Author's Note-Some of the campaigns we see submitted to our site every day aren't just pretty bad, they're terrible. Many of the people who make these scenarios with the large brush, using only the first four terrains, because "they don't have time for anything else". This article is NOT for advanced designers, and is only nominally usefull for intermediate designers.

Creating Fairly Good Scenarios

The caliber of many scenarios produced by beginners can be massively improved in just five minutes or so, using a variety of simple, idiot-proff techniques. These techniques won't make you an excellent, but they will make you a good one, and one at least worthy of a review here at AOEH. The following tips apply more or less in chronological order as your scenario takes shape. Beginner and Intermediate designers, take note.

Storyline
So many scenarios and campaigns are based on "the good guys" and "the bad guys". A crappy scenario with an excellent plot will at least be redeemed by an excellent plot. Make up nonsensical names and city names for your countries and cities. Instead of presenting just a list of instructions, open with a paragraph or two of storyline, and tell us a few tidbits about your people's religion, personality, whatever. Get the player hooked before he even begins playing.

Generate Grass Maps
A vast majority of scenarios are produced on large-sized maps, the default in the scenario editor. The result of this is that the grass/desert patches and rocks added with the grass brush do not appear. Even if you use a large-sized map, click one generate map anyway. This will give what would otherwise be large stretches of grass a bit more life by adding a few rocks, trees, and so on. You can delete them later anyway.

Fade oceans
Oceans are composed of mostly deep water, with a band of regular water between them. Once you've set this up, use the tiny brush to scribble bits of deep water down the middle of rivers, along the boundary between the deep and regular water, and so on. Clean breaks do not exist in nature.

Use the Tiny Brush
I use the tiny brush almost exclusively in the editor. This prevents you from setting down forests that are more or less square, and by painting on forests with a tiny brush you give the forest a more open, natural feel.

Mix Trees
Mix together pine and forest trees together to make forests that look more realistic. This is simple and takes literally a few seconds, but the visual effect is enormous.

Elevations
Elevations will give life to any bland area. Look around you. Most likely, you see hills. If an area is a stretch of nothingness, add some hills.

There is no such thing as a square hill, or a hill that is perfectly shaped. vary elevations and shape when you create hills.

Paths
Desert is the material of choice for paths. PLEASE, don't make your character walk by a palm tree in the middle of the mountains because you couldn't bring yourself to delete them.

There is no such thing as a straight path (are we beginning to see a pattern?). Make your paths wind and twist, and bring them over hills, etc.

Eye Candy

Many of the newbie map designers who submit their work here have apperently read the design tricks in our Seige Workshop section, and have used the eye-candy tips described there, but have left the rest of their maps bland. Place eye-candy in strategic spots where the player will see it often. These include along paths, on battlefields, and in enemy towns.

Villages, Towns, and Cities

No one, except the Romans, built square towns. If your village has a wall, make it, at the very least, L-shaped, or T-shaped. An interesting village will have a more creative shape.

Villages were not meant to be bland collections of houses with desert paths around them. Number one, they have trees. This is especially nice in smaller villages. Make sure you give the computer villagers access and proximity to some other wood source, however, or they'll cut all the trees down. For more on trees, check out the excellent article in the Links section below, by Rasher.

Playtesting

Please, PLEASE playtest your own stuff. It it bores you, it'll bore anyone else. By the time you're donw bug-checking the thing you should be sick to death of it. things that people DONT want to see include:

-Scenarios where you start with 90000 of every resource (with a few exceptions)

-Scenarios with huge, pointless battles that require little or no tactical thinking

Bridges

The bridges used in two of the eye candy articles here are excellent for large bridges, but what about small foot bridges over rivers and whatnot, or (as in Ingo Van Thiel's The Two Brothers) a rope bridge over a canyon? For this, cover desert in a careful arrangement of skeletons. This looks really great, especially on smaller bridges where you can bend the lines more and make the bridge look "curved". This works very well for making small docks too.

Links

http://aoe.heavengames.com/siege/MapDesign/bitmaps.shtml

This is our Map Design nexus here at AOEH. Anyone new to map design should give it a look.

http://aoe.heavengames.com/siege/MapDesign/Rasher/wccsdchap4.htm

Chapter Four of Rasher's design series talks more about the idea of putting trees in towns, and has some truly awesome screenshots.

Hopefully, with these tips in hand, you will go forth to achieve....well, at least mediocrity

Joe

[This message has been edited by Joecool1 (edited 12-18-2003 @ 04:41 PM).]