currently there is only one mission telling the story of the Delta team as they are fight the Borne Mercenaries to stop them from delivering cargo to their contact and allies.
To Much Of a Cliche Game Play :(
Anyway link is here: A New Order
@lolzguy: Go
Hey lolzguy, I gave your map a try, all the feedback is based on the "hard" difficulty setting. I normally play brutal difficulty in the campaign with no issues for reference.
That's it as far as verification testing, but I have a lot of validation feedback on the actual gameplay, it's all sort of stream of consciousness but I'll try to bullet it out for you and include some suggestions.
@designerdougm: Go
Thanks for your comment designerdougn, I will take your words anyday. The map is now in it's current state where it is very hard to fix the problems. I was thus forced to redo my entire map (This is gonna go on Fail.com) fixing the problems.
I have removed the difficulty selection dialogue as it makes my map more difficult to make and to balance out. I am going to find a shorter and better way to select difficulties.