Continuing the trend of doing map related blogs, heres another entry.

Today is a somewhat special day to me as it will be the first time a map I made will be played in a tournament, which doesn't feel all that weird to me right now as I've been making a more than acceptable level of maps more recently, but it still took about 2 years time to get here, which gives a bit of a weird feeling after all.

My last blog left off at retiring from mapmaking, and as you can probably see, didn't go as expected, and will mostly be what I'll write about in this blog.

While I wasn't doing any more mapping after the last blog, I still had lots of mapmaking thoughts circling in my head remaining.
and with that, from day to day slowly puzzled out some mapmaking things subconsciously.

Alongside this occasionaly some new ideas came up which I would scribble down on post-it's, slowly becoming a little pile on my desk.

What happend next is that I got a lot more free time in my life, to much time to handle probably, as I was slowly growing bored of whatever I was doing at the time

So there I was sitting at my desk, no desire to really hit up any games, and on my desk a pile of ideas for maps.
The decision to fire up the editor was an easy one at that point, I dug through the pile of post-it's and picked the one that stood most out to what I felt like making at the time.

And so I began working on maps again, after a few minutes in, I considered that I might as well stream this so I can have instant feedback and maybe entertain someone at the same time.
Suprisingly enough, the stream actualy got a good small following.

During this stream session, I also had a little talk with Baz, who was sitting in the chat at the time.
For those who don't know, Baz is a 2v2 community figure that also hosted a 2v2 tournament recently.
What the talk involved was showcasing a bit of 2v2 maps/works in progress, and the opportunity to get a map in the next edition of his tournament, which sadly enough is still being prolonged until more interest in 2v2 pops up.

And at the end of the stream session, the scribbling I picked up ended up as this

Which may not seem as much but it definitly felt like a huge jump in my mapmaking abilities, despite not having done any work in the editor during that time.

With the possibilty of actually getting maps played, new ideas pilled up, and available time, I started working a bit more seriously on maps again.

Delivering to Baz, I updated an older map that he was interested in.
going from this:

to this:


However, motivation quickly started dropping again, and despite that decided to pick up what would end up being quite a big task.

One of the scribblings, which I decided to pick up next, was a rework of Annihilation Station

I was quite content with the design philosophy, but it didn't really end up working well on the map.
Outside of the location of bases, I didn't really plan the rest of the layout well before making this one.
The scribbling contained mostly new ideas to approach what I didn't like it, and so I went to work on it, first trying some small modifications to the original, but before I knew it had 3 different map files, each with multiple versions of their layout.

Hours and hours went by, as well as multiple layouts and designs being scrapped over and over but to no avail.
The next step I decided to take was gather more feedback before continuing, out of this came something a little funny to me.

When asked what size the map was I came with what seemed to be an absurd measurement, which to me made sense at the time.
What turned out to be the case is that I had been measuring map boundries completely wrong during all of my mapmaking from day1, and ofcoures, the new measurements made a lot more sense, though the work in process was still fairly big, and I cut out some refinements.

With a smaller map size, the options became somewhat more limited, but also made it more clear what the right moves were and I felt more confident about the layout.

A few more adaptions later, the layout was finaly finished, but this was only the layout, and so began the process of decorating, which took quite a few more versions and hours.

About at this time, the next team liquid map contest was announced, which really made me pick up the pace.

Finalizing the artwork, the end result was this


Looking around for new ideas, none I felt could really match the reputation of TLMC.
One option which I ended up going for was a rework of Mahatma, my last map before the break in my activity.
Tinkering around it a bit, I changed it from this:

To this:

The map didn't have much going for it that made it exciting, but at least it was an entry on level.
And as final entry a bit of a joke map

A rotational Frost.

And so the waiting began for TLMC.
It was exciting to see what fellow mappers came up with during this period, but skipping forward a bit, TLMC results were still slightly dissapointing.
While Kantu's, IeZ's and ferisii's were all good candidates, adun's shrine and timberwolf were really ruining the mood here.
When 2 more mediocre maps end up between the finalists of what is supposedly the holy grail and only clear route mapmakers have to ladder, you can imagine this causing quite some fustration to all contestants.

This especialy when word was given that "we learned our lesson" when it came to high ammounts of free bases like on deadwing, only to see it happen again anyway on adun's shrine.

After this impact, upon an already low motivation to make maps, I'm doubtfull about where my activity status will go.

For now, I'm happy Dune Trenches ended up in the map pool of 2 tournaments, one of which will be later on today, hosted by basetradetv, definitly recommend you check it out: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-tournaments/479533-twovstwournament-tweurope-edition

Besides this, along with the other mapmakers out of the community, I will be helping a bit in organizing the map pool for the next shoutcraft clanwars, and I reall hope we can deliver on viewer expectations.

As said before, I have no idea what I'll be doing next, but should my adventures in mapmaking continue, I will probably write another blog.
I hope you all enjoyed the read.