Illijah's Map making experience

Taken from forum!

I had someone message me one day: How do you make your maps? It seems like you put a lot of work into it, it must be a lot of stuff to do and add, but how did start?

Well let me explain. When creating a map, the first thing you gotta think about is: "What kind of map do I wanna make?" This is very important. If your making a Single Player map you gotta think about will it have a story or not? If your making a multiplayer map you gotta think about what kind of multiplayer map. A saw? Sniper? Something NEW? Now since I make more SP maps then anything, I'll talk about how I come up with many of my maps.

Final Burst process:

This took me over 4 months to complete the ENTIRE series. Its probably my biggest and only SP campaign map I've created. Something that I didn't want to do though was make a simple typical SP map. So one of the first things that I thought of is making a BIG map to make it seem like a full chapter to the game series. Something VERY important is the story and dialogue. If you haven't seen any of my maps, I add A LOT of dialogue to my game. It's important for the player to understand what's going on and why it's so important. Something also important which is where I go crazy at, is the gameplay. My Final Burst series always had a new gameplay idea. Many consisted of upgrade systems, side missions, exploring caves, collecting secrets for rewards, using the "car" for a dramatic escape and so on! I even added a boss battle! Now how did I even come up with the idea of doing any of that? All I do is play other peoples PB2 maps and then create something BETTER using some ideas of my own and from the game. When I was playing The Awakening, something that I LOVED about his games was the amount of dialogue and story put into the game. So I added that idea to the game, but I wanted to make the cut scenes feel REAL and ALIVE, so I added A LOT of movement to cut scenes, not only characters, but to the environment as well. A good example of that would be my RPG Money 2: Wonder City map with the Tower. Another idea that I loved was the Indiana Jones maps where it felt like you were exploring and the train part was EPIC when I first played it. But I wanted to make it more EPIC. So in my Wonder City map, to start the train I added a range missions where you had to protect the battery, but not be too far from it or you could lose. Then I added a moving train mission where pods are falling from the sky with enemies trying to kill you with some drones at one point. If your trying to do something new, IMPROVE on someone else work.