Good Map Practices
On this page you will find various tips and tricks on how to improve or achieve certain aspects of mapping. It will guide you through building in a specific way, that will make the map play differently, despite the changes seeming small. You will learn methods and special ways of using the tools at your disposal to make your map more unique than just the standard door-room-spawnpoint configs.
Here's a list of things you can find on this page:
- Double Door Method: Locking rooms rather than doors
- Zombie Shortcuts: Making shortcuts for Zombies to travel through
- Suggested Prices: The recommended price values for guns and doors
The Double Door Method is not about actual double-doors. It is a special way to achieve a way of playing a map, in which buying a door doesn't just unlock that door, but rather an entire room regardless of which side you buy it from. Here's an example of a simple map that does not use this method:
In this map, if you open all doors in a certain direction, you will end up with all rooms opened, but one rather pointless door left. Buying this door has no real purpose, as it just leads back to the spawn room. However using the Double Door Method, you can make each door open a room rather than just a door. This is an example of the same map but using this method:
In this, each room has two doors seperating them. The doors of the same colors are linked together and will open at the same time. With this method, when you open a certain direction you will be left with the last red door. But this last door is linked to the one leading back to the spawn room. Buying the either red door will also remove the last pointless door; regardless of which side you bought it from. Another good thing to remember too is that you will never see these double doors in gameplay. During gameplay you will always only see this one red door from where the arrow is. You will never see the blue one, as that one will have opened before you could even step foot into this room giving vision. This of course does not apply to transparent doors such as fences.
In many maps, some areas are overpowered and allow players to easily just loop the entire map without any danger. In some maps, you even have too many short routes but want the config to only have a few longer routes. But blocking these off completely, just results in the problem of too big looping routes. Zombie shortcuts can help make these better. Here's an example of a Zombie shortcut:
Using a combination of a Barricade with no planks, but with jump animations, an Invisible Wall, and a prop to give some visual indication in-game, you can achieve a shortcut that only Zombies can pass through. The Invisible Wall will block any player from jumping over the prop. The Barricade will, since it has no planks, instantly trigger the climb animations on the Zombies passing it, and will also nocollide them for the duration, making them walk through the invisible wall. The prop isn't needed, but without it, players will think they can just run through and zombies will also awkwardly climb in mid-air.
For the best balance and gameplay experience, wall buys and doors should not have too cheap or too expensive prices. If they are too cheap, the map can become too easy. If they are too expensive, it can make the map very hard to progress through. Here are some suggested values of wall buys and doors:
- 500: First door, pistols, semi-automatic & weak rifles, weak snipers
- 750: First/Early doors, stronger pistols, stronger snipers
- 1000: Mid-game doors, SMGs
- 1250: Late-game doors, weak automatic rifles, strong SMGs
- 1500: Special/Very big rooms, medium automatic rifles, pump action shotguns
- 2000: Strong assault rifles
- 3500: LMG's and high magazine weapons
- 4500: Strong sniper rifles and special grenades