A group of my co workers are doing the same, one of us made a map but its....not good. What would you say are some fundamentals of well balanced maps? Or good duck game maps?

Originally posted by Sproglebee:

A group of my co workers are doing the same, one of us made a map but its....not good. What would you say are some fundamentals of well balanced maps? Or good duck game maps?

I think the base of a good DG map is that the spawn positions are balanced. So that every player has an equal chance of getting at least some kind of gun and not being in danger of dying instantly.

This is really hard to achieve, because either some players have higher ground than the others, or two players are in the middle of other players and thus are exposed to more bullets than the ones on the edges.

So what I usually try to do is that I try to place crappy weapons more closer to the spawns and then more powerful weapons to places where players need to compete in order to get them (risk vs. reward). Also giving lower-ground players a chance for an armor/helmet makes up for being at a disadvantage in position.

Also I think it's really important to be able to move in the map freely, so that there are multiple ways to get into locations and not get locked in (e.g. a trampoline that gets you to upper floor fast).

You say that your map was not good. Why is it not good? Can you see during the play what's wrong? Is it too random? The round ends too fast? The round outcome is always the same?

Maybe there's too few options for players, or too many options? Maybe it's too small or too large? Are there too many different weapons in the map? What do you want from the map, close combat, survival with poor weapons, more ranged combat, competing for the "gold" weapon?

Try to think a theme for a map and then build around, and don't be afraid to change the map (sometimes dramatically) if something doesn't work. Hope this helps :)