devtrackers.gg
In February, we discussed some of our thoughts and plans for our editor and the experience of creating and playing custom maps within our game. We also asked you to share your experiences with player-created content, and what you would like to see from our tools and custom game experience.
As usual, you provided us with a great deal of fantastic feedback, and we have gone through all of it. The discussion even spanned multiple forums–in addition to the Reddit thread, we also heard from RTS fans on the SC2Mapster Discord, and on the Hive Workshop forums.
Official Campaign Maps
/u/DrTh0ll asked for the ability to open campaign mission maps in the editor to help custom mapmakers learn from the scripting and triggers we’re using to create them. Our engineering team is currently working hard on getting our custom scripting and data systems established so our design team can use them to build all of our maps and content for exactly this purpose. Our goal is to give players the ability to open as much of the content we create as possible in the editor–we know it's often easiest to learn by example.
Griefing & Banning
On Hive Workshop, Dr Super Good asked that something be done about griefing in custom games. We saw this in StarCraft II as well: some players choose to troll custom game lobbies and disrupt the rest of the community’s ability to enjoy certain games. Griefing and toxic player behavior is a difficult problem to tackle, especially in free-to-play games like StarCraft II. That being said, we’re taking it seriously and looking into various ways to minimize the impact of toxic players in our game, including equipping our custom map creators with the ability to ban specific users from playing their map.
Create-to-Earn?
We really appreciate the avalanche of feedback you’ve shared on monetization. As shown by the range of opinions that chimed in, it’s a complicated area. Some of you, such as /u/scbroodsc2, advocated for maintaining a completely free to play UGC experience. Others like /u/lemindhawk, suggested that heavily curated monetization for high-quality UGC makes sense. If we decide to create a structured way for creators to monetize their work, our goal will be to find a sustainable solution that feels good for players and modders. These discussions will prove valuable in helping us achieve that.
We also saw several of you suggest creating some form of streamlined donation or subscription model that lets players support the creators behind the maps they enjoy playing the most. We’ll be investigating guidelines for any rewards that protect the integrity of the platform and community.
Custom Campaigns
Many of you, including /u/LordJafud and /u/FluffyMaguro, called out the importance of Custom Campaigns and the associated functionality to support them. This includes saving and loading, achievements, cinematics, story mode hubs, how maps are structured or grouped, license checking for working with official campaign and co-op content (some great discussions under this thread), and concerns around discoverability if we decide on map sharing as opposed to publishing. This kind of feedback is very informative for us as we dig into how we’ll support Custom Campaigns in the future. The extent to which we incorporate these various features and how they specifically function in our game is still being determined, but we hear you on how important Custom Campaigns are and we’ll be giving them the attention they deserve.
Did any of you use the StarCraft II Custom Campaigns feature that was shipped in the 5.0 patch? What were your thoughts on how it was handled? What would you change?
Security & Ownership
Many of you highlighted the importance of securing maps and banks/save files to prevent others from stealing your content or cheating in your games. Clearly, we want creators to be able to protect their creations from theft, and we’re looking at our options here. Uncle suggested the StarCraft II system of publishing maps might be enough to secure them, which is something we’ll be taking into consideration. Some of you pointed out the importance of server-side banks for storing information about player progress and stats to prevent them from being tampered with. While we will definitely be looking at server-side banks as an option, we’ll also be looking into other solutions.
UI Modding
We received a couple comments from /u/SC2FB and /u/scbroodsc2 about making UI modding as easy as possible. This area is more complicated for us because we’re using the UI tools built into Unreal Engine 5 for our game. This has the byproduct effect of making UI more difficult to mod compared to terrain, script, or data. We’re considering enabling a secondary way to build UI through script, similar to dialogs via StarCraft II triggers. As part of that, we’d also potentially include some tools to hide, adjust, or change the default UI.
Map Size & Dynamic Loading
Dr Super Good and Rui both mentioned the difficulty of fitting a wide variety of content or areas into a single map because of size constraints and impacts on loading times and performance. The good news is that the maps we are currently trying to support with our tools are 1024x1024, which provides significantly more space to work with compared to either StarCraft II or Warcraft III. Unfortunately, load times and performance would likely remain a challenge on the largest maps. We would like to support map-to-map loading, which could give modders the option to improve performance on larger maps by breaking them up into several smaller ones. But this is something we’d be tackling further into development.
Editor Tutorials
We saw a lot of great comments about tutorials, and it's a topic we’ve been discussing. We first and foremost are striving to design our editor and associated systems in an approachable way, but we’d love to hear even more of your ideas about learning tools and tutorial systems for the editor.
All of us at Frost Giant Studios are incredibly grateful for your thoughtful feedback and support. Lots of other great UGC-related topics spun up around this conversation–topics we’re eager to dive into with you again in the future as we continue development. /u/CADi_Master recently started a new thread discussing UGC monetization specifically in more detail, which we also found very interesting. We hope you enjoy the game we’re building for you–and we can’t wait to play what you create, too!
-The Frost Giant Team
Previous Discussion Topics:
Previous Responses:
- Our Thoughts on Heroes
- Our Thoughts on Asymmetry
- Our Thoughts on Onboarding
- Our Thoughts on Teams
- Our Thoughts on Win Conditions
- Our Thoughts on Social Features
- Our Thoughts on Competitive Map Design
- Our Thoughts on Esports