I highly recommend watching the video, since it has a lot of visual aids and I tried to make it as concise as possible.

Hello and welcome to this Door Kickers 2 Editor tutorial, where I’m going to walk you step by step through the process of creating your own and unique Door Kickers 2 map. We will be looking at everything from building, illumination, enemy placement and behaviour, game modes and how to publish your final product to the Steam Workshop. As I go, I will show you all the controls, how to optimize your map and will teach you some neat tricks I’ve learned along the way. If you are looking for something specific you can fast forward through the chapters on this video’s timeline, or you can check out the timestamps in the description down below.

Without further ado, let’s start mapping.

So, you have played a few rounds and now you suddenly got this great Idea for a map, you open the Editor and you see something like this. You can open any of Door Kickers 2 Maps in the editor, but for this tutorial we are going to start a new map by…
clicking FILE > NEW…

Set a name for your Map, we will call this one House, and leave map width and height as is. You can resize your map at any time during the building process, you will even be able to crop the map into a desired form, but we’ll talk about that later.

You don’t have to worry about map scenario, challenges and briefing info quite yet. Let’s click OK and take a look at the UI.

The Editor is quite straight forward; This is the live view of your map, and to the left you have the list of objects for your map. In the top left corner, you’ll find the Editor’s menu. The most important thing for now is Help, which has an overview of all the keyboard shortcuts. Here in the middle, you’ll find the different tabs for all the entities you can use. On the top right you can configure the grid size, disable the grid and toggle the snap to grid. If you select specific layers, all of them will show in the live view of your map, but you will only be able to select the layers active here.

Now let’s build a house, shall we? First, let’s move these two out of the way. Select Buildings from the menu at the top, scroll all the way down, and select wall. Click to set the starting node of your wall, and by clicking on every corner, create your first room. You can cancel the node placement with the right mouse button. Clicking and dragging the wall icon will move the whole room, doing so on a node will change the room’s shape.

It is good practice to place your first node outside of the Wall icon, that way it is easier to manipulate the nodes at a later point.

You now have your first room and you can see how it would look like in-game by pressing and holding the space bar. To fix that seam in the upper left corner of our wall, press ctrl z or y depending on your keyboard to undo the last wall and create two new nodes that touch somewhere along the wall, instead of meeting in the corner. Press space again to see the result.
When building an adjacent room, you can double-click a wall to create a new node and then create new walls from there, or click on already existing nodes and continue from that position. This three-room house is a good start for our first map.

We can now place some doors and windows. Select a door from the buildings menu and place it on a wall. Use the mouse wheel while pressing shift to rotate the door, press ctrl as well to rotate the door faster. You can use this for every object in the editor. Keep in mind not to place any doors or windows directly on wall nodes.

Our house now needs a roof. For this, select the roof tool and start building it as you did with the walls, clicking along the outer walls of the house and making sure to join the line back together at the end. The roof in Door Kickers 2 is obviously invisible, but it will allow us to set different lighting and sound conditions for interior rooms later on in this video.

Oh, and before we move on, let us add a fence around the house, for a little bit more privacy.

To paint or retexture the floors or the exteriors we are going to open the Paint menu. The materials that you find here come in sets of four and you should only use one set for each room, since the textures do not blend between sets. To show you what I mean, we are going to click on the grass material and start painting our garden. Now, change the shape of your brush, select a different texture and change the size of your brush using shift and your mouse wheel. When drawing this path, you can see how well the textures blend together. Use this to make your floors look more alive and interesting.

If you now click on Add Material and try to blend this grass with another texture set, this would happen. Press ctrl z to undo and just use it to paint the floors of the house.

Let’s start placing some objects on our empty map. At this point you can disable both the grid and snap to grid, just for some visual clarity and freedom of placement.

After switching over to Objects, you will be greeted by a myriad of entities neatly sorted into categories. Click on living room, select a table and place it in a room. When an object is selected you can see its coordinates, rotation and scale. You can use this menu to fine tune the position of the table. If Auto Y is selected, the object is automatically placed above the object beneath it, this is very useful when placing small decorative stuff.

Deselect the table by either clicking on an empty space, or pressing escape. Grab a chair and let me show you some shortcuts; you already know how to rotate an object using shift while scrolling, you can also rotate an object on the X and Z-axis by pressing shift X or shift Z respectively while scrolling. Hold ctrl on the other hand to scale the chair up and down with your scroll wheel. After placing a human sized chair, you can ctrl click on it to automatically select the chair from the menu. If you want to duplicate a chair with all its properties, you would have to use the old ctrl-c and ctrl-v to copy and paste it. You can also select various objects by either marking them, or clicking on the objects while holding shift. If you copy and paste various objects simultaneously they will group together and stay that way, until you ungroup them in the bottom left corner. If you happen to have an object that you cannot select because you have placed a bigger one above it, you can click on it twice while holding ALT to select the one underneath; you can repeat this to go through all the objects you might have stacked on each other. This is called depth-selection.

So, you now know the building basics, go and explore all the assets from the object menu and build something pretty. Oh, and before I forget, we have been working for a while now, so make sure to press ctrl-S regularly to save your progress.

Nice… okay let’s talk about lighting. By now you might have noticed these icons here on the top left corner of your map, the first three are for configuring the maps illumination and the other two are for sound, which we’ll cover in a minute. The first Ambiental light affects things indoors, and the second one, outdoors. Everything that is under a roof, which we covered while building the house, pun intended, will be considered indoors. Light direction pretty much defines where the sun or the moon are shining from, and its intensity.

After reducing the indoor lighting intensity a bit, let’s click on lights. Here you’ll find different light types you can play with; choose one, drag it into a room and set it up as desired. You can find these Lamps I used here in the Prefabs tab. Make sure to set your indoor lights to Shadow if you don’t want them to shine through the walls.

The two remaining icons up here let you configure the type of reverb sound you will have in your map, both for outside and inside. Click through the available options to find the one that fits the environment you are building.

If you click on the sound tab, you will find all the sounds available for your map. Ambience sound can be placed wherever you want, since their default values will let you hear that sound all around the map. Place another sound emitter on your map and click it to see its audible range. You will hear that sound as long as one of your units is located within the blue circle, and you will hear it at its loudest when you are within the green one.

To make a room have a special type of reverb, pick Effect Zone and draw the area of the room you want to sound different, like for example the kitchen or a bathroom.

In the GFX tab you can configure the map graphics like weather, fog, and shadow options. You can have a snowy map if you click on snow. You could now easily go over to paint, select the material set you used for the ground around your house, and replace it with a snow set.

Now there are two more tools we need to look at before we start to implement gameplay and AI elements into our map, and one of them is the Terrain Tool. Go to Buildings and use the Terrain Tool to crop the map as you desire. A point to note here, you cannot use this tool twice, so if you were to make a pool for example, you would have to draw a gap when cropping and joining the lines back together. While we are at it, you can add water to this gap by using the water shape object to create your pool area, do this by clicking with a little distance around the edge, and then lowering the shape underneath the surface. [Pause a second] You will find different objects for your pool in the exterior decoration category and BLING, perfect.

Now, the Terrain Tool we used before will only hide the ground texture outside of the selected area, but everyone can still walk on the now invisible floor texture. This is where the movement blocker comes into play. Go to buildings and use this tool to define all the accessible area on your map. As the name already indicates, no one will be able to cross this striped line, or fall into the pool, that would be embarrassing.

You have now created a wonderful map and it is time to add some spice to it, unless you wanted this to be a 1v1, of course.

Click on Humans and scroll all the way down to start adding some friendly spawn points. The Deploy slots are the spawn points available for your units at the start of the game. Place some units on these deploy slots. The number of occupied slots defines how many units will be available for this mission. Here you can already set the unit types that will spawn by default, but you can always switch them out during the deployment phase.

You can also add one other friendly unit, a sniper. For this, click on Sniper Position and place it at the edge of the map. Select it and rotate it using the scroll wheel while pressing shift, the red area will show you the Snipers area of effect.

Now let’s talk about the bad guys. Choose an Insurgent and place him on the map. When selected, you can configure that enemy’s behaviour and spawn locations. Click on Add Alternative Spawn to randomize this insurgent’s spawn location, don’t overdo this though if you want to be able to complete your map with a single plan. The AI settings are pretty much self-explanatory. If you want a unit to roam around a certain area, set it to roam and define the roaming radius. You will have to place at least 2 points of interest, or POI, within this radius. You can find premade POIs under gameplay, like chairs, or you can add an invisible POI wherever you want. The Insurgent will then move between these as long as they are within range and he’s not alerted.

Make an enemy sit or pee somewhere by placing one of these interaction items, selecting the insurgent you want and set it as a target for him. Instead of targeting it, you could just set it as a POI by making it attract enemies.

There is another way to make the enemies move around the map, and that’s by using waypoints. Let’s start by selecting Waypoints from the gameplay tab. You can now set a starting point and create a path around the house for an insurgent to follow, a patrol, for example. An enemy can interact with a waypoint in two ways; you can target him as we did before and make him follow the path until the end, he will then walk straight back to the starting node. This will work as a patrol and the enemies will engage you if they see you. The other way is through a trigger.

Triggers are simple switches for activating unit behaviour, lights, or sound, and are found in the Gameplay tab. Select the Trigger and target your patrolling insurgent, and then target the Waypoint, linking them together through the trigger. You could now set it in a way that, when a friendly unit enters the blue area, the targeted unit will start its patrol. Using the waypoint system together with a trigger, will make the unit sprint along the set path without stopping to engage you, and it will also not go back to the starting node. Using the trigger on a waypoint also lets you spawn in units that will follow that path. No matter what action you select when spawning these new units, they will always engage you if they can. As mentioned before, you can also use Triggers to turn on lights or sounds, but disable those beforehand if you want them to turn on by a trigger.

So, we are nearly done here, but before we look at how to publish our work to the steam workshop, let us go through a few things you will need depending on the type of map you are building. Under the Gameplay tab, you will find these three zones; the rescue zone is for rescued hostages and VIPs; the escape zone will be where scared civilians will flee towards; and the EVAC zone will be your evacuation point in raids. These destroyable objects are your objectives for the raid game mode. If you want your mode to be bomb defusal, you can use one of these two types of bombs. And last, we have these three areas; roaming civilians will not enter a civilian exclusion zone and the danger area forces absolute stealth or go loud, this means your CIA agents will be recognized if detected. The limit area does not have any use as of writing of this script.

Now one last step before uploading your new creation. Click on Map Settings on the top left corner of your screen, check that you gave your map a really cool name and then select the scenario for the map to be played in. Here you can also set up to three challenges for your map; if you choose clock race, make sure you play your map at least once to set a best mission time. But honestly, I would really expect you to test your map before uploading it.

And we have arrived, you can now click on Publish to Workshop if you want to make your map public, give it a good description, maybe write some lore about the mission, and share it with the world.
This is the end of the video now. At this point, I just want to mention a few things; one of them is that, when building a new map, try and consider different routes to your objective to give the player the choice between a stealthy approach or to enter guns blazing, especially now that the CIA operatives are a thing. If you need inspiration or want to know how a specific map is built, remember that you can press CTRL+E on any map to open it in the editor. This works to jump right into the game from the editor as well.

If you need any help, consider joining the Door Kickers discord server, where the community and the developers will help you out with any questions you may have. Shout out to Void for his amazing content on the editor and for being the inspiration for this tutorial, and also to Panguino, for helping me figure out the editor and having time for all my dumb questions. You can find all the links in the description down below.

That’s it for this tutorial on the Door Kickers 2 Map Editor. Thank you for watching, and happy door kicking.