Nolafus asked in a youtube comment about style differences between totd and competition maps. I’m putting my reply here as well since it may contain useful information about mapping. I do not go into what makes a competition map a competition map and how building for rounds/timeattack/other stuff combined with the expected players skill level is the actual underlying difference. Remind me to write something about that another time.
From Nolafus:
“I think it would be nice to hear what makes a competition map what it is. For instance, what are the differences between a typical ToTD map and something you would build for this competition? I’ve considered trying to get into competition mapping, but not sure where to start”
For mixed maps the line blurs a lot between totd and other maps and comp maps. There’s such a wide range in style for comp maps it’s hard to make a comparison of all of them to other things. For example the only thing that separates the agrabou map here from a totd mixed map imo is the amount of things you can crash into. I could talk about what I think an ideal version(s) of each surface style should be for mixed comp maps but at that point it excludes a decent amount of existing competition maps anyway.
Generally, I think you see more unusual turns on comp maps, fewer open spaces, and just higher difficulty in general. I would say you see more of these challenging multi turn combinations like some of the ones on germane and the mine and linh maps, but at that point we start to exclude a lot of (imo worse) competition maps. I’d say something people inexperienced in comp maps usually fuck up is using a lot of strange transition blocks and things but not really making interesting or calculated turn combinations. In that regard I think a lot of us can learn a lot by trying to map single style things (dirt, grass, tech, or whatever you build on your mixed maps) in a way that we think would be good competitively in order to see what is actually engaging and isn’t just filler being masked by constant surface and block transitions.
Also a lot of track of the days are just bad at being track of the days and fuck up things that are relevant to both totd/cotd and rounds competitions. If you take the best of totds then there’s going to be more overlap with easy competition maps, and to compare good comp maps to bad totd maps seems meh. Totd today would be fine in a very low level mixed competition, like for a us state regional, and you can compare to agrabou’s recent map Mellow as something slightly harder and shorter (was made for a now canceled cup). A lot of it is just universal mapping things and scaling difficulty in a way that is good. which not all comp maps seem to agree on anyway, and there are good and bad versions of different ways of doing things. I didn’t like linh’s map for this cup, but I think his map(s) for patc are much nicer. They still do a lot of weird nonsense and random precision, it’s just executed better.
There usually isn’t a finite number of good ways of doing entire maps/styles which makes it difficult to create a scripted video for example telling people how to make good mixed comp maps. It may work if the scope is narrowed down to for example how to make a map like germane or outer space, but that is probably a bit less useful. Actually it would probably still be pretty helpful to some people since replicating styles is pretty common, but I don’t know if/when I would feel like making something like that.
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