How do YOU make a jump map?

[johnnyenglish]

With the impending urtJumpers-CMM mapping contest on the horizon there are a few mappers who have never made a single jump.

I know there are a few jump map makers here, I wondered if you'd care to give a few personal tips, hints and advice for novice jump map makers.

[Douze]

Hum... I don't have so much experience but I can give you some tips I found mapping AND jumping (it's really personal, other jump mappers may proceed differently and disagree with my jump experience):
- When I create a jump
1. I have the jump in mind so I just map it and I test it (just simple brushes and textures: I just want to fix distances here)
or
2. I don't have the jump in mind (douzejumps ) but I have some plateforms shapes / general ideas in mind and I try to make something
- You have to finish (talking about jump skills) your jump map and not to depend on an other (pro) jumper !
- No randomness in your jump ! I made some stuff with a circle shape to gain speed but you had to hit the correct angle and this is so annoying for others...
- Connect you jumps with corner corridors so you don't have to hint you map
- Don't make it too hard (except if you wanna make the hardest map ever !) if you wanna convince more people.
- Difficulty should (has to!) increase.
- IMO, lighting is even more crucial on jump maps than on standard maps. Atmosphere (for me) is really important on jump maps, and honnestly, there are only a few really good jump maps (atmosphere).

I wanted to talk about spawn, lemming,... but I thought about X-RaY's post: http://www.urtjumpers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=918.

To conclude (I don't like long posts...), I'd say there are several kinds of jump maps: old school, realistic, outdoor,... / unique design, multiple design... so choose your style (or create a new one !) and enjoy you own map !

[Markinho]

1- Think of original ideas, pretty hard step if you never jumped; inspiration comes from experience
2- Build in radiant to test distances, most of times the final version is different than drawings, whatever lol
3- Design, you shouldn't need help here :p

[xandaxs]

I usually draw jumps in a paper sheet.
Then I build then in Radiant and from the on it's testing, modifying, styling, etc...

[HappyDay]

First thing I decide is how hard the map is going to be. Most jump maps are pretty hard simply because most jump mappers are pretty good jumpers. If your aim is to get your map played by a lot of people you have 3 choices. Make it very easy (e.g. uberjumps, happyjumptutorial), make it very hard (e.g. dontgetwet) or make it start fairly easy and let it end hard (e.g. Icyjumps). Thinking about it now, maybe it's not that simple to categorize the maps. What you want to do however is to make sure that the jumps for your intended target group are challenging but not so hard your target group gets frustrated and quits.

Next, the number of jumps is quite important, too. If your map is very easy and you only do 5 jumps, chances are people finish it too quickly and won't come back again because they pretty much can remember the jumps and see no challenge anymore. On the contrary if you have 300 hard jumps it's impossible to reach the end in one session and every time someone wants to have another go at the jump he got stuck he has to do the 150 hard jumps first to get to where he left last time. If it's too hard a challenge motivation is low. Maybe this isn't that much of a problem anymore as it used to be (since some servers allow you to save and load your position even if you disconnect) but still I wouldn't advice it. So you have to find a balance here. I don't know what that magic number is. Maybe somewhere around 20 jumps that are not too easy.

Ok, let's assume you have decided how difficult your map is going to be. You now try to imagine an interesting jump, or even part of a jump and quickly build it in radiant with some simple platforms. Compile and test the jump to make sure it is possible to do and it's the intended difficulty. Obviously you need to change and test over and over again until you're satisfied. And voilà you have your first jump. In the process of building more jumps you might notice that you want to rearrange the order of the jumps to make sure the difficulty throughout the map is how you wanted it to be.

Probably before starting building your first jump you want to have your theme in mind. Later you want to be able to add enough detail around your jump to fit your theme. You want to use the same theme for the whole map and not make every jump with its own set of textures and completely different architecture. Still you can make the jumps look fairly unique if you have some kind of consistency throughout the map. For example if you have the same kind of architecture for all the jumps but different textures. Or if you use the same teleporter to connect all the jumps, or something like this. I think you get the point. The jumps have to feel connected, you should be able to say by looking at the jump "this jump looks like it belongs to this map".

I think that's all. Imo it's a lot easier to make a jump map than a frag map. There are just very few points you have to pay attention to in order to make a good map. Pick a nice looking theme, build interesting jumps with the right difficulty and combine theme and jumps into one map.

Oh, if you want to make icy jumps you want to check out rambetter's surface generators to create interesting shapes: http://mapgen.nerius.com/

I hope that helps

[ValkoVer]

Think of what jumps You want to have in map (just play some of existing maps), choose theme, and then think of how You can add these jump ideas to theme. Then try to build one of jumps, compile, and check if You can jump it. If You can't, try to make it easier, but not too much Repeat, blah blah blah.

[xandaxs]

! addition to Happy Day's post.

You can also choose making a map with several levels of dificulty (such as Jupiter) which has 4 levels (Easy, Medium, Hard, Team).
Everything else was adviced before, which is basically - build it, test it, fix it -