I made a 'campaign map'. Basically, it tells the Story of Gabriel Tosh and why he turned against the Dominion in the first place, as the campaign only briefly touches on this. It involves him uttering his disgust for Mengsk's plans to make Spectres mindless slaves to his will. He goes into a Dominion facility to complete the last step of his 'becoming a Spectre' by being psy-indoctrinated (aka brainwashed), but ends up shooting the doctor and his guard. He breaks into the computer system, uncovering the plans needed to create Spectres and decides to shut down the facility before leaving. That's basically where the gameplay kicks in.
Map Type: Campaign, 1-player
Time: About 55 hours of work, total, spread out over about 10 days.
Special: It's got virtually everything that any random campaign map has. It's extremely well balanced (you control one unit only but it's still hard), there's cinematics, music, ambushes, you name it. The only thing it lacks is voice acting. It's originality is, like all the other campaign maps, that it's part of 'the big story' while still having a completely different playstyle from any of the other campaign maps. Additionally, the terrain (that being my specialty) is extremely creative and probably my best yet.
I'm 100% sure the contest rules said not to talk about them until 'the contest was over on the 11th', but I'm still going to wait with releasing my map. Should I win, I might not release it at all to leave a bit of excitement for Blizzcon.
Yet I can't share my artwork (or movie, or song) at all until the winners have been announced, even though after the deadline that too cannot be stolen now that it is finished and submitted?
Are we allowed to go ahead and publish the maps now? I wanna publish mine and start playing it online. Maybe add some more to it, cuz when I turned it in, it was still in testing phase. Plus, it'd be nice to get some feedback on ppls opinion of it.
Map Type: Tower Defense/Offense
Time: --- Lots of developing time, about 25 hours -ish on the editor including a final run of about 15 hours straight.
Whats Special: It's a tower defense where you do the spawning and the defending. I didn't get much chance to balance, but the units are interesting. The end goal is to destroy the opponents base, so when your units get all the way through the towers, they still need to attack the opponents base.
I added some spells you can use to kill units, or buff them, resources that spawn on the field for units to pick up while running, and three different turrets.
Hope its actually fun.
If anyone knows the answer to whether or not we can publish please let us know. Thanks.
Yet I can't share my artwork (or movie, or song) at all until the winners have been announced, even though after the deadline that too cannot be stolen now that it is finished and submitted?
Because mapmaking is different ? The map need to be actually played by a lot of ppl to gauge its value ? Bnet is the only platform to play multi map so even the judge has to go there ? AKA blizzard employees didnt even have a server on their own.
Here's a trailer of the map I submitted. It's a multi-player hero arena where the object is to get "over 9000" power. It's called "Power Level Overwhelming". There are neutral squads roaming the map to kill for power. You can also kill players / collect artifacts / use the "power up" ability to gain more power. At least watch until you see the jump abilities, those are my favorite :]
The contest submission said its okay to talk about your map after the 11th. I think the main reason you don't want people sharing until then is because people can steal ideas or it may discourage other people from entering.
Hope it speaks for itself. There is PvP combat but i'd rather save that gameplay for an actual release which should be coming in a couple weeks or so! Gotta tune up some abilities among other things before we actually make this public.
Edit: Sorry for the low quality and lack of sound, haven't used fraps or the video compiler much!
My map wasnt ready in time either, too much work to do and too many bugs to iron out with not enough free time to do it all. But thanks to the competition it did get a lot closer to completion.
the map i am working on is a dota/battlefield hybrid type thing with some cool new concepts but it wont be ready for a few more weeks. looking forward to completing it and unveiling it all even without any competition to win.
My map actually uses custom animations in max, nothing fancy just a quick 360 rotation using Nintoxicated's tools, then i export the model and play the animation just like you would an attack animation, simple trigger action.
If you're not a 3DSMax user, I believe you could string together a chain of events in the data editor (or even with triggers) to have it adjust its Y rotation to achieve a barrel roll that way, youd just need a lot of them pieced together to achieve the effect. For example the shields i use, i set their opacity through trigger events, calling the right trigger at the right time. I have 21 triggers, each one changing the incriment of opacity by 5%, 0 - 100 percent. You run them all in a line and it gives the illusion that the shields are growing weaker or stronger. Just like piecing together a bunch of triggers that set an actor's y rotation together from 0-360 would make it look like it spins. In fact, you might even be able to use a blend to do it with 1 single actor adjustment of 360 degrees.
Hope it speaks for itself. There is PvP combat but i'd rather save that gameplay for an actual release which should be coming in a couple weeks or so! Gotta tune up some abilities among other things before we actually make this public.
Edit: Sorry for the low quality and lack of sound, haven't used fraps or the video compiler much!
This is the only map I've seen so far that has the qualities to win the contest.
Blizzard wants something with nice appealing to show at blizzcon, I think that simple hero defenses or mini games won't have a chance to win it.
They want to show of their new fps and gui engine ;)
Cosmic Eclipse looks pretty nice (Especially the interface), but the ships only move on the X and Y axis? I think it'd be far more entertaining with movement along the Z axis as well.
@Sephiex Z axis would be cool, but there are a few major reasons we didn't go in that direction (get it? har har!).
In order of importance:
1. Full 3d space confuses players. Human beings have evolved to consider positions of things more or less on a 2d plane, even fighter pilots talk about things being in relation to the facing of a clock. I liked tie fighter and x-wing as much as the next guy, but when things got really hairy, i always felt like the game was reduced to finding the biggest red dot on the radar and trying to reduce combat to a 2d plane with that fighter. If you look at your favorite space battles in movies they mostly take place on 2d planes, both factions coming in from 2 directions, aligned on their y axis. The more "order" there is in combat, the more depth we can add to it without it becoming a clusterf#%$. The video doesn't illustrate it very well but down the line we're going for some very heavy RPG elements to offset the skill factor of movement a bit. If we add a 3rd dimension to movement, the skill gap grows exponentially and that's not something we want. We're trying to strike the right chord with exciting twitch movement, and ships that are able to go head to head with these ships without requiring lighting fast reflexes.
2. The engine isn't really build from the ground up to support 3 axis movement. Collision, control, everything would be exponentially harder to get running in a 3d space. Why spend months developing a new system to incorporate 3d movement when the system for 2d is so solid? Look at homeworld, the game was beautiful and revolutionary, but it was so hampered by trying to get 3d to work in an RTS, that the base gameplay became second fiddle to 3d mechanics.
3. We're not fooling ourselves into thinking we can make a perfect shooter, this engine wasn't built explicitly for this kind of game, we think we can make a fairly solid shooter. What we CAN do is throw all the awesome 2D RTS, and RPG mechanics that the editor does so well on top of a solid shooter and get what we think will be a pretty epic new experience.
Without getting into specifics, we have some really big plans to add some very compelling 2d gameplay. Tower defense mechanics, healers/ tank roles, and general 2d RTS NPC control (though greatly simplified). These genres are not exclusive, tower defenses have had heroes running around killing NPC's for years. Shaman throw down totems in WOW that behave like turrets. The 2d plane means we can implement these features and maybe even do it in a way that doesn't make the player's head explode.
The main issue we need address in terms of the 2d plane is the obvious flat horizon you get when playing. I've toyed a bit with background objects, tried adding asteroids to various heights, and it only serves to disorient the player. We haven't had much time to mess with the art yet, but it would be nice to replace many of the assets comprising the game with things that have more vertical scale. This way we can move them up and down in height without actually changing their XY position and the battlefield will look more populated from all angles, though again this could serve to disorient the player, making objects seem closer or further away than they actually are.
Bit of a ramble, I know, haven't really been able to talk about our mod and it was kinda pent up ;)
Well you've obviously given it a lot of consideration and that's good enough for me, I was merely making sure that you knew what you were taking away when you limited it to a 2D plane. It's true that a 3D plane would disorient players ( I do still remember playing the X-wing / Tie fighter games where I was just spinning around constantly trying to find the target ) but if you had something as a basis such as a land mass ( Like how Starfox and most other flying shooters are ) then incorporating 3D movement wouldn't be nearly as confusing, and there would be more to look at than just boundless amounts of space.
I also understand that it's something that would take a lot of work and time to implement ( If even entirely possible, I have personally done some dabbling with 3rd-person flying mechanics ), and I imagine your team made the right choice by not attempting it for this contest. It's an idea mostly just intended as something you could alternate to in the future, if you ever think it would be worth giving a shot at.
@wOlfLisK: Go
i look forward to that not alot of empire maps yet :(
I'm going to quote myself from that other topic;
I'm 100% sure the contest rules said not to talk about them until 'the contest was over on the 11th', but I'm still going to wait with releasing my map. Should I win, I might not release it at all to leave a bit of excitement for Blizzcon.
@Pandonetho: Go
Yet I can't share my artwork (or movie, or song) at all until the winners have been announced, even though after the deadline that too cannot be stolen now that it is finished and submitted?
Because mapmaking is different ? The map need to be actually played by a lot of ppl to gauge its value ? Bnet is the only platform to play multi map so even the judge has to go there ? AKA blizzard employees didnt even have a server on their own.
Here's a trailer of the map I submitted. It's a multi-player hero arena where the object is to get "over 9000" power. It's called "Power Level Overwhelming". There are neutral squads roaming the map to kill for power. You can also kill players / collect artifacts / use the "power up" ability to gain more power. At least watch until you see the jump abilities, those are my favorite :]
The contest submission said its okay to talk about your map after the 11th. I think the main reason you don't want people sharing until then is because people can steal ideas or it may discourage other people from entering.
Here's a video of my team's Map Cosmic Eclipse:
Hope it speaks for itself. There is PvP combat but i'd rather save that gameplay for an actual release which should be coming in a couple weeks or so! Gotta tune up some abilities among other things before we actually make this public.
Edit: Sorry for the low quality and lack of sound, haven't used fraps or the video compiler much!
My map wasnt ready in time either, too much work to do and too many bugs to iron out with not enough free time to do it all. But thanks to the competition it did get a lot closer to completion.
the map i am working on is a dota/battlefield hybrid type thing with some cool new concepts but it wont be ready for a few more weeks. looking forward to completing it and unveiling it all even without any competition to win.
that looks great crazy fingers. Iv been wondering how can you flip untis/change their angle? so can you tell me how?
@Zenx1:
My map actually uses custom animations in max, nothing fancy just a quick 360 rotation using Nintoxicated's tools, then i export the model and play the animation just like you would an attack animation, simple trigger action.
If you're not a 3DSMax user, I believe you could string together a chain of events in the data editor (or even with triggers) to have it adjust its Y rotation to achieve a barrel roll that way, youd just need a lot of them pieced together to achieve the effect. For example the shields i use, i set their opacity through trigger events, calling the right trigger at the right time. I have 21 triggers, each one changing the incriment of opacity by 5%, 0 - 100 percent. You run them all in a line and it gives the illusion that the shields are growing weaker or stronger. Just like piecing together a bunch of triggers that set an actor's y rotation together from 0-360 would make it look like it spins. In fact, you might even be able to use a blend to do it with 1 single actor adjustment of 360 degrees.
Oh and glad you like the video!
This is the only map I've seen so far that has the qualities to win the contest. Blizzard wants something with nice appealing to show at blizzcon, I think that simple hero defenses or mini games won't have a chance to win it. They want to show of their new fps and gui engine ;)
A slightly updated version of the map me and a friend submitted. Its a mix of Z and sc2.
We ran into quite a few engine and tool limitations but were able to hack around them.
Sadly, the map we submitted had a few bugs, an older cap system and the scoring system wasn't tweaked. :(
(watch it in HD on youtube)
@arvinmoses: Go
http://www.gamegoldies.org/z-zed-bitmap-brothers/
Foundation of zone control game :)
Edit: Bomberling Arena is now on EU, search away
@Pfaeff: Go
Yes, I seen that too. That's why it was strange how people posted their maps, hm...
EDIT: Cosmic Eclipse look good.
Cosmic Eclipse looks pretty nice (Especially the interface), but the ships only move on the X and Y axis? I think it'd be far more entertaining with movement along the Z axis as well.
@Sephiex Z axis would be cool, but there are a few major reasons we didn't go in that direction (get it? har har!).
In order of importance:
1. Full 3d space confuses players. Human beings have evolved to consider positions of things more or less on a 2d plane, even fighter pilots talk about things being in relation to the facing of a clock. I liked tie fighter and x-wing as much as the next guy, but when things got really hairy, i always felt like the game was reduced to finding the biggest red dot on the radar and trying to reduce combat to a 2d plane with that fighter. If you look at your favorite space battles in movies they mostly take place on 2d planes, both factions coming in from 2 directions, aligned on their y axis. The more "order" there is in combat, the more depth we can add to it without it becoming a clusterf#%$. The video doesn't illustrate it very well but down the line we're going for some very heavy RPG elements to offset the skill factor of movement a bit. If we add a 3rd dimension to movement, the skill gap grows exponentially and that's not something we want. We're trying to strike the right chord with exciting twitch movement, and ships that are able to go head to head with these ships without requiring lighting fast reflexes.
2. The engine isn't really build from the ground up to support 3 axis movement. Collision, control, everything would be exponentially harder to get running in a 3d space. Why spend months developing a new system to incorporate 3d movement when the system for 2d is so solid? Look at homeworld, the game was beautiful and revolutionary, but it was so hampered by trying to get 3d to work in an RTS, that the base gameplay became second fiddle to 3d mechanics.
3. We're not fooling ourselves into thinking we can make a perfect shooter, this engine wasn't built explicitly for this kind of game, we think we can make a fairly solid shooter. What we CAN do is throw all the awesome 2D RTS, and RPG mechanics that the editor does so well on top of a solid shooter and get what we think will be a pretty epic new experience.
Without getting into specifics, we have some really big plans to add some very compelling 2d gameplay. Tower defense mechanics, healers/ tank roles, and general 2d RTS NPC control (though greatly simplified). These genres are not exclusive, tower defenses have had heroes running around killing NPC's for years. Shaman throw down totems in WOW that behave like turrets. The 2d plane means we can implement these features and maybe even do it in a way that doesn't make the player's head explode.
The main issue we need address in terms of the 2d plane is the obvious flat horizon you get when playing. I've toyed a bit with background objects, tried adding asteroids to various heights, and it only serves to disorient the player. We haven't had much time to mess with the art yet, but it would be nice to replace many of the assets comprising the game with things that have more vertical scale. This way we can move them up and down in height without actually changing their XY position and the battlefield will look more populated from all angles, though again this could serve to disorient the player, making objects seem closer or further away than they actually are.
Bit of a ramble, I know, haven't really been able to talk about our mod and it was kinda pent up ;)
Well you've obviously given it a lot of consideration and that's good enough for me, I was merely making sure that you knew what you were taking away when you limited it to a 2D plane. It's true that a 3D plane would disorient players ( I do still remember playing the X-wing / Tie fighter games where I was just spinning around constantly trying to find the target ) but if you had something as a basis such as a land mass ( Like how Starfox and most other flying shooters are ) then incorporating 3D movement wouldn't be nearly as confusing, and there would be more to look at than just boundless amounts of space.
I also understand that it's something that would take a lot of work and time to implement ( If even entirely possible, I have personally done some dabbling with 3rd-person flying mechanics ), and I imagine your team made the right choice by not attempting it for this contest. It's an idea mostly just intended as something you could alternate to in the future, if you ever think it would be worth giving a shot at.
What will you do with the prize if you are a team? :D