Finger on the Trigger (Editor)

Finger on the Trigger (Editor)

This covers my latest foray into the map editor, not gun ownership as the title may imply.

Something was always missing. My previous endevours into the map editor weren't exactly failures, though not great maps by any means, I felt like I had a handle on the terrain editing, texture painting, doodad placing process necessary for creating a basic melee map. Yet I yearned for more. As a programmer by trade I wanted nothing more than to leverage my previous experience in the service of design but there was always something standing in my way.



If you've spent any amount of significant time with the Starcraft 2 map editor you're likely familiar with this, it's the trigger editor and for the longest time it was preventing me from truly enjoying the custom game development process. It sits in a kind of uncanny programming valley, meant to be simple enough for a novice user, safe enough to protect players from malicious map makers but powerful enough to do whatever you require. It serves many masters, few of them particularly well and it is a language unto itself, very little of it documented in an easily accessible fashion, helped little by overly complicated tutorials that never quite do what you need them to.

Given the number of times I've loaded up the editor in an attempt to learn the ins and outs of the trigger editor I could be forgiven in being a slight bit pessimistic; but inspired by the simultaneous disgust and fun i was having with the current batch of games on the 1.5 arcade beta I loaded up the beta version of the editor hoping that the changes instituted in the patch would be of some assistance. To my surprise the most effective change was a simple URL linked directly into the splash screen.



Yes, it's more tutorials. Yes they've been there since mid 2011, but by just drawing my attention to them I was able to make a break through. They're extremely well put together building up all the way from terrain creation to a simple campaign level in a way that doesn't assume prior knowledge. Games are a participatory activity and as such necessitate an amount of teaching and tutoring but the overlap between teaching and game design has never been clearer when comparing blizzard's tutorials to the communities efforts.



If you've ever felt the urge to learn but didn't know where to begin: these are great places to start, I walked away after being glued to my screen for a few hours with a much better idea how to achieve my own design goals and I'm very much looking forward to dipping into the improved UI and Cinematics editor come the release of patch 1.5.


GLHF.