Every Mapmaker's Style

[bobdaduck]

I recently downloaded every map ever made, and have been going through them one by one, and I feel its really important that I share some takeaways

All of these are tongue and cheek and affectionate, I just went through a ton of really, really old maps, nothing is hid from me including your first attempts at mapmaking

Sky_lark's mapmaking style is really big maps with so many lineitems it is permanently unclear what you are supposed to do (featured: Sky_Lark's "machine")

skylark.PNG

Quartz' mapmaking style: Fruit themed bottlenecks (Seen: Quartz' "Battle of the Bananas")

quartz.PNG

Arctic's mapmaking style: Dungeons that look like this:

capture.png

In arctic's defense, most maps from Zap! era ended up like this, teleporters were simply the thing for mapmakers to do

Little_Apple's mapmaking style: Free for all maps with approx 4 polywalls and a healthpack

Sam686 mapmaking style: take any old household object, such as a healthpack, and then string 70 of them together to make a carpet. That's your map. Shown: Sam686's "distraction curve"

Capture.PNG

Hampster's mapmaking style: Build a nice basic level outline, nothing too fancy but definitely decent, then take enough turrets and forcefields to fund another afghanistan war and cover the whole bases with them

Footloose mapmaking style: There is no map, but there are lots of lineitem drawings of things (pictured, footloose' "Splinters secret lair")

footloosestyle.PNG

CrazyLinuxNerd's mapmaking style: The same as hampster, except the turrets and forcefields are in the hallways instead of the bases, and they all have 1 second repair time

DrSpaceBar's mapmaking style: if the entire level isn't composed of isolated rectangles, its not a DrSpaceBar map

drspacebar.PNG

Blackbird's mapmaking style: angry birds art and slipzones that is it goodness

Opti's mapmaking style: Really small ranty maps

Lone Wolf's mapmaking style: pretty much just races

Santiago Zap!'s mapmaking style: When he's not doing collab maps, Santi is making making slipzones and turrets. Not maps. Slipzones and turrets. Sometimes just drawings of things.

Kaen's mapmaking style: Make some nice open level with just the right amount of obstacles and then paste the entire thing with lineitems over every barrier, a technique he learned from quartz' fruit levels. If I remember right he had a plugin for this, which he called "auto-quartzing".

Watusimoto's mapmaking style: Wide area with asteroids, with a smaller inner area protected from asteroids, and a giant "Bitfighter" logo splashed across the middle

Raptor's mapmaking style: Plug something in to the svg to barriermaker converter tool

Cloakdood's mapmaking style: Circle

Amgine's mapmaking style: make a tic-tac-toe board, that is the level

Zoomber's mapmaking style: empty the level editor sidebar the way a toddler empties his toy bin across the room

Fordcars mapmaking style: I haven't found a single fordcars map in all of bitfighter's history

Invader Alex' mapmaking style: make a solid basic design, then shrink it enough that players will feel pleasantly clausterphobic, somewhat like a cattle chute

Lamp's mapmaking style: Lamp is not a prolific mapmaker yet, but Lamp's flag dungeon will always have a home in my server and in all of our hearts

Furbuggy's mapmaking style: Pretty hard to discern, I want to say speedzones everywhere but I might be mixing him up with someone else

Unknown's mapmaking style: Giant void of emptiness that would take three solid minutes to cross separates two bases. Each base has a speedzone.

Thread's mapmaking style: Anything to push the boundaries of innovation. Like me, nearly all his maps are levelgenned, and they are nearly all extremely decent.

Qui's mapmaking style: Qui had a few hits but most of his maps are like, barriers that aren't even aligned to anything and resource items everywhere

Haha these are dead on! Awesome write-up

How can your maps be summarized?

[Skybax]

How can your maps be summarized?

Yeah bob you forgot to do yourself

and me

[bobdaduck]

How can your maps be summarized?

Yeah bob you forgot to do yourself

and me

I have no idea what my mapmaking style is

I couldn't for the life of me figure out anything iconic, all of your maps are completely different from each other

[raptor]

Skybax' style moves as a leaf aloft in the wind

All of these are so accurate, made my day :')

Tbh, I'm pretty glad none of my maps have made it to Bitfighter history; they are mostly completely empty Unnamed maps, sometimes sprinked with stacks of thousands of test items ontop of eachother.

[Skybax]

all of your maps are completely different from each other

This is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me

[Santiago ZAP]

Yeah bob you forgot to do yourself

bob doesn't make new maps, he makes new gamemodes

Yeah bob you forgot to do yourself

bob doesn't make new maps, he makes new gamemodes

Oooh that's dead on.

Tic tac toe board isnt my style thats only one of my maps

I ahve other maps like terrible trio all my classic remixes swarmed and my contest levels ( which I cant say tehre names yet)

mostly my style though is remixing old ideas.

[Little_Apple]

A tic tac toe board map sounds a lot like a remix of an old idea to me...

Invader Alex' mapmaking style: make a solid basic design, then shrink it enough that players will feel pleasantly clausterphobic, somewhat like a cattle chute

To me, chock points and bottlenecks forces players to interact with one another and make you more aware of the layout and flow of the stage. Having players consistently interact, I think is good and fun. Also I made a lot of my levels small because for a long time, it hard was to have matches that was more than 2vs2. So I adjusted accordingly, making my maps a lot smaller than the official maps which I think were meant for a lot more people.