NEBULOUS: Fleet Command Making a Puppy Map: The Beginning

The Difficulty Budget

In any new project, not just Nebulous maps, it is important to identify the features that are at the highest risk of having unknown complications, and how much effort those complications might add to the project. Doing this for each feature to be implemented can give a rough estimate of how difficult, or how much effort, the project will be to complete. I like to arrange things into high difficulty, medium difficulty, low difficulty, and negligible difficulty buckets. High difficulty items are those that I have no idea how to get started with. I don’t know where the unknown complications might arise. Medium difficulty items are those where I know what the complications will be but I don’t know how to address them. Low difficulty items are those that I know the complications for and I know how to address them. And lastly, negligible difficulty items are those that I know won’t have any complications.

Estimating the difficulty of each feature also gives a rough approximation of the timeline to complete the project. While raw effort forms the basis of the timeline, the difficulty estimations inform how much the timeline can vary. Many high difficulty items can cause a project to expand to the point that burnout can occur and the project won’t be completed. The amount of difficulty that can be absorbed in a project is what I call the “Difficulty Budget.” Difficulty budgets can vary from person to person and project to project. The important point is to set a budget and stick to it. For myself I maintain a general difficulty budget of two high difficulty items, four to eight moderate difficulty items, two to five low difficulty items, and an unlimited number of negligible difficulty items. This equates generally to a month of possible extra time addressing complications.

Shattered GiantShattered Giant is the first map I created. It is set in the ruins of a giant spaceship orbiting a sun. The sun slowly orbits around the map during the game, changing the quality of the lighting. When I was approaching this map I intentionally kept a smaller difficulty budget than usual because I knew the process of mapmaking would present many small problems that would need to be solved. Aside from making the map itself the only other difficult items were creating a map with no rocky structures and having a map that changed (albeit superficially) as the game progressed. Both were features not present in any map at the time (at least as far as I was aware), so when I encountered a problem I had to solve it myself. Those two features and learning the process of creating a map filled the difficulty budget for Shattered Giant. I pushed other complex features off to the next map: Bulwark Naval Yards.

Bulwark Naval Yards 5-3My second map I started with much more confidence and ambition than the first. Now, instead of the map changing continuously without input from the players I would make the map change as the control of capture points changed. In addition I was going to create one of the most visually striking maps in the game. Both of these features I estimated as high difficulty features, as I knew what I wanted but did not know exactly how to reach that goal. Bulwark Naval Yards 5-3 is set around a giant mining station and shipyard nestled in an asteroid cluster in deep space. The station itself has dynamic blinking lights as well as several floodlights that provide the majority of the illumination on the map. There is a mining drill attached to four of the capture points that activates and plays sounds, animations, and particle effects when the point is first captured. When the remaining point is captured a repeating animation is triggered of a ship leaving the top of the shipyard. The ship that leaves is determined by which team owns the capture point. I stepped up the visual quality of the geometry and textures and combined with the lighting and particle effects this was one of the high difficulty items on this map. The other high difficulty item was making the map react to changes in capture point ownership. Medium difficulty items included making the blinking lights, adding team dependent custom announcers, adding sound effects to many areas of the map, and adding team dependent deployment text. The difficulty budget of this map was roughly twice the size of the first map, and in total the map was an approximately two month project.

Tamarack Shipping Depot 3My current project is a map set in a container shipping depot in the orbit of a planet. The first high difficulty feature of this map is the stationary artillery emplacements located around the map that act as hazards towards the players. The second is an asymmetric capture point layout that breaks from the traditional layouts which generally place capture points at equal distances from each team. It is important when starting a new project to start work on the highest difficulty items immediately. Learning where the complications are quickly is key to determining if the feature is even practical to accomplish. To that end the two items for Tamarack are both finished, leaving only moderate difficulty items such as complicated animations, a custom skybox with a beautifully rendered planet, and other special effects that I haven’t done before.

Conclusion

Throughout the rest of this series of articles I will be going into more detail about the mapmaking process. I will have technical articles that go into detail on achieving one specific feature as well as high-level articles that talk through my decision-making process on the larger features. The next two articles are available now. They discuss how to handle player feedback and how to achieve the particle effects used on Bulwark Naval Yards.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3414317448

Making a Puppy Map: The Beginning

Directory

The Difficulty Budget

Conclusion

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