Hi teptonic56, welcome to Hive. I saw your post and I completely understand the excitement — when you have a cool idea, you want to make it right away. But I have to be honest with you: Build to Fight 3.6.3 is way too complex for a first map, especially if you've never used the World Editor before. That kind of map needs custom UI, multi-unit controls, and a lot of advanced triggering. Even experienced mapmakers would find it challenging.
I want to share my own story, because I was once exactly where you are now.
When I first started making maps, I also had zero experience. My very first project was a campaign — I wanted to create this big story with Jaina closing a space portal while the Undead invaded. I thought it would be easy. But I couldn't even understand the trigger editor because my English was poor and all the functions were in English. I didn't know how AI worked, so I just assumed giving the AI a campaign hero would make it fight like a melee hero. Nothing worked. I ended up with a completely broken map.
So I stepped back. I started making simple melee maps instead — just designing the terrain, placing units, and watching the AI fight itself. Sometimes the AI would get stuck in its own base. Sometimes I'd place monsters next to the AI's base just to see what happened. It was silly, but it was fun, and it taught me the basics.
Later, I found a Chinese editor called YDWE that made triggers much easier to understand. I also learned how to extract official campaign maps and study how Blizzard made their triggers, cinematics, and quests. I spent countless hours just reading other people's work. Eventually, I made my own campaign maps — they were terrible by any standard, full of unbalanced abilities and broken mechanics. But each failure taught me something.
Then I spent a whole year making a hero arena map inspired by a classic Chinese custom game. I created ten heroes from scratch, testing each one in actual combat, fixing bugs one by one. After all that work, I finally released it on Hive — where a reviewer kindly marked it as "Simple." It stung a little, but they were right. It was simple. But it was also finished, and that's what mattered.
My horror RPG map took two to three months and over a hundred revisions before I was satisfied. It also got marked as "Simple." But those two "Simple" maps are my proudest achievements, because they're proof that I didn't give up.
My advice to you is this: don't give up on your dream project, but give yourself time to learn the tools first. Start with something tiny — a map where a few Footmen fight each other. Learn how to place units, edit their stats, and write one basic trigger. The Tutorials section here has many beginner guides. If you really love Build to Fight, play it a lot first and study every mechanic. Then try to recreate just one feature — not the whole map.
If you run into any problems while making your first map, feel free to ask me or reach out to the map reviewers here on Hive. They're very helpful and patient.
Every experienced author here started exactly where you are. You can do this. Good luck!
