Thinking about it now, one of the major obstacles I see to mapping thus far has been the team element. While many great works have come from individual mappers, the fact is that working by yourself is doing it the hard way. It takes longer to make, depends strongly on your available free time, energy, and most of all, has no contingency or failsafes if you can't or won't continue working on it; if you fail, it fails.
With multiple people, though, you can address those problems. However, there's costs with doing that as well. You have to recruit competent members, manage their productivity, and most of all, bring together all of their efforts to produce a single product. Thus far, it's been that aspect that has been the most trouble with Starcraft. While you can easily divy up aspects like planning, play testing, story/script writing, and maybe production and release, aspects of triggers and terrain; the so-called "meat and bones" of a map, respectively, have traditionally been difficult to divide up. Doing so either requires a "pass the baton" approach with the map (where only one person can work on it at once), or else forcing people to have to copy each other's modifications by hand between edits across multiple copies of a single map.
However, thanks to the power of modern editors, and possibly this guide, you shouldn't have to suffer that any more!
Team Mapping Process
Roles
Like any group project, the first thing to establish, whether the idea has been conceived of yet or not, is who will be in your group and what they will do. There's two main things that determine who and what you need for a project:
Scale: The more ambitious a project is, the more people it will likely need to cover each aspect. While smaller projects may be able to get away with using only a few or even one person doing multiple tasks, larger ones may need multiple people just to cover a single task effectively. Sometimes you may even need people just to handle communication within the team (a "Producer"), depending upon the number of people or complexity of the project.
Type: Different types of maps/projects have different requirements. An RPG may require several people to be writers or planners to cover story, dialog, and game events, as well as having requisite competency in the terrain and trigger departments. A Defense or Bound map, on the other hand, may not require any writers at all, and only a few (or just one) planner, passable terrain or triggers, but a lot of playtesting/balancing.
Let's assume you're working on an ambitious Campaign or RPG-type map, for instance. I'll use this as my example because it effectively represents the full scope of what you may need for a large-scale team project with Starcraft. Here are some of the roles you may need to cover (note that for some of them I'll be using my own names and descriptions):
- Execution:
- The Project Lead - This is, of course, a given. The project lead is the person whose job it is to see the project gets done. That means commanding his forces, adapting to circumstances, and giving direction to the whole mess.
Skills needed: Leadership Ability, Vision, Problem-Solving ability, Persistence - Producer - For large or complex teams, a middle man to handle the exchange of communication may be needed. This most likely may also be the Project Lead himelf, but it may also be delegated as a seperate role. Producers keep the project and its members in focus by making clear to them the project needs, giving status updates as needed, and helping them to communicate their needs with others in turn. The producer will have to work closely with the Project Lead to keep the project's goals in focus, as well.
Skills needed: Communication Ability, Reliability
- Planners:
Writers:
[LIST] - Story/Plot Writer - This should be pretty obvious. Writers should have a good grasp of how to produce a compelling narrative, as well as how to keep it with the frame of the game itself. This job acts mainly as another planner's position, which should ideally be kept closely in line with the gameplay and area planning aspects (either following or leading, depending upon the story's 'importance' to the game's "experience").
Skills needed: Story writing ability, grasp of the context it's in (Starcraft, in this case), vision for how to map it into gameplay. - Scripts/Dialog Writer - Within the frame of the story and events, this role will be needed to add the 'skin' to the project. This includes things story characters might say, in-game messages, briefings, etc. Any of the actual 'text' (or even aural speech) in the map is done by this role, which may also be covered by the writer(s) themselves.
Skills needed: Grasp of emotional and circumstantial contexts, good expressive ability, and even sense of timing. - Editor - With projects involving lots of writing, this (also overlooked) role may come into play. The editor's job is simply to clean up the writer's works by keeping them grammatically and syntactically clean, to the point, and giving them effective language. They may also be called upon to tidy up the story or the plot itself to keep it focused towards being a good game. In spite of how it sounds, the editor's role actually holds a lot of power over how the final product will turn out, and should not be taken lightly.
Skills needed: Strong command of written/spoken language, grasp of effective language, grasp of how to focus on what's important.
- Area Planners - In other words, where to put stuff, or what to put where. This role may be flexibly handled by other members (particularily Terrainers) as needed, but best handled early on (sooner the better, in other words). This also sets the boundaries and definitions of what the Terrainers and Trigger Writers (Programmers) have to work with later, so close collaboration with other departments is needed.
Skills needed: Spacial and asthetic sense, grasp of area requirements, grasp of game limits. - Gameplay Planners - This is an important role that will be closely linked with the Trigger Writers' (Programmer's) job later. Gameplay planners outline the meat of the game, such as how the player's systems (leveling up, items, etc.), battle systems, boss battles, etc. all work. Working closely with the project Lead and the Programmers is important.
Skills needed: Familiarity with many gameplay styles, balancing, and creative thinking. Trigger experience helpful. - Prototypers - This role could be considered a subset of the Programmers or Terrainers jobs, or even an aspect of Gameplay Planning, but may also be handled centrally as well. Prototypers take requests for specific aesthetic or functional (gameplay) aspects of the project, and create test scenarios to find the best solutions for how to handle them. This is an often overlooked, yet highly useful delegation when methods are needed to solve given problems, where otherwise having to fully implement them into the map to test them becomes impractical. This, like other aspects of planning, is best handled as early as possible, but may be needed often during the project's development just the same.
Skills needed: Solid triggering/terraining ability (as needed), creative thinking, problem solving ability.
- Content Makers:
- Terrainers - These are the guys who add the "bones" to the map. They carve out the areas of the map, mold them into shape, add in the needed content, and then pretty it all up for show. Terrainers will need to work closely with the Programmers as they develop each area to ensure each others' requirements are being met. A good terrainer can make an area look snazzy while still doing what it's supposed to do without giving the programmers a hard time.
Skills needed: Strong aesthetic ability, spacial ability, knowledge of tilesets and tile blending, grasp of project requirements. - Trigger Writers (Programmers) - These are the miracle workers of the project. Trigger Writers (more formally known as Programmers) take on the job of adding "meat" to the "bones", so to speak. The programmer's job creates and ties everything together, including gameplay, player interface, and story telling, and makes sure it all works right. To be a Programmer, you will have to work well with the Terrainers, follow closely with the project's plan, and put up with receiving the full brunt of the project's requirements. This is easily the most difficult part of the map making experience, which is also coincidentally the most difficult (and necessary) to have delegated between multiple parties to share the load.
Skills needed: Strong trigger writing ability, strong grasp of the workings of the game, logic skills, problem solving ability, patience. - Foley Artist - In a nutshell, he who provides sound. Having a good ear for what sounds to use, where and how to get them, as well as a bit of knowledge on how Starcraft treats its .wav files once embedded in a map, and perhaps some sound FX editing knowledge as well.
Skills needed: <See description>
- Testers:
- Lead Testers - This role, like the producer, acts as a middle-man between the testers and the Content Makers, and is also charged with delegating testing jobs among the testers as well as maybe tester recruitment. A person with some experience in gameplay balancing should be selected for this job, as well as having good ability to compile and summarize testing results and present them to the project Lead, Producer, and the rest of the team (as needed). He may be called upon to do focus testing for specific aspects of the project, in addition to general balance testing and bug tracking.
Skills needed: Good communication ability, managerial ability (managing a team of testers), and skill at compiling and communicating test results to the team. - Play Testers - These folk will start to come into play during the late alpha and early beta stages of the project. The only real requirements for them are to be relatively trustworthy (so as not to leak or steal the map, if that's an issue), and to have some interest in the relative type of map being made. Beyond that, a good Lead should select as diverse a group of testers as possible, while keeping them relatively centered within interest range of the map they're supposed to be testing.
Skills needed: <See description>
Task Allocation
If you were to be working on the above-described ambitious Campaign/RPG, you'd need to fulfill each of those roles in some way or another. Chances are, you could recycle team members to cover those, or even do them all yourself, but again, if you expect to actually produce something in a reasonable span of time (or even at all), delegating tasks is really the only way to do it. Most of the Execution, Planning, or Testing tasks can be easily delegated with the right people, but the it's the Content tasks that need some special help. This is where I come in with some handy methods, and a few modern tools, to help.