The Learning Process of a Forger:
A Critical View at My Maps
2010-2013
A Critical View at My Maps
2010-2013
A Map Portfolio, by REMkings
Hello everyone!
My name is REMkings. Most of you will know me as an Infection forger, but I’ve been making other kinds of maps too, some of which got released, some of which did not. Since creating a forge history/map portfolio seemed to be a lot of fun I decided to make one myself. But because I want to prevent myself from being repetitive and doing the same thing like everyone else yet again, I figured I’d do things a little bit differently this time to keep it interesting for you to read.
After all, forging is a learning process, and so it has been for me. I tend to only publish maps that I’m really satisfied with, but that certainly doesn’t mean I have a flawless track. I made crappy maps too, or maps that just didn’t have it, even though they might have been promising (to me) at first. Therefore, I’m not just going to take you on a tour through all the maps I have finished, but I will also take a look at a good amount of maps that I started working on, but never revealed to the (majority of the) public for whatever reason. In this first part of the folio, I’ll go through all of my Reach maps, starting with the ones I released, followed next time by everything that just didn’t work out or did not get finished, but were close to rounding up. First off, here are the maps I did finish and release.
The Released Projects
If you were to ask people familiar with my style of forging (which generally consists of making Infection/Flood maps) to describe it in three words, they would probably do so by using terms similar to the following three: realism, competitiveness, and teamwork. This does indeed pretty much nail it: I want to create realistic atmospheres that suck you into the map, that get you involved somehow. I want to provide competitive, challenging and tough gameplay that keeps you excited and makes you want to survive as a reward for the hard work you did. And finally I want to encourage both humans and zombies to work together in order to achieve their respective goals of surviving vs infecting to the most.
Furthermore, I have a habit of releasing only so many maps because I put an obscene amount of time into testing them. Personally, I’m cool with that though, as I am much of a perfectionist and I hate it when my maps don’t work as flawlessly as I could have gotten them to. This means that there have been a lot of terrible maps from me that you’ve probably never even seen.
Ever since I have been forging, I’ve been trying to be different. Trying to create something innovative, something unseen that hasn’t been done before. Every time I come up with an idea for a map, I want to make sure I follow two rules of thumb: it has to stand out, and it has to be unique. Not just compared to maps by others, but also different from my own previous work.
These two rules add up to one another: a map won’t stand out if it’s not unique, and a unique map will still not be remembered by the main public if it doesn’t stand out in one way or another.
Forgehub is what really got me into forging. I had been lurking around on the website long enough until I finally decided to create an account myself and start posting my maps. The site is having a hard time nowadays, but I really feel it’s noteworthy to point out that this website proved to be an excellent way for me to get my maps out there. Without Forgehub, there wouldn’t have been a forging REMkings.
-– The Minigames Era –-
As I stated before, I wasn’t always an Infection forger. I actually started out as a guy creating minigames… crappy minigames. Well, I guess some of them were alright, but I certainly wasn’t great. I didn’t put as much effort into my maps as I would learn to do over the years, and I didn’t bother as much to create something unseen or unheard of. It was still an informative time period in my forging career and I don’t necessarily regret having built these maps. Let’s take a look at what I was able to cook up.
Sky Dive
REMkings Pick: (7/8)
Release date: August 1, 2011
Type: Minigame
Why It Worked For Me: Jetpacks and swords, ‘nuff said
This was the very first map ever that I dared creating a map thread on the Internet for. By this time I had already made some other maps which I will cover next time under “Unreleased projects”. Sky Dive was also quite your average bad map, though nothing too terrible. It was actually pretty fun! The concept was really simple: fly around using your jetpack and try to either stick the barely visible opponents or kill them with your energy sword. Thanks to its somewhat deceiving name, it received a ton of downloads, over 6K I believe… but that’s Halo’s Most Downloaded maps system for ya.
Aesthetically it was pretty much a box. Just… a box. So, yeah. Not much else to say really.
Whac-a-Mole
REMkings Pick: (6/8)
Release date: August 2, 2011
Type: Minigame
Why It Worked For Me: Inventive and skilful team game
No more than a day after I posted Sky Dive, I also posted Whac-a-Mole. This minigame was pretty inventive, if I do say so myself. Instead of having one zombie trying to slam the ‘moles’ with his Gravity Hammer, in this minigame there are two teams that take turns in trying to score as many points in the Hill as they can, while the other team tries to shoot them with Sniper Rifles. All in all, it was an alright map. A little bit too predictable if you had played it a lot, and too hard for the moles, but still a fun map to throw in in your custom lobbies. This was the first map in which I considered doing some work on the aesthetics instead of just creating plain environments like I did in earlier work.
I planned on creating a revamped version for this map, with better scoring settings, but I never got around to finishing it. I will probably cover this in more detail under the section “Failed Halo Reach Maps”. (No promises though!)
Bounce Lounge
REMkings Pick: (8/8)
Release date: September 28, 2011
Type: Minigame
Why It Worked For Me: I liked the explosions
Bounce Lounge was, again, an alright map, but with issues. This is probably the least fun minigame out of the ones I have built. It got boring really fast and it took too long to win. My reason for making it was because I love explosions in Halo, and this minigame was all about that. It was an enjoyable experiment that definitely took me longer to make than necessary, but it was informative and I learned a lot more about thinking about considering the expected outcome of an idea before turning it into an actual map. I dare you to try and legitimately get a perfection on this map. Not gonna happen.
Ice Cream Man
REMkings Pick: (5/8)
Release date: October 13, 2011
Type: Minigame
Why It Worked For Me: Best version at the time
This map received over 8,000 downloads, remaining my most downloaded map to this day. It wasn’t entirely deserved though. I mean, it’s a remake of a very old minigame from Halo 3 that has been remade a hundred times already, and will be remade another hundred times in the future. The reason why I made it regardless was because I felt that I could create a better map than the ones I had seen before, and I always enjoyed Ice Cream Man in Halo 3. Although it’s pretty solid in terms of gameplay, there are a lot of things I would’ve done differently when I look back at this map. One thing I am proud of though, is the fact that this is the first Ice Cream Man map in Reach that doesn’t require honor rules at all. After many many tests I came up with the idea of using a Safe Haven to prevent the ice cream man from leaving his vehicle and shooting the kiddies. The Safe Haven disables him from doing damage below a certain level, and only by entering his Warthog will he be able to deal damage again – by splattering people. It was very entertaining to see people try and shoot anyway, because it never worked. All in all, it’s likely the best Ice Cream Man map in Reach. This was my first map to be featured on a big YouTube channel, being ducain23’s. Interesting side note: Did you know I was one of ducain’s first 40 subscribers?
Just like with Whac-a-Mole, I considered creating a remake in which I wanted to put more effort in the aesthetics, but again, I never got to release it. More to follow in “Failed Halo Reach Maps”.
Lone Souls in a Lost Mine
REMkings Pick: (1/8)
Release date: December 1, 2011
Type: Free Roam Infection
Why It Worked For Me: Ghosts in a creepy mine
And that’s where we come across Lone Souls in a Lost Mine, affectionately known as LSIALM. Lone Souls in a Lost Mine was my second attempt at a mine map after the first one* didn’t feel right at all. And boy did it work out this time. Lone Souls was, and still remains up to this day, my most downloaded, most praised and most reviewed Infection map out of all the ones that I have created. And I think it’s for a reason. Personally, I definitely think this is the best map in Reach that I have made, and I’d still put it in my top three of all time REMkings maps. The fact that it was my first finished Infection map alone already makes it have a special place in my heart. It took me almost half a year to get it completed, a LOT longer than I had ever worked on a map before, but it was so worth it in the end. Considering the fact that I had literally no enhanced knowledge of Infection when I started building the map, this is one of the better examples of how testing can help your map to become really enjoyable and balanced. The map has a really convincing theme (being a mine, obviously) which adds up to the frightening settings of the gametype that goes with the map. (For more about that, just follow the link in the title.) The gametype has got to be one of the more important reasons why this map stands out, because it really changes the way Infection generally plays from an action packed battle into a tactical and creepy heartpounder.
* To be explained in "Failed Halo Reach Maps".
A corny named horror map, originally starting out as a submission for a contest hosted by YouTube channel V1rtualFlod, completely out of the blue this map really got my name out there. All the sudden I turned into a pretty well known guy on Forgehub, and received lots of feedback and opinions on the map. The map was featured on the three main YouTube channels that delivered Infection content back then, being THFE, Insanmiac’s and Zip Zap Zop’s. Ironically, it never got released in time for the V1rtualFlod contest and never made it onto the channel either - which both its owner iflod101 and I regretted.
It was a lot of fun to build this map, and to see it get better and better over time. A big, big thank you goes to Oakley HiDef for continuously helping me out during the testing sessions on this map and giving me tips to the best of his ability. He has supported me ever from the beginning, saying that it was one of the best maps he had ever seen aesthetically and really showing his motivation to make it play as well as we could get it to play. I don’t think I could’ve done it without him so again Oakley, a big thanks goes to you!
-– The Infection Era –-
After the success of LSIALM, I quickly got infected by the lovely virus of forging Infection maps. As a matter of fact, it’s all I’ve been doing ever since. Having learned a lot about the genre during the LSIALM testing days, I realized that I had potential to create more, better things than the majority of Infection I had seen before. A lot of people forged Infection in the “Matchmaking” way of doing, mostly consisting around an unfair advantage for humans and the allowance for extreme camping. Infection in Halo 3, both in Matchmaking and in Custom Games, had been a lot of fun for me seeing how it was actually challenging and frightening and encouraged teamwork to survive, and I wanted to bring that back in Halo Reach. It was yet pioneered by a guy by the name of Cryptic Inc along with the help of Ticky, who named it “Survival Infection”. Other than a few maps such as the No Hope Campaign by Rifte Gifle, Elliot’s brilliant map “Pandora’s Fear” and LD’s “Of Legions”, not many people made good Infection maps these days. It was around this time that I founded BIOC and contacted several good friends that I had met through Forgehub, such as Elliot and Berb and also Cryptic and Ticky, to help me out with the organization of weekly Survival Infection customs. But that’s a different story, to cover on another day.
Interesting side note: Elliot has been a long time and dear friend of mine. But did you know that before I met him, I kind of almost disdained him because of something really stupid? His map Pandora’s Fear took 3rd place in a contest on Forgehub, but when I saw the single picture in the winners thread I was like: “But how’s that even better than my submission?” – not yet knowing anything about what it was actually like. I decided to download it out of curiosity and checked it out in Forge. And I fell in love with it. I told the creator how cool I thought his map was and we added each other on Xbox Live to play some customs. That’s how we became friends. Pandora’s Fear is still one of my favourite maps in Reach. Shows how far from the truth your prejudgments sometimes (or usually?) might be.
Deadborough
REMkings Pick: (2/8)
Release date: September 14, 2012
Type: Free Roam Infection
Why It Worked For Me: Warthogging in cities is cool
Next to the whole BIOC thing, I started to work on an interesting concept which eventually turned out to become Deadborough. It came to be my second released Infection map, though for a long time it looked like it would never be released. It was a very refreshing and informative project, and I have to say that this must be my personal favourite map in Reach because it successfully pulled off all of my intentions with it and it has a freaking Warthog. I had never seen someone use the Warthog in an effective way on an Infection map, and seeing how I loved the Warthog I took the challenge upon me to be the first to get it done. More so, I also wanted to apply multiple accessible levels into buildings. Because why only stick to the first floor of a building on a Halo map, when in reality you would always try and move to the roof? I knew it was going to be tough balancing everything out, so I prepared myself for lots and lots of testing.
Building and testing Deadborough was an exhausting and annoying process, partially due to the aforementioned original plans I had with the map, but it was also the first time I ran into framerate lag on a map. In the end I’m very glad I didn’t give up on it and just kept going and changing things over and over again. Step by step, building by building I got closer and closer to getting it ready for release. Eventually, after I finished up the Tower (the tallest building on the map), I got in a flow and that’s where the ball started rolling. I also submitted it to the Testers’ Guild over at Forgehub where Psychoduck helped me out further on providing thoughtful feedback. Looking back, it still had its issues: the tower being overpowered in comparison to the other buildings, the bunker being greatly underused, and the dangerous jump behind the office being a death trap for the Warthog. But so did LSIALM, and many people loved the map regardless, thanks to its versatility.
Deadborough was my first urban themed map, which has turned out to be the style of Infection maps that I’ve been making the most. Which makes sense, since it’s also my favourite environment to play zombie games and modes on. I absolutely love the game Left4Dead that is all about infested urban areas. Ever since “Bro” I’ve been trying to perfect the urban style of Infection maps.
Favela Run
REMkings Pick: (3/8)
Release date: October 21, 2012
Type: Linear Progression Infection
Why It Worked For Me: Lovely theme and fast paced games
The last map I actually finished in Halo Reach – to be exact, one week before Halo 4’s release – was the first Linear Infection map I released. Originally a co-forge with Beybok, it was built on Ridgeline, which proved to be one of the reasons why not many people knew about it. Oakley HiDef really liked it though, and was planning to feature it on THFE… but unfortunately that never happened in the end. Despite of its less known identity, the map was still able to secure a third place in Forgehub’s yearly Infection contest, called Hub of the Dead, much to my surprise and joy.
You cannot really compare this map to others I have made, because of its different nature. It’s not just any Linear map, it’s actually a linear map so fast paced, that you’ll be on your toes all game long. This really is one of those running and gunning maps, so if you like action packed Infection this map is definitely for you. It also looks completely different than pretty much any other map in Halo Reach, simply because it was built on a much more colourful canvas map. Although it was extremely difficult building on Ridgeline, given that you don’t get Brace Larges and Wall Coliseums, it made it all the more awesome to see it get better and better over time with the core group of people helping me test it. Last Autumn/Fall, I hosted a BIOC Lobby in Reach and we played this map near to the end. It turned out to be the most enjoyable game of the night and everyone was screaming in their microphones out of enjoyment, including me. This map had a couple of issues though. First of all, it would’ve been better to release it earlier. I tested this map over 60 (!) times, but it could’ve received more feedback if only I had released an earlier version to improve it later on. Oh well.
Secondly, it was a little bit tough for the zombies, because of their lack of options. I think I did a better job on this part in the Halo 4 sequel named “Favela Vengeance”. (More about the sequel in my Halo 4 folio.)
Overall, still arguably my most fun and intense map from Reach, even if you count the minigames in.
The Promethean Temple
REMkings Pick: (4/8)
Release date: Late February, 2014 (!)
Type: Linear Progression Infection
Why It Worked For Me: An awesome linear temple map
I have a nasty history with co-forged maps. Numerous times I have tried working on a map together with someone else, but it always ended in either a totally abandoned project or in the end it came to be a solo project by just me. Although I did do the majority of work on TPT, I can finally say that for once a cooperation with another forger turned into an actual map. A definite fan favourite by Redy93 and me, this map was ready (pun intended) and done just too late for it to actually be released before Halo 4’s era began. We got really far though, and people were begging us to post it onto the forums. The map stood out thanks to the theme and aesthetics, but was simply not finished in time. In one of my latest BIOC Reach lobbies, held on January 12th 2014, I was actually able to finish it and get rid of most of the bugs. Now that it’s actually playable, I could definitely put it up in more Reach lobbies in the future.
The map has a really interesting opening, with a first holdout at a gate almost directly after spawn and various zombie routes opening up to increase the difficulty of progressing further into the temple. One guy would always spawn behind a turret a little above the other humans, providing them some cover whilst moving forward to the gate. This spot proved being a little bit overpowered and campable, but for most people that didn’t take too much away from the overall enjoyability of the map. This map was also the first publiced map to have applied an interesting method of promoting teamwork in Linear maps that I have been working on for a good while now, but only on a merely basic level. Still, it was original and people really seemed to dig it. I have found it to be particularly difficult to implement in maps in Halo 4, but what it came down to in The Promethean Temple is one human jumping on another human’s head and by using a double jump, gaining access to an extra power weapon. This basically rewards humans that communicate and work together without being selfish.
For the record: This map was indeed only released by the beginning of this year (2014), but I decided to include it in here nonetheless because it fits in the style of Infection maps I made in Reach and because the majority of the build had already been done almost 2 years ago anyway.
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And that’s the end of part 1! In my next post, I will cover the maps in Reach that I did not release, for whatever reason that may have been. So look forward to that.
Feel free to reply below and tell me what you think about my maps, this portfolio or whatever you like. Thank you for reading through the whole thing!
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I hadn't known you made that lol.