[MP Level] [PK3] Cole207 Custom Tracks Pack (Version 1.1)

Cole207 · Jan 23, 2019

My first custom tracks pack is here!
Screenshots!

OhNo Cup

UFO Cup

Battle Maps

Version 1.1 Changelist

- Now with PK3 format
- Battle Plus support added
- Final Lap Music support added
- Fixed the Checkpoints

D00D64 · Jan 23, 2019

Well... it technically functions. I guess it can go in releases...

I just don't have the time to go in depth with all of this, but hopefully, others can provide you with some feedback, because there is certainly work that needs to be done. There's a fair bit of quantity, but not a lot of quality, I'm afraid. Oh, and when you update, I highly reccomend making it a PK3, especially since this is so large. Music files take up a lot of space!

Twins'R'Okay · Jan 25, 2019

Holy SHIT that was bad

So, I just hosted this with a few players on board and

Ho

Lee

SHIT
that was bad.

Okay, since I can't cover everything, let me give you a generalization of this pack and its flaws

Exhibit A: It's Bland
I admire the variety in stages, but a lot of these were so boring to look at, compared to the other packs on the MB. They were bland, devoid of life, and looked clearly rushed. But I can excuse it a little bit if it had good design.

If it had good design

Exhibit B: It's designed badly
Blind turns, Unnecessarily narrow roads, Unclear direction, Bad item placement, you name it, this pack's got it ALL. Even the best stages in this pack are ok at best, Seriously, even Aura Remastered had more quality in its design, and that's a disservice to the Aura pack itself!

Exhibit C: The checkpoints are broken
Do I need to explain this one? The waypoints are just broken beyond belief. Resulting in shit where everyone is in 1st, everyone

. This also means that because of the broken checkpoints, The dynamic item roulette is essentially fucked, sometimes giving good items to the player in first, in first.

Overall:
There is no salvation for this pack by merely tweaking, no, if this pack is getting salvation by any means, it's going to be in the form of a complete overhaul. This is a great example of quantity over quality, I'd much rather have around 1 - 5 tightly designed and focused stages than ~10+ hackjobs of a stage merely for the purpose of "adding more" to the game.

Don't take this the wrong way, but if you want a make a stage thats considered good, you're going to have to do a lot better than what you did here

Chromatian · Jan 25, 2019

Twins'R'Awesome said:
Quote

Your over-dramatic flair does nothing to actually help the author understand where the flaws in his design are. Telling him his checkpoints are broken without even a suggestion on where he can go to find the solution is helping no one, including yourself.

That being said, trying to go through every map and point out the details would give you way more information than you'd be able to feasibly sort through, so I'm going to talk about your two best maps (in my opinion) and mention some general tips you can apply to all of your maps.

New Ink City

A mostly solid design with some issues holding it back, and general new mapper syndrome kicking in. Immediately out of the gate the player has to react with an S-turn. you want to give the player some space right at the start for Rocket Starts or breathing room each lap. Every edge of the course is a wall, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it lacks variety. Walls also immediately kill drifts, so if you want to go easier on the player, consider using offroad for some turns. I'd change it to 5 laps instead of 4.

Sunset Star Zone

A unique design with some cool turns, but there isn't much going on here. You have all this space, but you just aren't doing anything with it, so the drive around the course ends up being a lot more bland than it needs to be. Toss some offroad on the edges or a few sloped turns/humpy roads to add some variety to the course aside from the raw layout here.

General Tips

-Give players A LOT of room to turn if you're going to force them to turn after a jump. New Ink City slams you into a wall, and Sunset Star Zone throws you into a death-pit after dropping off of a cliff.

-Use a different texture for your road and your walls. What makes most of your courses confusing and/or bland is the fact that no matter which direction you look, you see the same color. Seeing landmarks or areas to turn becomes difficult when everything blends into itself.

-Keep the number of item sets on a course low. New Ink City really only needs the item set right at the very start of the course. You want the player to think about how to make the most of the item they have. If there's another set of items too close by, they're going to toss what they get immediately to grab another item. Don't feed the gambling addiction, make them play smart.

If you want more specific tips, check out some of the tutorials on our Discord of play one of your favorite levels and specifically sort through what you really like and dislike about each one. That will help you narrow down what you want to do with your map to help polish it up.

Lastly, focus more on one or two maps at a time. Level/course design takes a while to get right, and while you can make many maps to get a wide mishmash of different skills. You need to get the fundamental design down first before you can branch out into the crazy stuff.

TehRealSalt · Jan 26, 2019

Ho Lee Shit Twins' post makes me feel like I'm looking at the MB in 2009, when being unfunny & borderline flaming was the cool thing to do. Get off your high horse and lay off; regardless of how bad you think something is there's no excuse to be a complete ass about it.

For a few quick really easy adjustments that'd go a really long way to making this pack better for me: make most of the 4 lappers into 3 laps, and scale down the "tiny" mobjscale maps even more. I didn't feel a reason for any of the maps being 4 laps other than making some races drag on. I also didn't feel a reason for the scaled maps' road widths being tiny -- you're already scaling them down a lot, so what's a little more?

toaster · Jan 26, 2019

I'm watching the video you put up on YouTube (since I don't often get the opportunity to try new stuff with people due to scheduling) and while I see a few issues with the scaling and a bunch with the texturing, the problems with this pack absolutely did not deserve Twin's childish screaming. I would re-iterate Sal's criticism, but I have something else to add:

During the decade of development leading up to the 1.0.0 release, the Krew experimented with various arrangements of items and boosters in various in-development maps. One thing that they learned was that having an item next to a booster, and forcing the player to decide whether they wanted the item or the boost, was something that only helped players in first place - since they would almost never want the item, they would get the boost 100% of the time. Meanwhile, players in later places would need the item to catch up, and that item would not always be better than (or equivalent to) a boost - which means that they'd often end up disadvantaged either way. To that end, if you don't want boosters across the entire track, you shouldn't put items where the booster isn't to avoid the issue outlined there.

In addition, one consistent issue with your battle maps is that there are often hallways connecting two distinct areas, where that's the only (non-hidden) way to get between them. You'll find that the official maps generally have more than one way to get from point A to point B, and rarely have any places to get cornered in.

In short, it's a totally valid first try. You didn't hit the mark perfectly, but there's so much room to grow and ways to tweak your existing assortment such that they'd be quite fun popping up in a server's rotation. Good luck on whatever you decide to do with it in future!

Cole207 · Apr 4, 2019

I updated the map pack to version 1.1

Go see what's new.

[MP Level] [PK3] Cole207 Custom Tracks Pack (Version 1.1)

Cole207

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D00D64

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Twins'R'Okay

Mid-tier Pixel Artist

Chromatian

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TehRealSalt

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toaster

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Cole207

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