- Joined
- Jul 10, 2006
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The Poll
The Contest
User | WIPs | Entry | Download Link |
| Kino | WIP 1 | The Catacomb Chronicles | Download |
| Sclammerz | WIP 1 WIP 2 | Treasure Rush | Download |
| DD_legionTN | WIP 1 WIP 2 | The Mystery of Vigolateria | Download |
| ZiBitheWand3r3r | WIP 1 | Treasure Hunt | Download |
Cokemonkey11's judging
Kino's The Catacomb Chronicles
Originality/Creativity | As far as I’m concerned, this is quite original for warcraft 3 maps. • The player must enter tombs and search for clues, but avoid defiling them. The clues point to the correct artifact. The player is left to “leave” the map once they’re confident they’ve found the artifact desired. • Mechanics are mostly well implemented, and a lot of attention to detail has been made. • I didn’t particularly enjoy the gameplay, but I think with some refinement you might get a niche style that others enjoy. | 9/10 |
| Theme | The theme is very well tended to. I particularly like that you consider treasure as being some particular object desired by others, rather than just a generic chest of loot. | 30/30 |
| Aesthetics | Terrain and functional objects in the map are really nice. Everything about the map presentation is well done. • The skin used for the main chronicler (and this name, chronicler) are a bit silly. | 19/20 |
| Gameplay | The game is engaging, but trying to understand and make use of the hints throughout the map is a bit annoying for me personally. I think someone could really like this. • Ability systems are implemented nicely, although in some cases I wouldn’t say I’d do the same things as you. A spellbook for saved “journals” isn’t something I really agree with. • I like that you made a lot of effort to make this replayable for people who are interested in this sort of map. | 18/20 |
| Triggers/Code/Performance | Basically GUI, but mostly avoiding usage of TSA. • I don’t see any major leaks. • Seems quite functional and maintainable. | 5/10 |
| Polish | I found one object which when observed opened cinematic view but didn’t have any description. • I found it a bit anoying that using objects that provide some relic more than once kept giving you more and more ‘relic’ items. I understand why you did this, but there are ways around it that would make this a little nicer. • Otherwise the polish is fantastic, consistent with other works from yourself. | 8/10 |
Sclammerz’ Treasure Rush
Originality/Creativity | The concept of having a dungeon crawler where you’re racing AI opponents to the treasure seems original, but it’s not very well executed (racing the opponents is not relevant, and offers very little feedback since you can’t observe their behavior other than knowing they’re “almost reached the treasure”). It’s also a really minor twist on an otherwise simple genre. • The story/introduction is very much cliche and tired. • Visually quite boring. Hidden switches inside of units that look like doodads aren’t particularly impressive. (I have healthbars turned on!) Hints are also a little overly condescending. | 4/10 |
| Theme | • Thematically relevant: we’re hunting for treasure. • Story introduction is a little cliche and unappealing. • Very little to desire related to the theme otherwise. | 20/30 |
| Aesthetics | Tooltips and otherwise dialogue is mostly presented well. • Imported content is nice, cohesive, and aids your design. • Near the middle of the map I was able to walk up a waterfall. • Tall blizzard cliffs with narrow paths between them is pretty terrible. Makes units difficult to click and doesn’t look good at all. • I really disliked the low quality, noisy imported music | 15/20 |
| Gameplay | The game is fun and engaging because decent abilities, enemies, and balance kept my attention. This is arguably a more important aspect of dungeon crawlers so I’m quite happy here. 3 • I played the mage. Hero designs from their description seemed pretty tired (an agility ranger, an intelligence mage, and a strength paladin), but my abilities were at least cohesive and rewarding to use properly. • Having three characters could arguably lend to replayability, but based on the descriptions I’m pretty confident they all play quite the same. I won’t be playing again. • In some cases monsters attacked me from over walls indicating imperfect spell coding or creep-aggro behavior | 15/20 |
| Triggers/Code/Performance | It’s all GUI, there’s loads of TSA • Many very ugly combinations of triggers punch to the face anyone with an understanding of basic DRY principles • Major location leaks in CreepsBounty01, CreepsBounty02 • I feel sorry for you that you spent all this time making those Riddle triggers • Game doesn’t lag | 1/10 |
| Polish | • Pre-game lobby minimap image and description are really nice. Unfortuantely the loading screen is much less cohesive and also looks a bit stretched. • Cinematics, abilities, tooltips, units are consistently polished. • There’s really no excuse to have those blizzard cliff based terrain. . . | 6/10 |
DD_legionTN’s The Mystery of Vigolateria
Originality/Creativity | • The Mystery is a dungeon riddle story without conventional aggressive opponents. Rather, the player is meant to take his time searching the environment and figure out a series of puzzles in order to advance to more treasure. • I think this concept is a fair one, and the genre is fairly open and not too overdone, but I didn’t find your implementation fantastic. • This is a genre for which grammar and spelling are quite important, since your story and aesthetics are driving the gameplay (otherwise there is very little gameplay) - unfortunately you did quite poorly here. Dialogue was hardly coherent/relevant, and puzzle solutions were sometimes illogical and/or mindless. | 6/10 |
| Theme | • The map fits the theme fairly well, and having treasure doesn’t seem too contrived. You could improve this by making treasure a bit more functional and/or desirable. | 20/30 |
| Aesthetics | • The map is distracting to look at because the visuals seem quite arbitrary in many instances. • From a color palette perspective, the map is decent - terrain and doodads are at least cohesive. • Functionally, I like that you used some less common ideas - doodads moving out of your way, elevators, Z axis is always interesting. • Unfortunately your gameplay suffered because you lacked the programming experience to back up your aesthetic design. Needing to manually adjust the camera to compensate for the designer’s lack of consideration is a big no-no. • There were some instances of arbitrary boundaries which is very much detracting from the experience. | 10/20 |
| Gameplay | • The map is not fun, nor engaging because finding clues and tools to complete riddles was very much contrived and unimmersive. At one point I even opened the trigger editor to figure out a riddle solution, and was frustrated to find that the solution was not only nonsense, but a bit stupid. • Storyline and abilities are terrible. Ability usage is arbitrary and forced on the player. Little to no consideration to game design is given. Story is very forced and unimmersive. | 1/20 |
| Triggers/Code/Performance | • Map is made in GUI using loads of TSA and cached values • Magic numbers in every trigger • Many triggers are undocumented and impossible to understand without reverse engineering (for example ‘Periodic Effect’) • I don’t see any major leaks | 2/10 |
| Polish | • You should have had someone proof-read your dialogue, because it’s very greatly and obviously flawed. • You shouldn’t use advanced terraining techniques if you don’t have the coding knowledge or forethought to keep it from detracting from gameplay. | 2/10 |
ZiBitheWand3r3r’s Treasure Hunt
Originality/Creativity | • The map is essentially a team vs team treasure hunt, where players are racing to solve clues and optimize their team’s workload to solve the puzzle before the opposing force. • While quite original, the game isn’t particularly creative, and the competition seems a bit forced/arbitrary. • However, I’m trying hard not to let my opinions on your implementation influence my marking of your design. | 6/10 |
| Theme | • You made a minigame about being the first to find a treasure chest, kind of like what the grading rubric says. • I prefer not to award you for doing the minimal amount possible. The treasure chest could have just as easily been a rock or a flag, and the theme wouldn’t be very fitting. | 18/30 |
| Aesthetics | • You’re clearly a beginner at aesthetic terrain design. I hope you’ll not take a harsh mark too personally - you’re simply competing with designers with massive amounts of experience by comparison • Start by reading some tutorials and learning how to use non-pathing dooads to make more natural barriers. • From there, learn to draw functional map designs with graph theory, and implement them using the techniques you learned. | 8/20 |
| Gameplay | • My initial reaction was just frustration with the gate that blocked my path to leave. • As I played further and understood my abilities a bit more, I felt very unimmersed, realizing how many stardard warcraft 3 abilities there are being used etc. • There’s pretty much no reason to play a second time, even with the competitive component, which leads to the question of why include it at all. • The map is nearly symmetrical, so at least balanced | 1/20 |
| Triggers/Code/Performance | • No performance issues • A lot of very poor triggers converted to JASS - nulled local players, unnecessary BJ function calls, use of locations, udg arrays in attempt to optimize (magic numbers), arbitrary scope alignment, etc. 6 • I don’t see any leaks. • Really suggest learning vJass or Wurst. | 2/10 |
| Polish | • Spelling and grammar mistakes everywhere. • Map really feels incomplete as there could be much better and more natural hints for the puzzles. | 4/10 |
Final comments:
• The maps were generally quite interesting and original. My favorite map to play was
Treasure Rush, but from an objective criteria-based judgment, Catacomb Chronicles is
better across the board.
• I think this contest could have been more successful if there was a second sub theme.
• Overall good work guys.
rulerofiron99's judging
Kino’s The Catacomb Chronicles
Originality/Creativity | Puzzle maps are not new, but your focus on lore was something I haven’t seen before. There is a great deal of creativity in the amount of lore you wrote for this map, and the stories aren’t simple reskins of well known mythology (as far as I can tell, but I don’t read much). | 7/10 |
| Theme | You perform actions in order to acquire an item of value, so this passes the contest requirement. But it doesn’t feel like you’re looking specifically for treasure, it feels more like you’ve delving deep into a library full of dusty tomes in order to learn a bit more than you knew previously. The treasure did play a role in the gameplay, as the description of it was important to your quest. | 22/30 |
| Aesthetics | Excellent terrain. The doodads used fit the colour scheme, nothing was out of place. Objects were placed deliberately instead of spammed. When inside a tomb, the fog allows you to see all the nearby walls, which detracts from the mystique and mystery. The underground terrain was much less detailed, and all of them looked the same. Minimalistic can be good in some circumstances, but here it contrasts with the highly detailed surface terrain, and just a doodad here or there would have made a great difference. The glow of the tomb exit was a nice touch. Fog colour was well chosen. The lightning flash had a bad colour and wasn’t a good fit for your terrain. | 15/20 |
| Gameplay | I don’t think the addition of combat was a good idea for this map. As a puzzle map, the main objective is to read, watch, learn and make a decision. Trying to figure out what to do while also micro-managing your hero to defend yourself wasn’t particularly fun. If you added combat to add a sense of urgency or require the player to perform an action within a given time, it might have been better to use a timer, that way you allow the player 100% concentration on the problem itself. Having to carry combat items detracts from the main gameplay. Looking through your triggers I see systems for language skill being required to read certain things, that would have been a very interesting system if you had implemented it. You can attack/be attacked while reading, and the only notification was the attack sound. When more than one artefact are in the game world, you have no way of telling which is which (other than memory). Since they are generated it can’t be expected to make one item for each variation, but it would have been handy to have an ability that could describe what the target item is. The sacred ground/tomb disturbance mechanic was interesting. Giving all of the tombs the same structure (tomb, stele, treasures) made it a little repetitive. I struggled with the clues, they could have been clarified somewhat, or perhaps you could have added a difficulty selector which would highlight important words in the texts. | 10/20 |
| Triggers/Code/Performance | No lag, everything performed well. Triggers are well organised. The randomisation system for the names and such was a nice touch. I didn’t see any leaks or similar errors. Some of your triggers could have been grouped up into systems, e.g. saving all creeps and the corresponding item that kills them in arrays and using only one trigger to loop through them. I found a few empty containers with texts such as “In the container is a”. | 8/10 |
| Polish | Hero icon doesn’t fit, zero’d strength/agility/intelligence looks bad (you should rather have used a unit instead of a hero). You could have made a right click on an entrance activate the manipulate ability. Why did all the artifacts have the same icon? Three of the tombs were of persons titled “The Jealous”, which confuses matters and can make the core system – answering which is the right relic – much harder than designed. Missing a few pathing blockers – I could walk through the top of one of the tombs. No loading screen. | 7/10 |
Schlammerz’s Treasure Rush
Originality/Creativity | Very standard dungeon crawler, but the race element makes it interesting. Creeps and hero abilities were very regular. | 7/10 |
| Theme | Treasure is involved, but this is more of a dungeon crawler. | 20/30 |
| Aesthetics | Decent terrain and a fitting UI skin. The red fog all around the map was too heavy and overused. Such an effect is much better when used here and there instead of globally. Doodads were mostly placed with care instead of spammed. The torches on the walls were good. Heroes’ abilities and icons were fitting. | 14/20 |
| Gameplay | Standard RPG gameplay. The enemy heroes trying to do the same was a very interesting mechanic. Having them on the minimap was a nice way of visualising their progress, but being unable to move my camera to take a look at them was annoying – in effect it’s no different than if you had a multiboard displaying their progress percentage. The riddles were good – not too hard to prevent you from progressing, but hard enough to force you to take a second to think about it. The locked camera makes it difficult to navigate through passages that are only 2 spaces wide. Although I say the gameplay is basic, the combination of racing against other heroes and respawning creeps adds strategy to the game. Do you decide to run past all the creeps, or farm up so that you’re stronger? The boss fight wasn’t very interesting, you just auto attack and spam spells while picking up the runes. You could have made the area bigger and add some element of skillshot to the boss’s attacks, and maybe some spike traps for you to lure him on to. Three character options adds some replay value, but subsequent playthroughs lose a great deal of interest as you already know where to go from the start. The heroes, abilities and creeps are well balanced. | 14/20 |
| Triggers/Code/Performance | Map performs well, abilities work as described. Quite a few memory leaks in your triggers. It didn’t affect performance because you had very few triggers that loop with a high frequency. Many of your triggers were very similar, and could have been replaced by a few triggers that made use of arrays and other functions. E.g. you have a different trigger for each ability’s floating text, this could have been done using only one trigger that displays the name of (ability being cast). Triggers are well organised. | 6/10 |
| Polish | Tooltips are well detailed and structured. Nice boss music! Thoroughly customised interface, no useless elements. You can attack the spike traps. A few instances of bad grammar. Overall highly polished map. | 9/10 |
DD_legionTD’s The Mystery of Vigolateria
Originality/Creativity | Puzzle maps are nothing new, but your search/inspect system was a fresh feature. The puzzles were well thought out, just badly implemented. | 6/10 |
| Theme | Fits the theme, although the actual treasure is just the reward for clearing the map instead of a primary feature of the gameplay. | 20/30 |
| Aesthetics | I can see you made an effort to place doodads well, but overall the terrain feels very flat and bare. More rocks, small environmental doodads, terrain height sculpting would have been good. Large-scaled doodads look bad with their textures stretched so much. Rather stack doodads on top of each other. The water river model had some issues – it only flows when you’re nearby, and it looks bad. It was a good idea, but using a traditional water model would have been better. The bridge only becomes textured (out of fog) when you walk over it, also looks bad. Some cliffs are so high that the camera is blocked if you’re too close. Cliffs should never be that high. The camera height at some areas was very low, due to the character running on doodads while the terrain is far below. The skybridge was a nice idea, but could have been executed better. Get rid of fog of war so that the area is visible, and fix the camera height. Ability icons were fine. The lightning effects were good. | 12/20 |
| Gameplay | Traditional puzzle game. The inspect/search/manipulate feature was an improvement on the usual method of just clicking things. At times it’s really difficult to figure out what to do due to poor terrain visibility, e.g. I didn’t know I could wash the paper at the waterfall because I didn’t know there even was a waterfall there. At the last area, I had to hold Delete (to rotate camera) just in order to be able to tell me character where to run. | 9/20 |
| Triggers/Code/Performance | The last puzzle didn’t work on a few of my attempts. There should be an indicator that the puzzle has been reset so that you can try the order again. Triggers were well organised and leakless. The map performed well. I could open the treasure chest multiple times. | 7/10 |
| Polish | Very little work put in in terms of polishing, e.g. why does my character have -2 armour? Gold/lumber/food could be blacked out. These are of course very small things, but that’s what polish is about. A few instances of bad grammar. Lots of terrain/visibility issues as detailed in Gameplay and Aesthetics. | 5/10 |
ZiBitheWand3r3r’s Treasure Hunt
Originality/Creativity | A team-vs-team hero arena with an economic goal isn’t very common, but it’s nothing new. The treasure hunt systems such as the prism and drill were a good addition. | 7/10 |
| Theme | Instead of the expected “find treasure artefact”, this map takes a more literal approach – amassing gold to win. The way in which this is implemented (prospecting and creep farming) really gives the feeling of a treasure hunt. | 23/30 |
| Aesthetics | Very basic terrain. You should avoid such large empty dirt areas. The doodads didn’t fit the terrain. The texture colours contrast in a bad way. Generally you should only use doodads from the terrain type. Some specifics: Cityscape trees didn’t fit – who comes out to this area to trim them? They’re also right next to barrens trees. Having the whole map explored looked bad, and detracted from the exploration aspect of the game. Hero models were fitting, but very little else in the map fits the theme of a dwarven expedition. Many icons didn’t fit their purpose. | 9/20 |
| Gameplay | The game starts with a very nice little logic puzzle. You hunt for treasure by either searching for the buried treasure or killing neutral creeps. I really liked the way in which you locate the treasure, but it was too easy. The map would have greatly benefited from more of these puzzles/special systems. The two heroes perform different roles, so a player can sort of choose what they want to focus on. Getting the code from medivh was an interesting method of unlocking the prism, but having it spoiled by the quest menu didn’t give me a chance to figure it out by myself. The hint should only be added to your quest menu a few minutes after the code has been activated. A bit of replay value. | 13/20 |
| Triggers/Code/Performance | The map performed well with no noticeable lag. Triggers are an awkward mess of GUI and vJASS – not bad in itself, but could have been organised much better. I noticed no bugs with the prospecting system, which is something that would typically have a good chance to be bugged. | 7/10 |
| Polish | The multiboard was way too big, everything would fit in in a third of the size. Poor grammar and spelling at many places. Some tooltips had different styles to others, and weren’t detailed in a useful way. | 5/10 |
Final comments:
Kino's Catacomb Chronicles - Pleasing to read and look at, this is a unique map that falls short of its ambitions.
Sclammerz' Treasure Rush - Well-polished RPG with a few interesting mechanics.
DD_legionTD's Mystery of Vigolateria - A puzzle game with some good ideas but lacking implementation and polish.
ZiBitheWand3r3r's Treasure Hunt - A fun mix of creep farming and prospecting, but mostly empty and lacking content.
Sum of scores
| Originality | Theme | Aesthetics | Gameplay | Triggers | Polish | Total | ||
| rulerofiron99's scores | 10 | 30 | 20 | 20 | 10 | 10 | 100 | |
| Kino | Catacomb Chronicles | 7 | 22 | 15 | 10 | 8 | 7 | 69 |
| Sclammerz | Treasure Rush | 7 | 20 | 14 | 14 | 6 | 9 | 70 |
| DD_legionTN | The Mystery of Vigolateria | 6 | 20 | 12 | 9 | 7 | 5 | 59 |
| ZiBitheWand3r3r | Treasure Hunt | 7 | 23 | 9 | 13 | 7 | 5 | 64 |
| | ||||||||
| Cokemonkey11's scores | | |||||||
| Kino | Catacomb Chronicles | 9 | 30 | 19 | 18 | 5 | 8 | 89 |
| Sclammerz | Treasure Rush | 4 | 20 | 15 | 15 | 1 | 6 | 61 |
| DD_legionTN | The Mystery of Vigolateria | 6 | 20 | 10 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 41 |
| ZiBitheWand3r3r | Treasure Hunt | 6 | 18 | 8 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 39 |
| | ||||||||
| Votes | Percent | Adjusted | Score Avg | Score Adj | Total | Place | ||
| Kino | Catacomb Chronicles | 3 | 25.00 | 8.75 | 79 | 51.35 | 60.10 | 2nd |
| Sclammerz | Treasure Rush | 7 | 58.33 | 20.42 | 65.5 | 42.58 | 62.99 | 1st |
| DD_legionTN | The Mystery of Vigolateria | 1 | 8.33 | 2.92 | 50 | 32.50 | 35.42 | |
| ZiBitheWand3r3r | Treasure Hunt | 1 | 8.33 | 2.92 | 51.5 | 33.48 | 36.39 | 3rd |
0.35 * (votes / total votes) + 0.65 * ( (judge 1 score + judge 2 score) / 2) * 100
Congratulations to:
1st place - Sclammerz' Treasure Rush with 63 points
2nd place - Kino's The Catacomb Chronicles with 60 points
3rd place - ZiBitheWand3r3r's Treasure Hunt with 36 points
- First Place: 45 reputation points and your entry on the award icon
- Second Place: 30 reputation points and an award icon
- Third Place: 15 reputation points and an award icon
- All other participants, including judges: 5 reputation points
Well done to the winner and thanks all for participating. Please forgive me for the long delay!
Last edited by a moderator:
You did a great job handling yet another contest that got a little messy there when judging rolled around.
