Just a little bit of feedback from the first wave of maps that were available on battle.net. I noticed a lot of maps were using custom loading screens with text and press any key to continue. Little bit of a pet peeve you can call it.

I can't force you to, but please, for at least smaller productions, use the "Melee" loading screen type and disable the "press any key to continue". As feedback from someone who was playing quite a few customs games, if you have a small map, or you don't have a whole lot of useful information to add to your custom loading screen, leave it as melee. It adds the progress bars for everyone who is loading the map, which is infinitely more interesting to look at everyone's loading bar then it was to read one paragraph of useless text, usually something like "this is my first creation" and then having their name beside it.

Already as it is the mappers name is viewable from battle.net, and if you really want you can put it inside your map, but it got to the point where I became somewhat annoyed at the amount of mappers who decided to forgo the loading screen, which I'm guilty of it myself. I did that for some of my first productions, a mistake I will not be repeating now that I know how irritating it is. Even if you're putting in patch notes, its sortof cool to read it the first time, but every other time you aren't going to read it again, its especially annoying for a small game you could be playing 30 times in one day. I've seen people utilize the "tips" section in the help, you can use that for patch notes and telling people how to play. It works. This applies as well for introduction screens on maps that seemingly will be played over and over again, the best maps I've played got started immediately, some even setting your control groups for you and selecting the main building to get you started, things like that.

Also I'm not sure what the purpose of "push any key to continue" is. Games are created so fast on battle.net 2.0, there's no point in making everyone wait. Maybe there's something I'm not understanding here but I have no idea why people enable it. I've sometimes joined a game, left briefly to get a drink before the game got started, just to see I was accidentally holding up the game for everyone by not pressing a key after the game loaded.

Just two of my little criticisms... I will love your map so much more and you as a map maker if you leave in the loading bars and remove the "press any key", that is all.

Also, this evidently doesn't apply for single player (or low number of players) maps, I'm mostly talking about those large 12 player custom maps.

Updated the map, release v1.0. Changes:

• Increased boundaries slightly to lessen safe zones in corners.
• Nukes are slightly more frequent at the beginning so it's not boring.
• Nuke protesters have much lower health regeneration, but higher health now to reward dodging throughout the game.
• Game variant added for support of battle.net.

Map is also currently on battle.net, you can find it under the name "dodge the nukes".

Since there's a misunderstanding of what I'm doing I'll post some early screenshots of it in development.

The idea is you can copy and paste it into your map. There's a button at the top beside the menu buttons, it has a hotkey of F8, and numerous options.

Quote from iHaveReturnd: Go

@mikelat: Go

I was trying to think of a way to give players the choice at the beginning of a map to play the cinematic or skip it. Sounds like even if thats not a specific feature that it could be done with what you have in mind. Sounds good and useful to me :)

Yeah the idea is to make it relatively simple by having an action definition that enables you to add your own options, and the framework will essentially add the checkbox to the map options, do whatever calculations are required to resize the window to accommodate the new option, and handle all the bank related issues. This system benefits everyone, the users get a consistent interface that spans across potentially several maps, newer map makers don't have to worry about all the funky dialog triggering, and veteran map makers don't have to waste their time making a polished interface for their map.

I'm in the process of developing something I'm calling MapUI. If there's any similar projects underway, somebody letme know. Basically MapUI is intended to be somewhat of a framework for a semi-complex dialog system that has several useful features to add to maps. These items include:

• A vote system. When 3 or more players are in the game, they can all vote to kick a player out, must have a 60% successful vote rate (kind of like the ban beacons from starcraft 1, but has a nice ui this time and isn't dictated by host or whoever is player 1). They can also vote to end the game for everybody and presumably restart the map. I haven't thought of anything else I can add that people can vote for (if you have an idea let me know).

• Local Map Achievements system. From what I can tell blizzards achievement system is pretty much locked out from anyone doing anything similar with it. It's going to be a simple system of adding your own custom achievements. The achievements however are obviously not battle.net driven, they will be stored in banks specific to the map, obviously can be edited, but it's just one of those fun little features that can be added to your map. When you get an achievement it'll announce it to everyone in your game, and it will be possible to view all the achievements, which ones you have, and which ones the people in your game have.

• Statistics. Will keep track of map based statistics. Things like the total time you've spent playing that one map, your win/loss rate, etc. You will also be able to see the statistics of your friends in game. Planning on making it easy to add map-specific statistics.

• Settings. Basically it'll allow you to set some more specific settings for the map you're playing on, such as disabling certain UI elements or the entire UI (if you feel like playing in a cinematic kind of a view), the ability to disable statistic gathering for the MapUI system. Certain settings will be global within all MapUI maps, as well as the map you're currently playing and settings specific to that.

I haven't gone into the Bank related things, from what I read it's all XML based and multiple maps should be able to pick it up. If I'm wrong about any of this let me know, or if you have suggestions let me know that as well (any feature I can add that potentially adds to this framework and helps map authors that decide to implement it would be great).

I'm already well under way on developing this, main menu is done and I'm working on the vote menu now. I'll post up screen-shots and possibly demos later this week.

I originally made it purposely to be simple chaotic fun. I'm planning on adding a last man standing gametype for multiplayer and fixing the corners having a low nuke rate, but that's pretty much it.

It's not that I don't know how to do upgrades and powerups, I just feel that there's way too many maps coming out that are over-complicating what could be simple and fun ideas. I just don't personally think that it will enhance the fun by adding powerups and upgrades... although the map I consider it to be open source GPL, so you're more than welcome to make a new version of it if you feel strongly about this.

I was thinking of randomly targeting players every so often.

Also I've posted me beating it with commentary here:

http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/dodge-nukes/

Pretty self explanatory. Dodge some nukes and chew bubble gum. But you're all out of gum.

It's a very simple map, was not meant to be complicated. I might end up making the difficulty slightly higher if too many people find it easy.

http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/starcraft-troopers/

About

Classic defend the compound style gameplay from waves of zerg.

Supposed to work in multiplayer, but lack of map publishing means I don't know.

Tips

• Start with marines or reapers at the beginning.
• Utilize those choke points!
• Repair bunkers!

It's in beta because I'm sure there's balance changes to be made, throw me some feedback if you have any.

I also did a partial playthrough of this game with commentary, you can see it here:

I'm doing a tutorial series on youtube. It's a bare basics tutorial showcasing the fundamental features, intended for completely new or SC1 -> SC2 mappers.

My profile (includes lets plays on maps I've already done and other games): http://www.youtube.com/user/mikelat