Hey, just went and played through the three of these, and I have some (hopefully constructive) criticism for ya.
Some specifics:
1. The first map lacked good direction. I couldn't find the medic very easily, and it wasn't necessary to do so for some reason. The map could be finished almost instantly by walking to the tax building then dodging the rines real quick.
2. In the second map, it was actually pretty fun navigating the corridor of battling marines at the start, and the mass of civilians stuck outside the walls at the end of the road painted a pretty good picture. The random procurement of your friend Richard with a dropship made very little sense, and for some reason, flying near the red base got me shot down on one playthrough. Flying to the beacon was trivially easy after skirting around the base.
3. Similar sort of criticisms on the third one. Lack of direction, lack of content in the map, etc.
The general stuff:
1. Right at first the start screens just throw you in the game right away and dont give you a chance to read. Need to have some sort of wait on the start screens.
2. Surprisingly you were able to create a sense of atmosphere with such simple maps, so good job there.
3. Keep in mind audio files are very costly in terms of map size. If you were to try and share maps of these size on bnet, it would take like an hour to download. For a single player campaign, this isnt of much worry, but for any multiplayer maps you may make, keep the audio clips down to just snippets, and compress heavily to reduce size.
4. You should really be naming units and such. This will not only contribute to the atmosphere of your levels, but it can be a good tool in giving the player information. I found myself a little lost at times, and this could help a lot.
5. You need to do more in the map design in order to guide the player where to go. In each map I was essentially set free from the start to just roam wherever. A lot of the time the rest of the map was simply useless space, and this only seems to make the map feel empty unless it is absolutely filled with content.
6. In the end, as some other have said in other threads, you simply need to play more UMS maps! You just need to take things up a notch and increase the complexity of your maps. This will take time, but experiment with stuff!
Good luck with future maps!
Oh yea, heres some tools for ya:
SCMDraft Map Editor - very powerful map editor. Learn it. Love it.
SEN Mapmaking FAQ Thread - Tons of useful mapping info here. Start working your way through here and learning each concept well.
Some random links - You may find some useful stuff here.
SCMaps Archive - Over 18k UMS maps here. It's a little overwhelming but if you want almost all of the UMS maps ever made, here's where you'll find em.
Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Aug 3 2016, 7:15 pm by Swampfox.
None.