I wouldn't dream of telling you how to design your map. What I can do is offer an insight into how I approach level design in general, and for Minecraft in particular. In writing this guide, I haven't assumed too much about your experience, so I will start at the beginning. Feel free to skip ahead if my style bores you.
These are my own personal considerations when creating a custom map or level for others to enjoy. You may find they resonate with your own design philosophy, you may disagree on points. Some principles are fairly universal, and some are dictated by the features and limitations of the game in which your design is to be implemented. It's very zen!
Minecraft for Level Design
Here I use the more traditional term "level design" somewhat quaintly, since in Minecraft an entire world is your map boundary, but it is a less-ambiguous term than "map design" in my opinion, and World Designer is not a common occupational title just yet. Level in this usage simply connotates a designated area within which objectives must be achieved in order to proceed to victory, and can here be used interchangeably with world or map in general.
For both novice and experienced level designers, Minecraft is a paradise, making it a prime choice as both a fairly abstract medium of expression, and a learning tool. Our imaginations aren't restrained by polygon limits, texture alignment, invalid vertices, lighting setups and compilation errors. The blocks are a primal language of their own and we arrange them sculpturally to interpret them universally.
Map editing is real-time and first-person, not as an optional feature, but as an integral part of the game. You are trained to build and change the landscape from the very first night in the game. Eventually ideas spring forth on their own.
"Build a fort here! A mine under this! A base on that mountain top! A railway connecting them! An enormous bridge! A sea port with galleons and a lighthouse! What can't I build? Muahahaha my hands are crackling with raw power, I rule supr-- CREEPAUGH!!..."
Soon, when you respawn, you are not a mere player anymore, you are Steve, Maker of Worlds. And you eventually end up on Peaceful dammit because Creepers really start to **** me off... you, off after a while. So Minecraft automatically converts most every player into some sort of world engineer, and sharing of custom content is massively community-supported. You can design your own skins and textures with ease due to the simplistic geometry and low-resolution 16x16 textures.
Of course you want to build something awesome, why wouldn't you? It's as elementary as needlepoint or digital Lite-Brite, and you can explore the thing with your net friends when you're done! Minecraft makes 3D modeling itself a basic and accessible concept.
Set Your Sights
Maybe you simply enjoy building things in Minecraft for its own sake, which is fine by itself, or maybe you have some vague ambitions as a game developer or asset production artist.
Now to be clear, the professional experience value of creating Minecraft worlds, by itself, is not worth a whole hill of beans, let's not get ahead of ourselves. It is highly unlikely that Blizzard is going to hire 150 new artists to work on a cube-based MMO (although... nah). But all experience is cumulative, and put this together with perhaps some classes in graphic design, 3D modeling with 3DStudioMax, Maya, Cinema4D, Blender or Cuisinart or whatever the hip young kids are using these days, a smattering of programming logic and project management, and you start to have something of a well-rounded skillset. What starts as a fun hobby can turn to serious opportunities as you gather these skills along the way and doors begin to open. You may be just starting down this road now, or already some ways along.
Compared to many other, more robust SDKs and level editors, mapping in Minecraft offers a number of immediate advantages. But while there are many analogies to building an adventure in Minecraft and creating a custom map for L4D2, ultimately only certain skills transfer forward to other platforms.
They are some of the most important however, because specialized technical knowledge can always be attained, but imagination and visual conceptualization skills are much more difficult to train. The ability to plan and work within design constraints and achieve the intended effect is a valuable one. And knowing how to put it out there in a way that demonstrates some sense of style can make a big impression as you grow your portfolio of completed works.
Avail yourself of any tools you possess to help you distinguish your work. Do you have other relevant hobbies, such as writing, playing music, drawing, sculpting, acting, photography, astronomy, particle physics... that you can incorporate into your project? What life experiences can you draw upon for narrative or situational inspiration?
The best reason to choose one game over another for starting a level design project, well the best reason is because you love the game, but next best as far as a design artist is concerned is the popularity of the game, which can increase the profile of your work and see your ideas reach a larger audience. There are a number of massively popular games, but few with editing tools so accessible and fun to use. Minecraft is smoking hot property right now and it hasn't even mainstreamed yet. There are limitless possibilities with the inclusion of engine modification, the surface has barely even been scratched.
There is another consideration, which is the degree of saturation within the community of custom maps, because after a while the sheer volume of content will start to drown out lesser works and only the best will be on must-play lists. But this is actually a much smaller concern because the greatest enrichment comes from the act of design itself, and mapping titans sometimes spawn even among newcomers, other times a haggard trail of amateur projects can lead to a visible refinement of stylistic sensibilities as a hardworking and prolific designer matures.
Broaden Your Scope
I absolutely recommend expanding your experience through other mediums as well. Try your hand at video editing, do some Photoshop or Blender tutorials, learn a bit of ActionScript or better some Python, VisualBasic or C. Even Java suddenly seems relevant again.
Look into other games with level editors. If you have a Steam account, odds are you have HL2 and the Source Developer's Kit. Crack that puppy open and learn a bit about Hammer. Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are highly customizable and great fun to mess about with, its modular format is easy to learn and reconfigure. CryEngine is pretty fantastic, especially if you have some 3D modeling skills in other applications.
For more immediacy, look for other block- or tile-based games with editors to experiment with. Broderbund's Loderunner was a formative experience for me. Super Meat Boy has a level editing feature that I am looking forward to exploring someday soon.
Another similar, prior tile-based action game I consider to be fantastic is N, Way of the Ninja (aka N-Game) by Metanet. Like Minecraft, a simple and elegant concept with a few basic but essential elements with virtually limitless potential for creative interpretation. You can check out some of my maps for N here!
The Little Big Planet games are somewhat of a big deal on the PS3, if I had one, I'd play that.
The more varied your experience and understanding of game engines in general, the more solid experience will accumulate in your bones, and you will over time develop an expert vocabulary regarding game design concepts, techniques and methods that will help you communicate with other serious creators sharing your interests.
So really, Minecraft is just one block in a big thing that you're building out of... a big, uh, nevermind, that metaphor is lame.
From Playworld to Gameworld
Now, building towns, castles and airships in Minecraft is great and all, I mean it's fun to just wander around a heavily built-up server and just ogle at all the amazing architecture, certainly. It can be edifying, almost like a trip to the museum, to stir an inspiration or two. Nice to visit, but is there any reason to stay, something compelling you to explore the whole thing, or keep returning to a certain area?
Can you conceive of an activity worth doing beyond sight-seeing? An obstacle course, parlour game, race, sport, maze, puzzle, combat arena, gauntlet or other installation that just sounds like pure fun? Then you are almost ready to design and eventually distribute your idea to the general public!
To make sure your brilliant idea is realized to its full potential, you need the right tools and methods. And for it to be received in the best possible light, presentation is key.
Master the Game
If you are considering designing your own map for the first time, odds are you feel like you've seen everything Survival Mode has to offer. But have you really?
Familiarize yourself with Minecraft inside and out. Watch video demos of interesting concepts. Read the wiki [link], especially about anything you haven't encountered or utilized properly. Learn how to use rails, as they have their own logic when making junctions or stations or just about anything beyond a simple length of track. Railways, redstone and fluid mechanisms are puzzles for the designer, and certain space considerations must always be taken into account when using them.
However, if you have a burning idea but you haven't tackled all of that necessarily, then just jump in, forge ahead and learn as you go. Having a solid concept is half the battle, and making mistakes early on will only make your later efforts stronger. This is true of all creative efforts. Most critical is to have the key details of your idea proven as a clear foundation upon which to build.
Best Work Practices
First, a word of friendly but stern advice: Backups. You needs 'em. They do start to pile up, so you'd better figure out a way to archive them at key points in the build.
It is common to use a versioning scheme of some kind, v1.1, v1.2, v2.31, etc. works fine for release builds, but internally you should be creating a backup at least daily after committing changes. Remember, the more elaborate your concept, the more your cumulative efforts are going to start to resemble hard work. It would be a shame if sssssomething were to happen to it!! My own versioning scheme is [worldname] v[yymmdd] with maybe a .[hh] tacked on at the end if I'm trying something potentially regrettable all day long. Occasionally I'll complete a major milestone worth noting, so I end up with backup names something like this at times:
Minerva v110829 Minerva v110831.12 Minerva v110831.14 Bridge_Final
The advantage to this system is having clear dates of authorship and states of progress for comparison of archives.
Keep a notebook to document your ideas on paper, to establish a touchstone for down the road when your vision is obscured by the inevitable technical hurdles you will face when attempting new things. Not every idea will stick or work out as envisioned! Roll with it and keep moving. If you think the idea can be salvaged or further researched, put it aside for now and come back after completing a few other goals when you have more experience. Sometimes you can revisit these ideas later with a fresh perspective.
Sketch out overhead plans, landscape views or ornamental details you think of when offline. Try to plan the flow of your map, minimize forced backtracking and try to create loops that spin off of one or maybe two main paths connecting key areas, if you want to control exploration. With proper design you can make a very linear map appear to have a great deal of open exploration. The secret is to control the exits to large regions and skillfully interconnect the main areas with looping side routes which pass through secondary locations, rewarding discovery with more unusual loot, clues, or even mini-games, then depositing the player somewhere back along a main route or hub.
Advancing in Redstone
The redstone wiki page might look daunting at first. Read the circuit notation guide at the beginning of the page to interpret the diagrams. Soak it in slowly if you need to, find a simple logic gate which you can think of a clear application for, and then build it to test your understanding. Note that many circuits can be constructed with various space constraints, choose one most relevant to your usage: Where are the inputs and outputs placed? How much space is available to conceal it in? Does it require a pulse or a sustained signal? Does the functionality need to toggle, auto-reset, or trigger once?
I recommend having a scrap world with some clearing, possibly mass-cleared and uniformly paved with MCEdit, or just download a "flatmap" with preflattened terrain. Build all your proofs-of-concept there in the clear, so you can access all the wiring, and optionally even import them into their functional place if your prototype is good enough. Once you understand some of the basic circuit concepts, ratchet up the complexity and attempt a more difficult build, perhaps use a new logic-gate type or incorporate 2 or more simpler gates into a compound circuit.
Editing Tools & You
You know all that stuff people say about "I built this legit" or placing importance on mining and acquiring all resources in-game? Well, congratulations, as a map designer that no longer applies to you! Save that integrity for the actual game. It may feel icky or wrong at first, but here's several reasons why Cheating is for Winners in the map design game:
- Time is of the essence. Value your time and maximize your productivity by learning and using the right tools for the job. Game design of any kind typically begins as a hobby and is limited to your recreational time, so use that time well! And if you are seriously considering a career as a rockstar in game design, this is a no-brainer.
- Certain things are impractical or just downright impossible in vanilla building mode. Certain items are not obtainable through normal gameplay. Don't you want some nice cobwebs and lovely ice blocks? Do you really intend to farm slimeballs to make all those sticky pistons? There's loving craftsmanship, and then there's insanity.
- To build the box you need to be outside the box. The Game Master has to know where every dungeon is located, every treasure, every trap, what's behind every wall and under every floorboard. Where is that tricky pocket of lava or that dirty sneaky hidden spawner in the corner? Only you know for sure!
- Pretty much any other reason I can think of boils down to #1.
There are many other extremely useful tools out there now, however, as Minecraft's broad fanbase seems to include many skilled programmers and 3D artists. Have a look at some of these and other tools available on the forums:
- NBTEdit
- World Painter
- MC Dungeon
- Cartograph_G
- binvox
- pic2map thing
- redstone planner thingy
- ...
- [add links]
Regarding Mods
Note here that creating custom mods is not currently within the scope of this article, but I will discuss some generalities about mods and a couple in particular which I use.
I only use two mods currently, both of which I also find fairly indispensible now. The first is TooManyItems, although it appears that 1.8 will make this fine mod almost completely obsolete, except perhaps for the Trash which is nice. Anyway, if you're still building in 1.7, you should be using TMI for level design. Just don't be tempted by it if playing a world for fun.
The second mod is Single Player Commands, which I was introduced to by a fellow mapmaker, my friend and rival Albarel (don't tell him I said that!). SPC has a plethora of features accessible via a command line and is very powerful as a building and map tweaking aid. The uses I have for it are mainly enhanced run and jump to get around my own obstacles quickly, superpick/instabreak, and turning off damage and item drops to speed things along. Waypoints are also a nice feature.
Flying and noclip (pass through solid objects) are also very useful commands but can cause glitchy rendering sometimes, so I try to avoid them except for under certain conditions. Avoid loading new chunks with these activated and you should minimize bug encounters, to my experience.
There are many interesting mods that extend gameplay with various new mobs, items and even new dimensions and environments, and some map makers have created works using these. Largely I have stayed away from added content mods, mainly because I don't want to play with toys that will end up broken in a month. And until Minecraft goes retail and the official modding support is in place, I won't use any of these in my own maps, a personal decision because of the value that I put on my own creative time; I prefer my works to have longevity.
However, there is something to be said for being on the bleeding edge of development, and sometimes maps showcasing particularly excellent mods can get them the attention they deserve, occasionally even unto official adoption by the developers. Some mods, such as AdventureCraft and the Portal mod are well-established and have a large enough following that they are probably safe bets for keeping maintained projects in. So I say, if you feel it, go for it! The mod-makers love it, for sure.
That's what any of us are really making this stuff for. Firstly, to create something to please ourselves and express our own creative vision, and secondly but still importantly, for the enjoyment of others, to be appreciated and hopefully make a lasting impression. Works not created with these as the primary motivations tend to lack some kind of soul. Although, being showered in money is occasionally nice too, I'm told.
Exploiting the Engine
Every game has quirks, bugs and hidden properties which can be exploited in unusual, and sometimes very useful ways. As map designer, you are free to use these arcane techniques as you will, but there is always the risk that they will become patched out or superceded by a future update, especially in a game with rolling development like Minecraft has. Ask me about my 7km railway system powered by booster carts. Yeah, it broke. It was worth it at the time though.
Sometimes it is worth it -- hitting the web first with a new idea or unorthodox method can gain you some community recognition or influence, but if you want your map to stand the test of time, take steps to future-proof it by not invoking effects that are likely to break after one update. Although, it's not always clear what the game designer (in this case Notch and the Mojangles) has intended with regards to secondary or undocumented game behaviors, and some fun times can often be had within the loopholes in the code, ask any rocket-jumping Quake veteran.
Know Thy Player, Know Thyself
If you wish to reach the widest possible audience, certainly don't assume your players understand any unconventional gameplay ideas outside of their vanilla game experience, though some obviously may. If you need the player to use an item in an unusual way or perform an obscure operation -- for example even placing redstone properly is for many players a mystic art -- be sure that you give them clear guidance, or at least solid hints if some mystery is required for a surprising puzzle. Well-written signs are great. Visual cues are awesomer, by about 20%.
Player patience in Minecraft adventure maps is short, partly because custom maps are abundant and free, and because the only thing preventing them from spawning diamond armor and TNT to get around your puzzle is you, constantly conditioning them to understand or figure out what is expected of them in a given situation. I'm not saying players are stupid, I'm saying the fact is that, short of modifying the game code directly, you (thus far) cannot restrict player access to key facets of Minecraft Survival gameplay, such as crafting, or adjusting the difficulty slider to Peaceful, breaking and building blocks, dousing your lava pits with water buckets, or jimmying iron doors with redstone torches and TNT, at least not without limiting player access to many common building resources, and thus limiting your own choices in construction materials.
Therefore if you have any gameplay "rules" that must be adhered to, you are often relying upon pure player immersion to keep them mindful of your intentions with the game. Players want to be challenged and entertained, but not frustrated. When they can break through virtually any substance with their bare fist, they must be regularly rewarded or encouraged to stay within the bounds, much like in real society. Did I just blow your mind, or... no? Well then, moving on.
Gameplay Concepts
Now you should already be familiar with the basics of gameplay in Minecraft -- you punch trees, you craft tools, you break blocks, you place them again, sand and gravel falls, water flows in its peculiar but logically consistent way, you mine in caves, you must light the darkness, Creepers are pure evil, Skeletons and Spiders are to be feared, you kill animals for food, wood burns, items can trigger plates can trigger redstone, dogs and minecarts and boats and portals and all these things that currently define the MC gaming experience.
The game already offers these in a loose sort of way, throwing various instances and combinations of them at you more or less randomly, often to great effect, but we know after a while what the engine and the terrain generator are going to cook up, for now at least. But all of the systems at work between behavioral AI and simple physics modeling and various mechanical simulations interact wonderfully such that many types of gameplay are possible, and a few genres have already defined themselves and blend in various ways:
Singleplayer (SP)
Survival - A controlled take on familiar SSP rules. Resources are scarce and the world is often exceptionally hostile. A typical goal is to complete some sort of monument or totem composed of rare materials. Variations on the theme often export the player to more exotic landscapes -- huge lava caverns, planetoids or skyways, for example.
Adventure - More action-oriented, sometimes with a mix of puzzle and combat elements, exploration is usually rewarded and a stronger narrative aspect ties the map together. Players expect a sense of direction and progression from such maps, and sometimes a bit of roleplay and simulated NPC interactions can be introduced. This category of maps can vary widely, and I suspect they are the most popular and numerous. Everyone wishes Minecraft would be a little more adventuresome.
However, adventure maps generally require the most planning and work overall to pull off effectively. Unless they are very short and straightforward, the complexity in the demands of imaginative variety and balanced advancement of gameplay increases rapidly. Many beginning mappers initially overreach with the intention of creating an epic fantasy world, but release a product that is aimless and empty, with a lot of pointless travel through unremarkable territory.
I will be addressing these issues specifically in later sections.
Puzzle/Escape - This type of survival adventure map is less-forgiving, and particularly Escape maps tend to share a similar scenario, along with games like Portal and psychological thrillers like Cube and Saw: the player is trapped in a deadly puzzle of fiendish design, and needs to perform the correct actions to avoid an unpleasantly sudden demise. Players of these maps just love abuse! What does that say about those who make the maps..? A drawback to these types of maps is that a failure can often render the map uncompletable without restarting fresh, although that's just par for the course I guess.
Puzzle is a much broader term inclusive of Escape types, you don't have to be into BDSM to enjoy them all, but likewise they tend to have a mysterious location to break into or out of using wits, clues and items in unusual ways.
Parkour - ...is a $2 word for platforming in Minecraft. It's a cute term appropriated by the creator of the amazing Mirror's Edge tribute map which caught on, so I get it in that sense, but the fact remains that Steve is way more than he is Neo.
Parkour maps are basically purely jumping puzzle maps, which sounds fairly mundane because it is a pretty basic type of action, but they can sometimes be very entertaining if done properly. These maps are best enjoyed by players who wish to hone their skills and reactions in a variety of situations, and with imagination, some challenging possibilities can be devised. Sometimes player guilds expect a certain level of technical proficiency from members, and use maps like these as training courses, a tradition dating back to at least Quake Team Fortress days, to my knowledge.
However, because failing a series of difficult jumps repeatedly can be punishing, you need to not have expectations or setbacks too ridiculous to keep the player from rage-quitting, at least not without building up these challenges procedurally.
Multiplayer (MP)
Sports/Racing/Contests
Co-op Adventure
Roleplaying (RPG)
PvP/Anarchy/Faction Wars
Note that few of these are exclusive to just Single- or Multiplayer, but some genres lend themselves better to one or the other. With planning, many SP maps can work fine in MP games.
A Time and a Place
Every good map needs a proper setting. Perhaps you have some puzzles, traps and other gameplay ideas in mind you are eager to utilize. These are all very important elements, but your real challenge as designer is how to make them have any relevance to the player. "Why am I here? And what is the point of these constructs?"
Some pretext for the venture in the form of even the simplest narrative is at least necessary.
Your world design needs to convey a sense of place. You must justify to the player the reason for the surroundings they find themselves among. It needn't be stated outright, even ruined buildings remain vaguely suggestive of some former purpose.
Decor is the key, utilize your full palette in a controlled way to differentiate regions and unify areas under a common motif. Is the location civilized or primitive? What era? Is it urban or rustic, industrial or domestic, sylvan or rocky, wealthy or humble? Historic, fantasy or science fiction? Are we set in a well-known real world location? What are the landmarks? Does the map begin during the day or night?
Another aspect of your setting is the atmosphere, which can come partially from explicit story, but which comes across much more though attention to detail. Background objects, deliberate use of color, lighting and materials, sound effects (such as are possible), and the use of space and scale all have a psychological impact on the player, especially effective in first-person games, serving to immerse them in the experience.
Set a theme for your map, decide if the mood is light, cute, dark or scary. Well-chosen text cues reinforce the character of the map, setting the tone as comical or serious, sane or twisted.
Tell Me a Story
Nearly every successful action game has some sort of narrative behind it which further defines the setting, even the simplest and most abstract games, though it may only be implicit by the title:
Asteroids is not some buggy limited-license application involving a thrust-accellerated triangle, which emits dots to subdivide and delete irregular polygons that otherwise crash the program if direct-selected by the cursor. It is a tense science-fiction drama of survival in the chaotic harshness of space, and a tale of conflict with a mysterious hostile alien race. Not only that, but it is inevitably a heroic tragedy, for all but the most prodigious players.
Pac-Man? Several interpretations have been suggested, but at the very least, we know the player is ravenously hungry, following trails of crumbs through a maze of death, but his ghostly pursuers are comically vulnerable: under certain circumstances they can be converted to calories as well, and the player spits out their eyeballs. An actual cutscene reveals that the ghosts are not all that frightening underneath their sheets, perhaps a deeper commentary about persecution and the struggling victims of ignorance and authoritarianism in society? As before, this story almost always has an unhappy ending, unless you are Ken Uston or something.
Donkey Kong... bah too easy. By this time, Shigeru Miyamoto had already realized all of this and more. The player's motivations are clear, as the premise is based in popular culture since the original classic, King Kong.
The objective of saving the girl from a giant ape is a textbook case of emotionally manipulating the player, providing a sense of heroic effort in pressing Jump, and holding the joystick right, left, up as you climb the broken girders of a skyscraper construction site turned to chaos. As your megasimian antagonist is periodically hurtling projectiles at you with all of his might, you feel elated as you nimbly outsmart him, only to be denied once more and thrown into a new and more dangerous situation.
The tension builds until a climactic battle at the top, where you must methodically engineer your enemy's satisfying downfall. Yet as he plummets haplessly before you to an almost certainly gruesome fate, do you not feel a remorseful twinge of pity for this magnificently singular beast?
The story ends, not as a tragedy, but a heroic victory with romance benefits. And then, most happily of all, the now-beloved villain is too tough to die! He makes a surprise comeback and it starts all over again, gently taunting you. "How high can you try?" That is some masterful game design.
One more, throw me a tough one this time! Oh, Tetris? Sure uh, okay. You're in Russia, hardworking everyman breaking down the walls of the materialist castes that divide society, or maybe just you, from your vodka and toilet paper or -- okay I'm reaching there. But, while it is technically an action puzzle game, and many versions exist with purely puzzle graphics, Tetris games often create at least a minimal setting using the backdrops and musical cues of various nations. Breakin' blocks and goin' places. As for an actual narrative... got me there. I think Chess has more actual plot than Tetris.
If you give a player enough busywork, you don't need a story, such as in sports, races or parlour games, but there is still an appropriate feel to such locations. Many various arenas, tracks and arcades exist to serve as examples. Know your audience and cater to them by providing environments that compliment the action, and players will usually modulate their own playstyle to fit into the picture.
The Ley of the Land
You also need to consider how you wish to introduce the player into the scenario. At the very least, include a short rulesheet with an introductory paragraph explaining the player's predicament. Another common tack is using signs in-game, which is very hard to do attractively, or in a way not detrimental to immersion, but may be a necessity at least until books and notes are introduced into the game.
The problem with only giving the player the rules in a separate document, as I can attest from personal observation, is that the player is not likely to remember detailed paragraphs (the sort I tend to write) once they are surrounded by spiders or on fire, nor are they inclined to pause the game and Alt-Tab over to a text file to search for what exact blocks they can break or not. I still think a guidebook is valuable for players to provide an overview before playing, but your game must be self-contained and self-explanatory once the campaign is begun.
A wall of signs is a bloody eyesore, but depending on your approach, acquainting the player can be made seamless to the game experience. If you want the player to immediately sally forth and conquer, perhaps you start them off in some guild hall or library where these tenets of play can be displayed in an authoritary way. Or if you are introducing gameplay concepts gradually, only tell the player what they need to know at the time.
If you must assault the player with a literal wall of text, at least make the verbage clear and concise, and format it appealingly to make it readable. The copy should be brief and to the point, like Hemmingway writing haiku. Try to summarize a full message into the four 15-character lines you have to work with, admittedly this can be extremely challenging. But no text should span more than two signs, unless you are using signs in some unconventional way, such as to create ASCII murals, hieroglyphics, a memorial or maps of some kind are possible exceptions that come to mind.
Read the signage yourself several times to be sure it serves to inform rather than confuse. Ask someone to proofread if you need to. Almost nothing is more appalling than a bad or hard-to-read sign, especially one with critical info. Formatting text on signs is a pain, mostly because there is no insert feature, but don't be squeamish about removing and reformatting one that is crappy-looking, it's par for the course.
If you must place signs right next to each other, make sure the text formatting doesn't mislead the eye out of sequence to the same line on the next sign over; this is a common problem with sign walls. Don't forget to make sure that the lighting is adequate to read any important information!
Some of the DO's and DON'Ts of signage. (Click to enlarge.)
Still writing sections about these and other subjects:
- Pathing & Layout
- Visual Impact
- Construction Standards
- Technicalities
- Publishing & Promotion
I'll be adding to this over the next few weeks as I finish more sections, adding links and images and such. Let me know what you think!
1
Awesome!
My map I want to make accesible to all players, yet I do limit the resources... I will make a much easier one next.
I use kind of the shell-shock experience that Three_Two uses, where you can scavenge enough resources to live, but not get comfortable.
But I do rarely use the blaze spawner, the ghast spawner, or the cave spider spawner. I will use them on rare occasions.
But they will come out in the final areas of my map... [puts on evil grin]
2
So I heard that that poor guy MattGeek1997 didn't have a banner... Poor him.
What do you think?
Good.
Ma boy, remember, if you still have the signature saying that Withers are cute, I iz disappoint. Change one word.
Withers ---> Bats.
5
What defines a CTM map is that it has an objective, and it is tougher than normal vanilla minecraft, with a different environment.
Vechs was the first ever to think up of the CTM genre. He had already made a couple survival maps, but they had no objective, so they were never really complete. Vechs got bored of just surviving, so he made the monument system.
I believe the biggest reason that defines a ravine between adventure maps and CTM maps is the fact that in an adventure map, you have very VERY strict rules, with basically no difficulty. On the other hand, a CTM map forces you to survive in a land in the hands of a maniacal mapmaker with the means to twist the terrain in any way he pleases. He can limit you to no diamonds or iron until very late in the map, or throw billions of mobs at you. The means of a CTM map maker are to make aesthetically pleasing areas, with ultimums of different levels of difficulty, where as the adventure map maker has to build awe-dropping structures for a player to explore.
2
Change dat signature.
1
Hmmmm...
*Downloads
*Get's pwned by [REDACTED]
*Respawns on top of world with no water pillar
*Quits
1
A lot of people may say that it is a copy of Legendary, but I wouldn't say so. I think that you have very nice structure layouts and you really spend a lot of time on it. Now that ModLoader is out for 1.4, I will have to start working on my map
1
It's alright. You don't need to feel that way. I guess I was a bit to harsh on what I said, and I guess I didn't completely understand it. Can we just make up and continue on with life? If so, then we can end it, and we won't continue on. Hope we can do it.
-WittyWhiscash
1
-WittyWhiscash