This was my entry in the Blizzard custom map contest. Since then I've continued to develop and refine it and now that the judging deadline has passed, it's ready for release!
This is a mazing tower defense map with a number of unique features. In particular, if you liked Gem TD in Warcraft 3 you'll probably get a kick out of it - while it's not a remake, some of the ideas are similar.
Since this is a map development forum I won't talk too much about the gameplay features - you can check out the project page or the YouTube video, or just play it on battle.net yourself. One thing I will do, however, is answer any questions about how specific features were implemented. I do plan to release the unlocked map publicly at some point in the future as well as create a series of tutorials on how to do some of the niftier things in your own maps. So if you see something and want to know more about how it was done, just ask and I'll do my best to answer.
No worries. A question regarding your Tips panel, how long did it take you to do that? Did you do that manually?
Well that depends on what you mean. Getting the towers and creeps to show up in the help was pretty easy, once I figured out how to do it. For each heading you need to add a text value with the key "UI/HelpMenuDialogTechGlossary_Control_Unit/Category/xyz" and value of whatever you want the label to be, and then under the unit, you set Glossary Category field's key to "Unit/Category/xyz" (obviously xyz can be anything as long as it's the same in both places.) The value of the Glossary Category field doesn't seem to matter, only the key.
If you mean how long did it take to make the tooltips for all the units, a very long time. All the data references are dynamic which helps a lot because it allows me to tweak values without having to remember to keep the tooltips consistent.
can you give it to eu ? i think its ok, but 1 thing why checkpoints are that big ? and mazing area is so small ? Did youplayed soemthing like gem td in wc3 or aritafact td ? You should build these checkpoints smaller so player have more ways to do mazes, now its very limited as i can see, i dont know how this looks in game, because i live in europe, but hope soon this map will be uploaded to europe, anyway very polished map. Just think about these checkpoints ....
Ah. I see. That is an unholy amount of tedious works. I actually thought you made a script that generates them for you procedurally.
I played your map some more just then, and now I have more questions.
- Cinematic at the beginning, are those re-textured models of the BNet login scene? It looks magnificent.
- Custom animated portrait? Technically very impressive, although I prefer ones that is easier to recognize.
- Real time path drawing? I know how it is done, but the fact that you came up with it is ingenious.
- Tower construction animation? Please share your technique in this. Many TD maps can benefit from this.
And some feedbacks,
- Need a notification when a life is lost.
- Simpler tooltips. I don't know the game well enough to give specific examples. But when I see the tooltips, all I can think of is wall of text.
- Why use the mineral icon for mana. Either call the mana mineral instead or use a different icon.
- Better Youtube video. I think you should show off more flashy stuffs (there are plenty in the map, including the ones I pointed out), instead of giving a monologue of the game's system.
That's all I have right now. You really went all out for the contest! Great map. Can't wait for your tutorials, they are always the best.
Quote from kfrx:
Your map crashes SC2 quite a lot when I play with my friends. I'll try copy the error message next time it comes up. It only crashes for 1 person.
----
I've gotten reports from a couple of people that it causes CTDs. It only seems to happen for certain people and it's fine for others (including myself.) If you don't mind, can you tell me what video settings you're using and whether or not you have sound and music enabled? Also, if it only crashes at certain places, or just randomly. Thanks a lot, I really want to squash this bug.
I'm on lowest for everything (1920x1080 resolution) and it has only crashed for me once. It's crashed for my friends multiple times though, their settings are all very different though, a mixture of ultra/high/medium. It usually happens within the first 3 levels as we either die or someone crashes by then. There isn't really a specific time it happens, it happens when we are building towers and when the waves are happening.
I'm on lowest for everything (1920x1080 resolution) and it has only crashed for me once. It's crashed for my friends multiple times though, their settings are all very different though, a mixture of ultra/high/medium. It usually happens within the first 3 levels as we either die or someone crashes by then. There isn't really a specific time it happens, it happens when we are building towers and when the waves are happening.
Oh man, this is the worst thing possible. It doesn't crash for me, and the reports I have of it crashing for other people are completely idiosyncratic and don't seem linked to any particular audio or visual setting. I basically have no way at all of diagnosing or debugging it. Sorry it doesn't work for you :(
- Custom animated portrait? Technically very impressive, although I prefer ones that is easier to recognize.
If you mean the planet portraits for the essences, those are just additional planet view models. The only custom assets are icons which are just Blizzard icons that I colorized/added numeric overlays to.
- Real time path drawing? I know how it is done, but the fact that you came up with it is ingenious.
The approach I use is almost entirely in the data editor. The dots are individual units, I have an invisible unit which has a behavior that periodically spawns the dots. To refresh the pathing I create the invisible unit (actually four at each corner), have it run the maze and remove it when it gets to the next corner.
- Tower construction animation? Please share your technique in this. Many TD maps can benefit from this.
Event macros are your friends. I have a couple of event macros shared by every tower and implements the construction animation. To be honest, it's very simple - during construction, I use actor events to tint it and then scale it from 0.1 to 1.0 over 10 seconds (the construction time of every tower.) Most of the visual flair comes from a couple extra models spawned on construction. This would probably be a good thing to do a tutorial about.
Y, same problem for me. I actualy never got over level 2 because of these crashes =( I always win level 1/2 and suddenly - Crash! Looks like a very good game tho, if you can fix it, it would be great =)
Posted an update that removes cinematic mode from the phase transitions. Hopefully this helps with the crashing issues. Updated version is NA only for now.
I just had another crash during the tower building phase :(. I had finished building and my friend was still building when I crashed. This is before wave 1.
Thanks for the crash reports, they're very helpful. As for the tower range being short, that's by design in order to make where you place a tower a very strategic decision, however higher tier towers have longer ranges, so it's also an incentive to upgrade.
Repeat x4 for each of the four corners of the platform. I use an ultralisk because it's too large to fit in a 1x1 gap, and I wanted to make sure there's always a 2x2 gap for units to move through so they can pass by each other and avoid traffic jams. (ALL creeps in this map, even the ginormous ones, have radii of 0.375 for this reason.)
Quote:
- Mind sharing your experience working with custom map attributes (e.g. Spawn Order)?
Pretty basic. The "Attribute Game Value" function lets you check the value of per-game attributes, and the "Attribute Player Value" function lets you check the value of per-player attributes (such as the difficulty level, which can be set in the lobby.)
Quote:
- Give the transmute buttons their own page in the commandcard. It is kinda crowded right now.
I would LOVE to do this - and believe me, I'm aware that the command cards are far too busy right now - unfortunately there's a hard cap on the number of sub-menus and I've already reached it. :(
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http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/sorcerers-defense/
This was my entry in the Blizzard custom map contest. Since then I've continued to develop and refine it and now that the judging deadline has passed, it's ready for release!
This is a mazing tower defense map with a number of unique features. In particular, if you liked Gem TD in Warcraft 3 you'll probably get a kick out of it - while it's not a remake, some of the ideas are similar.
Since this is a map development forum I won't talk too much about the gameplay features - you can check out the project page or the YouTube video, or just play it on battle.net yourself. One thing I will do, however, is answer any questions about how specific features were implemented. I do plan to release the unlocked map publicly at some point in the future as well as create a series of tutorials on how to do some of the niftier things in your own maps. So if you see something and want to know more about how it was done, just ask and I'll do my best to answer.
Does that mean you won?
Haha, I wish. Today was the deadline and I haven't heard anything from them so I'm assuming I did not win. :)
No worries. A question regarding your Tips panel, how long did it take you to do that? Did you do that manually?
Well that depends on what you mean. Getting the towers and creeps to show up in the help was pretty easy, once I figured out how to do it. For each heading you need to add a text value with the key "UI/HelpMenuDialogTechGlossary_Control_Unit/Category/xyz" and value of whatever you want the label to be, and then under the unit, you set Glossary Category field's key to "Unit/Category/xyz" (obviously xyz can be anything as long as it's the same in both places.) The value of the Glossary Category field doesn't seem to matter, only the key.
If you mean how long did it take to make the tooltips for all the units, a very long time. All the data references are dynamic which helps a lot because it allows me to tweak values without having to remember to keep the tooltips consistent.
can you give it to eu ? i think its ok, but 1 thing why checkpoints are that big ? and mazing area is so small ? Did youplayed soemthing like gem td in wc3 or aritafact td ? You should build these checkpoints smaller so player have more ways to do mazes, now its very limited as i can see, i dont know how this looks in game, because i live in europe, but hope soon this map will be uploaded to europe, anyway very polished map. Just think about these checkpoints ....
Your map crashes SC2 quite a lot when I play with my friends. I'll try copy the error message next time it comes up. It only crashes for 1 person.
Ah. I see. That is an unholy amount of tedious works. I actually thought you made a script that generates them for you procedurally.
I played your map some more just then, and now I have more questions.
- Cinematic at the beginning, are those re-textured models of the BNet login scene? It looks magnificent.
- Custom animated portrait? Technically very impressive, although I prefer ones that is easier to recognize.
- Real time path drawing? I know how it is done, but the fact that you came up with it is ingenious.
- Tower construction animation? Please share your technique in this. Many TD maps can benefit from this.
And some feedbacks,
- Need a notification when a life is lost.
- Simpler tooltips. I don't know the game well enough to give specific examples. But when I see the tooltips, all I can think of is wall of text.
- Why use the mineral icon for mana. Either call the mana mineral instead or use a different icon.
- Better Youtube video. I think you should show off more flashy stuffs (there are plenty in the map, including the ones I pointed out), instead of giving a monologue of the game's system.
That's all I have right now. You really went all out for the contest! Great map. Can't wait for your tutorials, they are always the best.
Quote from kfrx:
Your map crashes SC2 quite a lot when I play with my friends. I'll try copy the error message next time it comes up. It only crashes for 1 person.
----
I've gotten reports from a couple of people that it causes CTDs. It only seems to happen for certain people and it's fine for others (including myself.) If you don't mind, can you tell me what video settings you're using and whether or not you have sound and music enabled? Also, if it only crashes at certain places, or just randomly. Thanks a lot, I really want to squash this bug.
Just an update this is now available in EU. The map name is "The Sorcerer's Defense (EU)"
@RileyStarcraft: Go
I'm on lowest for everything (1920x1080 resolution) and it has only crashed for me once. It's crashed for my friends multiple times though, their settings are all very different though, a mixture of ultra/high/medium. It usually happens within the first 3 levels as we either die or someone crashes by then. There isn't really a specific time it happens, it happens when we are building towers and when the waves are happening.
Oh man, this is the worst thing possible. It doesn't crash for me, and the reports I have of it crashing for other people are completely idiosyncratic and don't seem linked to any particular audio or visual setting. I basically have no way at all of diagnosing or debugging it. Sorry it doesn't work for you :(
Not a custom model, it's a story mode model. Look under "Planet View" in the model list, there's a whole bunch of similar ones.
If you mean the planet portraits for the essences, those are just additional planet view models. The only custom assets are icons which are just Blizzard icons that I colorized/added numeric overlays to.
The approach I use is almost entirely in the data editor. The dots are individual units, I have an invisible unit which has a behavior that periodically spawns the dots. To refresh the pathing I create the invisible unit (actually four at each corner), have it run the maze and remove it when it gets to the next corner.
Event macros are your friends. I have a couple of event macros shared by every tower and implements the construction animation. To be honest, it's very simple - during construction, I use actor events to tint it and then scale it from 0.1 to 1.0 over 10 seconds (the construction time of every tower.) Most of the visual flair comes from a couple extra models spawned on construction. This would probably be a good thing to do a tutorial about.
Thanks for the feedback too.
@RileyStarcraft: Go
I just played this by myself and here's the crash folder that was generated. Link Removed: http://www.mediafire.com/?ld4jirca9xd1rgc
I think I was building a magma tower and I hit ready or the magma tower completed and it crashed. You should be able to tell from the replay.
Y, same problem for me. I actualy never got over level 2 because of these crashes =( I always win level 1/2 and suddenly - Crash! Looks like a very good game tho, if you can fix it, it would be great =)
Posted an update that removes cinematic mode from the phase transitions. Hopefully this helps with the crashing issues. Updated version is NA only for now.
@RileyStarcraft: Go
I just had another crash during the tower building phase :(. I had finished building and my friend was still building when I crashed. This is before wave 1.
Link Removed: http://www.mediafire.com/?5hqgir04uz16uih
Also how come the tower ranges are so short? It makes it really difficulty to get a good maze.
Thanks for the crash reports, they're very helpful. As for the tower range being short, that's by design in order to make where you place a tower a very strategic decision, however higher tier towers have longer ranges, so it's also an incentive to upgrade.
Thank you for your replies :D
Some more questions,
- How do you know if the tower will be blocking when it is being placed?
- Mind sharing your experience working with custom map attributes (e.g. Spawn Order)?
and feedback,
- Give the transmute buttons their own page in the commandcard. It is kinda crowded right now.
Repeat x4 for each of the four corners of the platform. I use an ultralisk because it's too large to fit in a 1x1 gap, and I wanted to make sure there's always a 2x2 gap for units to move through so they can pass by each other and avoid traffic jams. (ALL creeps in this map, even the ginormous ones, have radii of 0.375 for this reason.)
Pretty basic. The "Attribute Game Value" function lets you check the value of per-game attributes, and the "Attribute Player Value" function lets you check the value of per-player attributes (such as the difficulty level, which can be set in the lobby.)
I would LOVE to do this - and believe me, I'm aware that the command cards are far too busy right now - unfortunately there's a hard cap on the number of sub-menus and I've already reached it. :(