During Map Night, I was thoroughly perplexed by the phenomenon that people liked eggball far more than other maps with more in-depth gameplay and better effects/triggers. I asked myself: is it because eggball is just inherently more fun than everything else? After all, people never got bored with it, but other maps tend to get comments like “I like it; it’s just… let’s play something else o.o”. After much pondering, I arrived at the conclusion that my definition of “fun” deviates substantially from that of the general Bnet definition of “fun”, and figured out the general themes and elements of popular maps that make them fun to play. While incorporating these elements into your map may not necessarily make it popular, it is beneficial to check your map to see if it at least has some of them; after all, if your map isn’t fun, who would play it?

Therefore, in response to the epiphany, I present:

The Ultimate List of things that make your map fun
(This applies to both BW and SCII, although most examples I mention are taken from Brood War.)

1. Game Replay Value
I cannot stress sufficiently the importance of replay value. No matter how great your map is, if it is the proverbial “same sh*t” every time it is played, people will stop hosting it after a while, just because they played it already and don’t feel like repeating the same stuff all over again. Linear RPGs suffer this fatal flaw: play it once and you saw it all. Is there any allure in grinding up again from scratch, just to read all the dialogue and play all the quests the same way you did the first time? Of course there isn’t any.

*While replay value is not essential to making a good map (just like how Portal can be an awesome game even with its short length and lack of difference between each playthrough), it is absolutely necessary to have replay value if you want your map to become widespread on Battle.net.

This brings us to:

Ways to generate replay value for your map:
This kind of replay value is an endless tap; they will never exhaust themselves within the lifespan of a mortal human being, and thus will guarantee that your map will continue to be hosted even after years, if it is designed very well. Try to strive for this in any map you make, because maps with these elements are genuinely fun, as opposed to maps with “fake replay value”.

-Give players strong control over the outcome of the map. This is when the players “lead” the map to go the way they want it to, by getting what they want when they choose to do so. The Desert Strike and Nexus Destroyers series do very well in this category because players shape their own armies with precise control, effectively allowing limitless combinations of strategies. With AoS-style maps (cf. Temple Siege), this is achieved with level-up systems that let players decide on what aspects of their hero they want to buff, and choices on what to spend a limited amount of resources on (Upgrade my skills, or make mines and other beneficial buildings?). Essentially, the more choices a player has, the higher your map’s replay value will be for this category, as players will be able to make almost endless different series of choices to affect gameplay substantially.
-Incorporate interactivity between players. This is where we draw the line between PvP and PvE style SC maps. With well-designed player-versus-player maps, the possibilities are nearly endless with players pitted against other sentient beings who have skill levels ranging from n00by to godly. 7v1 Comp Stomp maps and PvE open RPG maps were insanely popular for a while, but they eventually faded after a while, simply because there is only so much you can do in a game against a computer/preprogrammed storyline. (Remember Avalon? No? Exactly.)
-Integrate a strong competitive aspect. Just like the previous point, this is where we find maps that are essentially player-versus-player where the balance can swing either way depending on player skill. Again, this is why AoS/Desert Strike/Diplo/RISK maps are so popular: players enjoy competing against other players, and the act of defeating other players (Counterintuitively, it’s not the act of winning as much as wiping out other people. There’s a reason that “The Banning Game” is an all-time favorite of pubbies; everyone is sadistic in some way, and they enjoy the momentary feeling of power they obtain from banning someone over the internet.) The competitive aspect is, after all, the only reason there’s a StarCraft progaming scene in South Korea right now. Even if the map isn’t directly player-versus-player, a leaderboard of some sort can encourage players to compete as well, as is seen in the silliness that is “1 Billion Zerglings”.

Ways to generate limited replay value for your map:
This kind of replay value is finite; players will play it more often than once, but they will exhaust all possibilities after enough time has passed, and stop playing after that. This is not to say “avoid these elements”, because having them is not bad at all; it’s the act of having ONLY these types of replay values that damages your map’s lifespan.

-Allow different potential outcomes/gameplay styles on each playthrough. This mainly applies to RPGs and AoS maps, and it is done either by letting the player choose different heroes/characters, or allowing multiple endings based on the success of the gameplay time. We see the former a lot more often than the latter simply because it is infinitely simpler to create a map with multiple heroes than it is to create a map with multiple endings, but both have the same effect of drawing the players in with the “how will the game play out if I did this instead?” aspect. Forcing the players to choose between upgrades and extra lives, or making it so they can only learn four out of six spells are also easy ways of implementing this.
-Unlockable content. This is exceedingly rare in SC UMS maps because it is nearly impossible to detect whether a player has accomplished something in a previous game, barring painstakingly-designed password systems that I only remember seeing once in an obscure and unfinished RPG game; but if it is implemented correctly, it will generate strong incentive for replays, just so the player can unlock even more characters/effects/tricks by playing all over again. (Individual Lurker Defense secret combos, anyone?)
-Achievements. I hate using this tactic, but it works well. And I mean REALLY well. You cannot imagine how many times players will replay a map that gives some secret bonus for having a perfect run through some portion/minigame.

Ways to generate fake replay value for your map:
I personally detest this type of replay value, mainly because it does not constitute “genuine” replay value. It makes the map more challenging/frustrating at the expense of fun, and is generally not recommended, even though it does have the effect of making people play it over and over again. Again, this is not fun. The only real positive to using these tactics is making people play your map over and over again; they may not necessarily enjoy it.

-Defeating the player frequently (or making it very easy for players to fall into an unwinnable situation). The scourge of all SC maps, and the reason Strip Sakura/Impossible Scenarios/Snipers maps are hosted all the time. Players die so often that they spend more time in the lobby than in a new area of the game they have not seen before, especially with people who do not know the map by heart (e.g. finding out there’s a DT on null terrain, the hard way). Beating these maps will often require memorizing patterns/locations/everything else and a painstaking pixel-perfect navigation through the obstacle course of a map until the map is beaten, often for a trivial reward other than the feeling of accomplishment at achieving an arbitrary objective in a video game.
-Allow the players to “fail” at aspects of the map without defeating them. This is accomplished by allowing players to “fail” a stage in a puzzle/RPG but allowing them to move on regardless, thus creating incentive for players to do it all over again for a “perfect run”. Timed high-score systems frustrate to no ends with this, because then you see the “187 of 192 enemies killed” leaderboard and can’t help but exclaim “FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-”.
-Introduce an element of randomness. The “random” aspect of a game can go a LONG way in making it popular and high in replay value, by making people want to play it again just to get something different. See how Helm’s Deep RH is infinitely more popular than the original Helm’s Deep? This is why. Phantom/Random def/Random Micro Arena/etc. are popular not because they are well-made, but because they have this “random” aspect that draws people in. I personally perceive this as an underhanded tactic in making people play your map even though there is nothing “new”, by creating a pseudo-lottery that players automatically participate in. But if you have to resort to this, then by all means go ahead, since the masses seem to like it.

2. Gameplay Length
This is the length of time that your map will last during an average playthrough. While SCBW is not designed for playing longwinded RPGs, this is a very substantial quality to consider for SCII, where you can design games that easily last for hours, if not days, due to the vastly superior aesthetics of the game and the possibility of developing an RPG-oriented game engine. The problem is the play time of your map: is your game too short or too long?

Short ‘n sweet games:
These are quick, short games meant to be played for only a few minutes at once; this type of game is not created by slapping a ludicrously short timer on a long map that is almost impossible to do in one run; that creates fake replay value, as explained above, and makes for an arbitrary and unnecessary forced ending of the game.

(I know that speedruns and time challenges are extremely addictive in other games, but this is SC UMS where no data is saved after each run. It does not work that way, not without some substantial ingenuity in design.)

-They should be gameplay intensive. When people play a short game, they expect it to be action-packed and interesting, not “sit around for five minutes to move onto the next stage”.
-Do NOT pad your game with mandatory tutorials, especially when they are designed to be short. It’s a huge waste of time.
-They MUST have replay value if they are going to be this short. ‘Nuff said. This should be fairly obvious.

Medium-length games:
These games last between 15 minutes to an hour, and usually have to be PvP to be this length and still satisfying. Some things to keep in mind:

-This is not a short game padded with unnecessary cutscenes/tutorials/unnecessary boot-up times/five-minute long respawns/etc. They must be interesting throughout the course of the gameplay by offering the player something to do at all times, and that something better be new and not a task they performed before on a previous playthrough.
-This is not a long game with ridiculous timed limits. I have mentioned this before, but it is worth stressing again. Timed missions/quests/survival maps are bitches. They are not challenging; they are just frustrating.
-They must have reasonable objectives stated at the start of the game. These games are short enough that players have to know what they’re trying to do at the start; people tend to quit when they have no idea what is going on. This, however, does not warrant a 5-minute cutscene tutorial that people can’t skip.

Long games:
These games last anywhere from 60 minutes to half of a day; Labyrinthos and a lot of the huge RPGs come to mind.

-They should be interesting. A 256x256 one-life snipers map where you literally move half of a screen every five minutes due to the density of the enemies is not fun, and most people will quit very quickly and never play it again.
-They should progress in difficulty at a reasonable pace. When moving from one area to the next, it should be expected that the player will have gained sufficient levels to survive adequately in the next region. Jumping from 5 hp 2 attack zerglings to 60 hp 25 attack vultures is NOT a reasonable region gap, and putting a 6000 HP 180 attack siege tank for a boss at the end of an area when your character starts with 4 hp and 2 attack is just terrible.
-Forced grinding should be avoided at all costs. Remember that this is StarCraft and not an online MMO where your character is saved. A 16-hour RPG where 15 hours are spent grinding for the impossible final boss is not really 16 hours long, and a dungeon that requires a 1/256 key drop from a golem that takes 5 minutes to kill each time is not really a long dungeon. (“Kill-x enemies” quests are occasionally acceptable, when that “x” isn’t a three-digit number.)
-Do not make the player waste 5 minutes walking from one place to the next. You have “Move Unit” triggers. Use them.
-Turn-based RPGs should not have ridiculously long turn times. I played a Final Fantasy clone map where the mere act of attacking took about 30 seconds as the game created explosions everywhere and used a slow 4-reaver 1 damage DDS system to whittle down the enemy HP. Just no.
-Side quests suck. I can destroy mountains, call upon the powers of the underworld, summon magical spells that decimate entire fields, but you’re telling me I can’t move past these nuke silos or open this fragile-looking gate until I save 15 civilians and kill 250 dragoons after making a sacrifice of 1500 minerals to your god Xenu at the monster-infested altar in the middle of nowhere? What is this I don’t even


3. Gameplay Difficulty
This is where many, MANY mappers screw up. A game’s difficulty lies not just within the challenge of beating the game: the difficulties in learning the game/fighting other players/controlling your character are present as well.

What defines “good difficulty”:
A map with “good difficulty” is fun. It is challenging, but not so challenging that it takes 38749829342379 tries to beat, and can be reliably completed by a skilled player without memorizing specific movement/shot patterns. Some things that make your map have “good difficulty” are listed below:

-Its difficulty should be skill-dependent. A map should be beatable by any player who has moderate skill after a few tries; it should not, however, be beatable by a complete noob who just happens to know where all the hidden powerups/treasure chests/MONEY9999999999 triggers are. No one joins UMS games to play something that requires the same level of skill as Snakes and Ladders.
-It should be beatable regardless of what path the player chooses or how many players are present. Again mainly applicable to RPG maps, they should be beatable by any number of characters and not force a full house. Hour-long maps that require 6-7 players to beat and do not adjust for leavers are just annoying as fuck. RPG boss invincible to every character but the rogue? Not true difficulty. Sorcery RPG does a very good job at this: You can win the game with any of the five characters, yet it is not so easy as to allow people to just blaze through the game with a party of five. The difficulty and gameplay time are about the same regardless of party size.
-Characters should be balanced. AoS maps like Temple Siege suffer greatly from this, especially when one character happens to match up against another character who is just, in every way, superior to him in 1v1 combat. Volt vs Archer? Too bad if your shockwave misses. Not only can a hydralisk outmicro an archon outright, it even has a devastating level 1 spell to own you. Rock-Paper-Scissors gameplay is just annoying.
-Luck should not play an extremely substantial role in gameplay. It is okay if the luck can be somewhat subverted by good playing on the player’s part, but it is not okay if the luck simply screws you over outright. Having an enemy cast a 2% kill spell on you and seeing it proc is never fun.

What defines “bad difficulty”:
This kind of difficulty is most often deliberately added o the game just to make it harder, and is often dumb and terrible. Examples include giving enemy computers maphack in a snipers game, and the entire freaking Lizard 37 map. Maps with this kind of difficulty often reek of these elements:

-Aspects of the game that can’t be beaten other than via astronomical dumb luck, often because the solution isn’t hinted at in any way whatsoever. Sometimes, only the map maker knows how some triggers work, and figuring it out takes a frustratingly long time by even the most skilled of players simply because it is coded to screw with you. Puzzles should be solvable within a reasonable amount of time with the information that is provided to the player, without brute-force experimentation.
-Bastardized controls that screw with your gameplay. Eggball uses EUD selection and a location grid to achieve what would be a trivial task: moving your unit. While that is the entire point of eggball and part of the reason why it is fun for some people, it annoys others substantially. Having this incorporated into another game where the game would be far better played without is nonsensical. Imagine having to play melee SC with eggball-style controls and having to type out “Build SCV” in chat to make it.
-Having only one life that is lost in one hit, especially in extremely long games. While that makes the game have fake replay value, it’s annoying as hell. Fighting through 3 hours worth of enemies to die in a single hit will probably result in a voided warranty and a lot of glass shards. Don’t do that to your players. Maps like Impossible Scenarios should just restart a current round rather than forcing players to start all over again at round 1.
-A task that is technically possible but not realistically feasible. Okay, so a vulture can theoretically kill an infinite number of zerglings and zealots. That doesn’t mean a micro map with 1 vulture versus 1 billion zerglings is “fun” or “challenging”. It’s just stupid. Same concept applies to other “challenges” that you may decide to add to your map: don’t make it ridiculously hard.
-Battles that revolve around no more than “who has more of x”. Especially prevalent in AoS games where it boils down to “who has better spells” or “who has more mana”. That isn’t skill. Make it so slightly weaker players can defeat a player who has better stats through superior gameplay and tactical use of in-game elements.
-Ludicrous imbalances down to the core of everything. Again a plague of AoS games where the drastically differing movesets are annoying as hell. It’s okay if a weaker character at the beginning grows stronger as time goes on; it’s not okay if you’re stuck with “night vision”, “healing beacon”, “splash”, and a bunch of worthless team-buffing spells while your opponent gets “flaming arrow”, “meteo”, “quake”, and a bunch of spells guaranteed to rape you in one trigger cycle if he as much as gets vision of you.
-Everyone is overpowered. Just because there is a game breaker doesn’t mean you can balance it out by making every character broken. There’s no fun in trying to play a game where you get 1-hit by the ultimate spell of your enemies all the time and it boils down to “who can press the button faster” matches.

-To be Completed Later


Post has been edited 7 time(s), last time on Jun 15 2010, 12:08 pm by Aristocrat.

4. Game Attractiveness
This is the quality of your map makes people actively want to play it. It’s a quantifier of just how good your map is, gauged by the active interest in your map by average Battle.net UMS players. A map that is very good in this category will be actively rehosted by people who play it, and if that occurs, widespread play is almost guaranteed. A map that is, however, poor in this category will become infamous for it, and their name becomes like a plague and maps with similar names are inevitably associated with it and shunned. Avoid doing this at all costs, because it’s pretty much a giant “F U” to other mappers.

What makes a map attractive:
These elements generally make your map appealing; they are things that impress players and make them think “I want to play this” or “I really want to know the rest of this map”.

-Lots and lots of explosions, shots, and dead units. For some reason, people like this. AoS maps where spells literally involve 25 exploding arbiters over the player’s head and a crapton of dead ultralisks after the explosions wear off are actually popular and well-received despite extremely poor terrain and balance. You wouldn’t believe how much explosions help make a map awesome in the eyes of the average player. A trail of ice creamdead dragoons is good, too . (Of course, these things make already-awesome maps like Alpha Marines even better.)
-Epic, fast-paced gameplay. A game where the balance can swing in mere fractions of a second due to a spell is exciting. This can go both ways: it might frustrate people who hate how fast they die, or it might give people an adrenaline rush and make them addicted to the map. My Probe Arena map focuses on this as its main selling point, and reactions from pubbies show extremely polarized and mixed results: some of them royally hate it and ragequit in 30 seconds after two deaths, while others like it substantially and play it over and over again because of the fast reflexes and insane micro involved. You should try to avoid making it frustrating for the players if this is going to be a main focus; no one likes to spend more than 50% of their time waiting for respawn.
-Well-designed triggers. Triggers that do something without telling players what they do are annoying; players want to know what spell they just cast or what trap they just triggered, not straining their eyes to try and see just what happened through the cloud of 20 wraith and devourer explosions. This is why you want good triggers, or triggers that inform the player as to what is actually going on. It's actually nicer to get a message saying "You just died to a grue because you're fucking retarded and walked into a trap" than to get absolutely nothing at all aside from a dead character and a "Respawning..." trigger.
-Functions that players do not usually expect. This is where conventional play gets replaced by stuff players never saw before. People often like to see new things, and are impressed by stuff they do not expect from typical experience with StarCraft. Selection detect, buildings that cast spells rather than make units, and other unorthodox things are seen as remarkable features; I suspect that Eggball is considered awesome only because of the “teehee I can move scourge by selecting eggs!” factor.
-Originality of the concept of the map. If your map is original, people have nothing of precedent to compare it to, and no standards to which they will hold your map against. It has become increasingly difficult to make a new RPG/defense/mass game that people like, simply because there are so many predecessors that are essentially the same thing that they just feel like playing the one they are familiar with in lieu of your new and potentially worse one. That being said, avoid concepts like “tag”, “snipers”, “random micro arena”, or pretty much anything that’s a category name here, if you want to be original and credited for it.

What makes a map unattractive:
-Ugly error messages.

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‘Nuff said.
-Piss-poor triggering that doesn’t do what you want half of the time. When we fire our Vulcan cannons, we want it to hit that giant glob of monsters to our right and deal terrible, terrible damage. Not that tiny enemy broodling to the far left with nothing around it.
-Ridiculously long cooldowns for spells that players WANT to cast. 5 seconds is good. 30 seconds is excusable. A 5-minute cooldown for a level-1 spell that only loses 10 seconds every time you upgrade with 5 stat points is horrid.
-Transmission/text message spam. Okay, HUDs look nice, bullet indicators look nice, and a reticule for a TPS is icing on the cake, but that’s only great for single-player maps that probably won’t be hosted on Bnet. People who play multiplayer maps tend to want to talk to each other, and transmission spam gets in the way of that.
-Uncontrollable characters. Okay, HUDs look nice, bullet indicators look nice, and a reticule for a TPS is icing on the cake, but that’s only great for single-player maps that probably won’t be hosted on Bnet. People who play multiplayer maps tend to want to talk to each other, and transmission spam gets in the way of that.

5. Game Presentation
Wait a minute, you ask, isn’t this the same as “Game Attractiveness”? This “Presentation” revolves more around the presentation of the map before the first playthrough of the map, and involves drawing in “new customers” rather than keeping the people who already played playing it. This also includes effort on the part of the game host, so pay attention to those parts. A host’s actions can make or break what a person thinks of the map.

What makes a well-presented map:
These elements generally make your map appealing to people who have not played the map before. Maps with these elements usually draw people in

-Gameplay mechanic that is intuitive and easy to learn. The concept of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) applies here. The simpler a map is, the more likely it is that people will stay and play it. No one wants to play a map they don't know about that also has a ridiculously steep learning curve. This is not to say extremely complicated maps are always bad; there are many maps that take forever to learn yet turn out to be quite fun to play (This is Anime! comes to mind). However, strive for this in your maps, if you want it to be challenging:

Quote from name:devilesk

Easy to learn, impossible to master.

-Well-decorated terrain. If your terrain looks awesome, it makes people want to explore the map more, and a well-terrained starting region is usually a sign that the map will be great in all other aspects. If the only thing you knew about the map was a screenshot, you’d much rather play a map with terrain like this than a map that looks like this. Avoid square terrain interlaced with isometric; use one or the other, but not both*. It’s just strange to be on ISOM one second and square terrain the next; it’s disorienting and ugly.
-Professional-looking map name. If your map name is the default color and not capitalized correctly, people will think that the developer put no effort into the map and probably leave before they even download the map.
-Copyedited strings. Spell check, spell check, spell check. If you have to, copy paste everything to MS Word to make sure that you have not made any terrible mistakes in your “monkies atack” map or whatever it may be; a misspelling turns people away, because it is typically a very reliable sign of a bad map.
-Non-default unit names if they serve a different purpose. Players don’t want to control a “Devouring One (Zergling)” or an “Gerard DuGalle (Ghost)”. They want to control necromancers, snipers, rogues, etc. Default names give the map an unpolished look.


*You can use square terrain for off-field switches and other things. The non-mixing only applies to playing areas that are connected to each other.

6. Game Strategy
This covers the actual gameplay of the map and the depth to which strategy is involved. It overlaps with Game Difficulty if it Is PvE, but in PvP this means something completely different.


7. Game Playableness

8. Game Marketability


Under Construction

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jun 20 2010, 4:57 pm by Aristocrat.

<Reserved since I hit character limit and probably will again>

TL;DR - Eggball Sux

But no, really, I think eggball actually derives a lot of its fun from two things: Simplicity and Complexity (I will explain, it's not contradictory).

Simplicity. The game in itself is a cheap dirty little game. You can play it for about five minutes and have a great time because you can make a goal in under 10 seconds. The game is hard enough (the controls) so that if you mess up, a person could take a quick advantage and make a goal. The game is easy enough so that you require near nil explanation.

Complexity. This one is a bit more abstract and obscure, but when I played it and saw SO MANY scourges running around in chaotic patterns, it was just a lot of things going on at once. It was kinda cool just to look at.

Unlockable content - I know of some people who are working on a password system that is impossible to... well... cheat by putting in other people's codes. The rpg you are thinking of is Xuru Rpg.

"Fake" replay value - If you design a horror-style rpg map, where things are linear but really hard (IE: The Other Side) it makes quite a gem, because you KNOW that you could die at any moment, putting you on edge.

"Allow the players to “fail” at aspects of the map without defeating them." THIS ONE IS SO TRUE.

The whole "vulture vs 1bil zergling" maps were what got my micro better back in the day. Ah... impossible vulture... what a good time... [/nostalgia]

Could you NOT use gray? Please? It makes it harder to read. With a post 26k characters long, I think that's important. Thanks.
Edit: Ah, I see, you posted in the shoutbox that white hurts your eyes. K.

I really thought I would have more to say, but I don't. K.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 13 2010, 5:32 pm by TiKels.

You know nothing. You're implying sameness is the ideal way to balance. Chew on this ~ Generally speaking, yes, balance increases as conditions are mirrored. This is even true in melee, the most balanced maps are those mirrored ones, but then why does everyone prefer stuff like python? It's because when things are mixed up a little bit, things are more fun.
What exactly in ts would you change if you could that you think would make it better? Make every hero a hydralisk, and make every Lv1 mutas? Do you think that would be fun?

No man no. What he's saying is that there shouldn't be hard counters. Soft ones are GOOD, but nothing that pretty much guarantees success.

This is what balance is.
Oh, a good example: Sometimes when I play TS (rare), I'll play as medic. Just for lulz. I usually get teamed against a volt, which is faster and stronger than me, so when he's almost got me dead I'll start running back to the base. Of course you must be saying "BUT YOU CAN'T OUTRUN HIM". That's where you spawn l1 medics and order them against him so he is blocked for a second, slowing him down. Of course he could attack the medics for good money and XP, but what is ONE MEDIC compared to a LIFE. If you think he will try and freeze you use l2 so he can't cast spells.
Edit: Found the quote I was looking for, changed it out.
Edit2: added example

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 13 2010, 5:20 pm by TiKels.

I address a lot of these things in upcoming sections (attractiveness/presentation/etc.), so hold your horses .

CAFG stop feeling insulted, I'm only pointing out an inadequacy prevalent in many maps.

You just come off as trying to sound smart to me. I know it's hip to hate on popular maps everyone likes, but when you are trying to put something professional up like this, expect to get called out on things.

You just come off as being butthurt to me. I know it's hip to hate on people who say things you don't like, but when you start making generalizations like "everyone" and calling me out as an outcast, expect your posts to be taken with about a tablespoon of salt.

Aristo, what's the problem? CAFG isn't being hostile. He was just defending his comment. Then you start trolling.

In regards to this thread, I think you in some form or another addressed the things about mapping that I found make maps more successful (or games in general). Achievements are a big one. It could be some awesome item in Diablo II, or something arbitrary, like in GTA where you spray gang tags and get guns in your house or something. Upgrades are pretty important too. Like in TS your character is pretty consistently getting to add a point to some stat or another. There's others, but those two are my favorites I kind of want to base a game off those two things alone and see if people like it.

You're thinking of this. ;o. Over a million plays for a game that has achievements and nothing else.

This is stupid. Drop it. Don't antagonize him any more Aristocrat, even if you ARE right. <--- Best policy ever. It's even in the ToS

Get back on topic.

I'm in love.
I beat it in 275 seconds. SO CLOSE TO 240! Hard.
Edit: I got it in like 213! Okay that was fun. Too bad there aren't more levels.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 14 2010, 1:24 am by TiKels.

Eggball - easy to learn, impossible to master.

Also, sports type maps that are either 1v1 or team always have high replay value.

No, I wasn't thinking of achievement unlocked. I think Boxhead 2Play or whatever would be a more accurate representation of what I'm thinking of.

Boxhead 2Play

Something that is unqiue from the competition ?

The ability to customize a map's gameplay is a must have in a "fun map." Although I may get scoffed at for using this as an example, I think Alpha Marines has this nailed down. Even though it's very simple, its extremely addictive.

he already said that lol

Well sooooooorreeeeee for not reading the great wall o' text. Don't lie to me and tell me YOU read the whole thing.