What of RTS games

Here's my take on a "no-rush" map for Command and Conquer: Generals.

Because I decided to create this layout for Generals, a RTS game My approach had to be completely different. For simplicity's sake I decided to make it completely 4-way symmetrical. hence, the very first step is just a set of triangles.

Second image I drew "edges" where I wanted the player spawns to be. adding a cliff wall separating the four bases.

At this point I removed the guidelines and drew out where I'd like the cliff edges to be. including two ramps into the different player's bases. Each player has one ramp leading down straight into the center of the map whilst the other one leads into the "back" area.

Because of the no-rush stature of the map I wanted the bases to be very easy to defend, leading to long and quite tense games as all four player will hopefully reach Max Tier before anyone dies. To re-enforce this notion I added extra heightened plateaus to the player spawns so that there are three different cliff height-levels to defend your base from.

To re-enforce the notion of this map being 100% no-rush I realized that I could simply fill up the middle part with water. This water will act as a natural "no-rush" barrier. Over the first 5 or 10 minutes the water will slowly drain from the center opening up the flood gates for tanks and infantry you have built up during the no-rush phase.

I personally love no-rush maps, especially in Command and Conquer games as they truly re-enforce the core C&C experience. I've designed this map around the idea of four people's completely built-up armies crashing into each-other all at once leading to an epic battle for survival.

..Launching up World Builder and making this right now is soooo tempting you would not believe. :V

Something familliar

Since this is the first time I'm making one of these for the purpose of making them I did some research on different types of level flow and decided to, for the first one do the most basic; a multiplayer First Person Shooter level, as I can most easily relate to this and will not require me to do a massive amount of research to simply figure out what the major set-pieces have to be.


To start off I simply placed out the two team-spawns like so:

After that I drew a bunch of boxes everywhere:

Following I removed all intersecting edges and Bam, free TF2 map layout. Not a work of beauty but as far as I see it it's a great starting point.

At this point I was thinking a lot about the spawns and trying to keep them away from the main "combat" areas, placing walls blocking of Blu Spawn from Point 1. I also moved around big pieces of the mapand opening up blocked off areas creating rooms with windows creating one-way-only movement blocks. (You can only jump OUT of a window, not in.

During this part I decided to draw blue and red lines flowing through the map. I have found this "drawing of flow lines" very useful as it allows me to see glaring issues which were previously hard to see. a good example is the very bottom of the map where Red only had one real way of getting to Point1. I solved this by making the previously unreachable area simply be a heightened platform for 1-way-movement into the Point1-area.

So, here it is.

First layout made for this thing-a-week thing. It's not beautiful, and it feels as though Red is slightly overpowered but I have to stop now. I have decided to not spend more than an hour in total researching and  drawing each layout.

intro

Heya! My name is Mattias Westphal, Matt Westphal but better known online as "Stinger, Stinger21 or Paimail." I'd like to call myself an amateur level designer, as this is what I spend most of my non-gaming free time doing. as of posting this I have racked up a scary 4000 hours total in valve's Source SDK. This amount of time has given me quite a lot of technical experience, I know the ins and outs of the source engine and am very familiar with the hammer editor and the associated compilers.

What doing this has not given me much of however is experience drawing actual level layouts. For most of my maps I have been sticking to maps with very simple layouts or tweaking layouts found in other maps. Because of this gap in my skill-set I have decided to start this log.

Every day I will draw a 100% original and new map layout from scratch. big, small, complex, simple, FPS, RTS or MMO does not matter. The point is to make sure I do something every day. My goal with this is to get good at creating basic layouts quickly and efficiently.

One final thing; Every week I will pick my favorite layout from the last week and do a block-out of it in.

oh, also. Feel free to take and use any of the layouts create here. No need to give credit :)