I've been working on a map for just over a week now.
mainly inspired by a zombie rpg map i played from warcraft 3. each player controlling a hero unit. items and such. objectives to accomplish. all the while being assaulted by zombies constantly. very easy to die.
wanted to do something similar. i basically designed it the same. 8 players. each player controlling 1 hero unit. 4 classes. i made a fairly simple spawning script which spawns infested terrans around the players and removes them once they are too far away.
it will also detect if someone has run off on their own and spawn.... ALOT of infested for that player. punishing splitting up.
i then started making fairly simple "missions/objectives" that would spawn. i made it in a way that the objectives were random and while locations were pre-determined. which location the objective actually spawned at would be random.
so for instance i have a mission that spawns called stranded team. which spawns a handful of marines somewhere and has infested attack them. infested grow with time and players need to get to them before they die. rewards xp and probably something in the future. this is a really simple mission that can pretty much be spawned anywhere. all it needs is 3 regions. an objective. friendly spawn and enemy spawn region.
i have another mission that spawns a few buildings and then drop pods fall all around them and infest them. this mission has no "failure" condition. it simply spawns a set amount of infested that seek out and attack the player (via attack wave campaign ai). the number increases with each wave.
i have another mission but it's more or less a larger version of stranded team.
i've created a shop and items. you can buy new and better weapons at the shop for your heroes. plan to add more items like armor and such.
i want to also have consumable items like grenades and others to help in pinch spots.
overall idea i have is to make the map quite hard. heavy focus on working together. completing missions to level up/acquire better items.
the climax will eventually be the giant zerg base which. like the infested mission will create attack waves and send them to kill the players. these grow in strength over time but not as quickly.
last objective will be to destroy the zerg base.
i basically still have a TON of work to do. trigger/data editor wise. but i just dont have the time or the ability to pull off the terrain. obviously want it to be very detailed. being an rpg'ish map. along with needing many many good locations for missions of different types.
for example one idea i had which i remember from the warcraft 3 map was to have a power station go out. turning off all the street lights in the map. your mission would then basically be to go out and find... power cores? or something? to get it running again. completing the mission would reward xp and turn the lights back on (no real benefit from this but it'd look cool)
here are some screenshots of what i've done so far.
these are basically "indev" shots. you can see i have a buttload of heroes. you would normally have 1. you would also not be able to see the entire map. i havn't decided on shared vision between players or limiting vision to your hero only yet.
Class Selection (and kind of an intro)
Defend Outpost Mission
Player Units dropped off
Zerg Base
Stranded Team Mission
Stranded Team Completed. Rewarded with +25 XP
Infestation Mission Intro
Level 5 Zerg Attack Wave
So. Many. Triggers. (despite this map being probably 1/10th of completed as my TD. it's already more triggers...)
so anyway. as you can see. the terrain is. flat. i figured to find a talented terrain person i'd need some sort of proof of concept so they know they aren't wasting their time.
if you are one or know of one. pm me ;)
http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/infestation/
Infestation - Need Terrain Artist