My Mapping Journey in TrackMania 2020

this is the journey from building my very first map to getting a track of the day at the end of the video I'll share how I got accepted into one of the greatest mapping teams in track media history spoiler alert it is exotic so let's jump in and start with my very first map I'll be using this track Mania exchange plugin to jump between each map so this is the very first time I ever stepped into the map editor and made a map and as part of this video we're just going to be roasting all of my old Maps so let's go ahead and just start by watching the world record here um so right away we have this outside dirt turn gearing up through the turn which is at an absolutely awful start confusing jump here um I'll show that in Camp 7 in a second uh why that part's confusing then we have this massive Air Time awkward Landing onto the wall uh way too much speed for this drift here and then just a completely blind jump uh straight to the finish so let's go into Camp seven and take a a look at this beauty uh from above so we have have some awkward scenery so basically the idea with this map was hey maybe you were making a little track and you got too much speed so you jump off the track and then kind of do some some other wonky route uh but the biggest problem with this is that a lot of players were you know saw this track and were like oh where where do I go do I go on this booster the top booster or take the turn here so lots of problems with this track very basic scenery but um kind of learned a valuable lesson which is you want to make sure it's clear where your route is going um and not kind of have these indecisive patterns because they they might seem cool in your head but in this case it it didn't really work out in practice so let's go ahead and jump to the next map uh so the second map I ever made and we have 16 maps to go through um if you're counting so this is going to be uh some some real Beauties let's check out the world record here so this is kind of where I took Carl Berg's advice and went for something that was admitting like a 19 second map uh let's do you know we have some decent transitions here um just a massive amount of pink trees I don't know why I thought we needed so many [Music] um and then we kind of have this this weird uh risky finish so really not too bad of a map but really I think the main issue with this one was just having lots of trees and then you can also see we're just using the basic colors so we're not you know to the map and I think these these science changer maybe the white was added later um but yeah let's go in Camp seven and just look at this from above so pretty pretty decent mini like looking back on it it's just I don't know why we need so many pink trees so let's go ahead and go to the next map and one of the goals here is to show that so I'm I'm a silver ranked player and I just want to show like how you can go from like you know just starting off getting mapping learning a lot along the way and then taking that journey to actually getting a track of the day um I think anyone who who puts in the time and effort to learn learn mapping can get to that point um so at the time there were a lot of like full speed grass track of the days so um that's what I wanted to build here and this is where I first got started into building uh some custom items and so we actually like that turn was maybe something that I built in using the mesh Model area uh we have a cam changes here which I know I screwed up the uh the exit to the cam change at first but um I think the texture for that might have been a little different this part is slightly blind but not too bad um this scenery here so there's I mean there's no scenery outside this turn but a pretty cool turn so I think overall just has some very basic scenery and um you'll see this scenery style like with a lot of like if you're beginning at mapping um a lot of beginners just take these um scenery blocks and it's like that's going to be the scenery for your track but okay so yeah this scenery is not great um but we'll see how like my skills building with vanilla's scenery has evolved uh throughout the video so let's go ahead and play the next map this map actually let's show it in cam 7 first so this map pretty colorful much more focused on like trying to learn transitions um and then we have some ice here and kind of an interesting magnet finish so let's go and watch the world record [Music] it's a little confusing here where to jump to but we're jumping to this checkpoint and then here's a pretty classic transition um and then just kind of a blind Landing onto sausage water bounce straight into plastic which is yeah it was fun on a mixed map a lot of players don't like the wet plastic so yeah this is really a mixed map um and then we have okay the engine off into the uphill at the end and go to the next map this one I spent a lot of time on the scenery like I spent a lot of time placing blocks and a lot of the scenery and I also learned some uh some media tracker here um a lot of the scenery is not actually visible from the route which will show it's kind of a major problem um so let's go ahead and show the world record so you can cut through there I I thought it wouldn't be faster which is why I had edited that start um this one is an auto slide map so the idea is that all the drifts on the map would be Auto sleds and this part I think is fairly creative having those um some custom plastic pieces there um this could be a little weird to drive um but yeah having that plastic was kind of cool to start the drift so I think that concept could be still good at really good in another map this is dirt just colored like snow and then we just have like a simple plastic finish here so after watching that so originally when I built this start I had added these here because I was thinking you would go through the middle and then turn left to have the gears work better uh but it's just too easy to like drive through this other side which is a little faster and the GPS is hidden off to the side um so if we just zoom out like all of this scenery here it you just can't see it from the route and I spent a lot of time like building and placing things on it um all this scenery you can't see so there's really no point in building scenery that you can't see from the route so this all like a sloping Hill like this you just can't see it uh but this one was I was at learning mapping and I was basing off a plastic Tech map but trying to make it look like a campaign map so I used the color scheme from one of the campaigns uh which is using green plastic for it so kind of a Precision start um and I think the big thing I learned from this is that like campaign maps have a certain style of scenery and it's great for the campaign but it's really not popular for uh track of the day style map so if you played in a lot of track of the days um yeah have a little engine off there which is fun um if you played track of the days you'll know that they look very different from campaign Maps like usually they have like you're on the moon or you're in the desert you have some kind of custom environment and you can see there the world record doesn't use the plastic bounce at the end um which if I go to cam 7 um the idea is that you would jump oh I'm under the track you would jump off of here hit the plastic on the wall but you don't actually need to if you have the jump right you can jump straight to the finish so that little Bonk is is kind of like not uh in force as part of the route but got a little better with the Custom Scenery here it's still fairly basic um but yeah it really just looks like a campaign map and that's probably not going to impress um anybody so let's go to the next map and even the newer campaign Maps now look far better than uh that one so let's see what else we can roast all right so the next one Lake Superior so I was like okay I learned some blender uh which is back when I made some tutorials about how to make this um Mountain scenery and so this is kind of one of the first Maps where I was like it doesn't look like Czech Mania and I think that Meme of like is this even track Mania uh is really interesting and kind of like you want to embrace that for track of the date maps um where you're actually going out using custom items finding something that really doesn't look vanilla but you might be totally set in a different world one of the big problems with this map is there's these are all real water blocks so I didn't use the fake water because the real water actually looks a lot nicer with the rendering but because of having a massive amount of water um and this water you can't even see from the route that can add a lot of FPS issues for players and then the other issue is these houses have a lot of lights and shadows as well as like this massive amount of houses so it looks kind of cool in the distance from the map usually if you have scenery that's further away you want to use larger items and not like a massive amount of small items because that's that's going to have a lot more edges and shadows and when you suddenly have all that in your field of view it's going to be hard to see so let's go ahead watch the world record I know these players had a lot of fun um like grinding and racing on this map and so part of the idea was that if you have like some kind of way to land on the route maybe I could have made this uh multi-lap um but this is a NASCAR track and I think there's one drift in it which we'll see but NASCAR was really fun to make um it's not a very popular style for players to play but I also really like this um this bridge I think it's pretty cool so yeah there we have the that's yeah here okay here is the the drift um that turn can be adrift I think so yeah essentially just a NASCAR map the route I think I made in like five minutes it ended up being pretty fun to drive uh let's jump to the next map okay sweet so this is this map is called sunshine and I had built some custom items for this as well and I have another Channel um another video on my YouTube channel about how I built those custom items but this start is very unique um which I was I was really excited I still really like this it's just with the mini booster so let's go ahead and show the route um I did some free blocking here and then we have this um jump into a drift I guess this part this scenery is not great it's kind of hard to know where to go that's probably one of the main problems with this map this you can also get a Slowdown on the grass if you don't depending on how your car lands which isn't ideal I got some nice feedback about this turn it's pretty fun to have this like risky turn at the end and then this finish is actually kind of kind of interesting I think it's not like your typical finish that you would see out with like I guess a better map okay let's see what's next we have stealth Mission so this was like the probably the first map where I was like let's really get good with vanilla scenery or like try it and maybe it's not perfect but like let's try and make something that looks really cool with vanilla scenery um and this is actually a mini RPG so it's one of the main criticisms so it's 31 seconds so it's kind of like a mini mini RPG um we have the numbered checkpoints and then we have this interesting turnaround where you can grab the checkpoint and just jump down to the dirt on the side here and then we're jumping across the track and basically the idea of this track is like what if you had a dirt road and you were driving on the scene already around it so I kind of put this road down um but the Finish is not very exciting it's like it's a 31 second RPG map but the last 10 seconds you're just driving on a dirt road with some nice scenery um so I think there definitely could have been some uh after this dirt road like baby here like go back and do some more RPG elements before the Finish um but overall I think this color scheme uh Sunrise with the uh the blue and the green and and then the turquoise lighting I think it looks pretty nice so yeah I'm pretty proud of how the scenery turned out um so let's check and see what's next but yeah the map is just yeah it's a mini RPG but half the map is just a dirt road so maybe that'd be even a fun one to go back and finish and add maybe 10 or 15 more seconds to it so Monticello um this one I really tried to build a lot so I built a full grass Tech map and tried to build a lot of vanilla scenery on it so let's go ahead and watch it um I drove the route a lot it was fun at first I kind of got bored of driving it I think it's it's fairly easy um this part was a little confusing I think for players because you can you were changing what you were landing on so quickly like the different surfaces it's like what am I even driving on um then we have a basic drift here jumping over the engine off [Music] another drift so I think it's a decent route I think the scenery um is okay but yeah really I I just got bored at playing it and it's nothing like super unique but we have a nice finish here uh we kind of like eat off of the um the road so really the part I was talking about is right here you go from grass to this black surface Glass to this wooden uh bridge and this just happened so quickly that it's kind of hard for um players to process that um the other thing so this map has a massive amount of vanilla scenery so it would have been nice to get something a little more lightweight um but I like that I like the finish here too where you're basically just eating off of this um wooden platform variable so Faribault if you've been subscribed to my channel uh you've probably seen a few videos from it this is a speed Tech map uh very high skill ceiling really fun map um these world records are absolutely like are absolutely insane by some top tier players um so yeah let's go ahead and watch it so this one like the scenery is fairly basic but I was kind of going for that like competitive speed Tech Vibe I think if the scenery was a little crazier um that could be good but I do really like how this turned out where it's kind of just that pure speed type feeling um with some basic vanilla scenery that turn was supposed to be a drift when I drove it but I guess you didn't need to and that's something that can be common with uh speed Tech Maps is having turns where you might think it's a drift but then better players find ways to take it without drifting that's actually faster so let's go ahead but overall I think it turned out great and there's plenty of turns that you do need to drift um actually the one of the main feedbacks that we got on this map is it's a lot of like similar turns in a row so like when you start off you're turning like left left left left and then you turn right a bunch of times and then you turn left a bunch of times when you drive it it doesn't quite feel like that is much but when you're initially learning the map it feels like a lot of the same turns in a row and one of the reasons I built that is because I wanted it to be a fairly compact route where it's like going over itself and having um the same like Road above itself um so I think if you were gonna because if you go left right left right you're going to end up with a snake across the map um so that's kind of why it ended up being like that but definitely something to keep in mind all right so this is it ghostly Boardwalk so this is my first map and actually only map that's gotten track of the day uh one of the things I learned with gear 5 speed Tech Maps is if you're a bad player like maybe rank silver uh but you build a gear 5 map then it like experienced players are not going to have gear issues with your map uh as long as you plan out how to get to year five um then once they get there they're going to be good so let's go ahead and watch the world record here so you can see what we're gearing up here uh using downhills at the start to make it quick to Gear Up kind of planning out where the Europe's will happen and then the last one's here so then you're just saying you're five for the rest of the map uh one of the cool things about this map so is that all of the all the respawns there's these um I guess I'll show one but there's these ghosts and boosters at the respawns locations you'll see one on the left right here so if you double respawn it just puts you on a booster to the side of the track which really helped in Map review where players were trying to learn the map because wherever they might mess up or need to double respawn they can do that so yeah what I'm talking about is basically if you double respawn at a checkpoint then um the first very first one doesn't have it but all the rest of them do you'll be put on this booster and have a little ghost here and then you'll just be on your way so they're not because of how the track is built it's not used a ton um the main criticism for this map is that it's super dark and it probably could use more Lighting in like certain corners but it was meant to be like you're driving through a spooky forest at night but that can be hard because not every player has nice um their monitor settings might look darker than what your monitor would look like the other issue that was almost a problem is a reroute so fortunately it was not faster but basically like jumping off here and trying to take the map a different way so we we just had enough checkpoints that wasn't an issue so that was it so I got you know got track of the day with this I think really what helped a lot was having um that custom environment of like the route's fun enough and the route's really fun especially on your first playthrough um and then having this environment this spooky feeling uh is just unique so after that um a couple of the day you know obviously I'm Gonna Keep mapping because really it's more about the joy of mapping rather than a specific goal and this is essentially like a lull map or practically a Fest map uh that I made where I built of over 30 custom items for it to have this really unique Driving Experience where some of these boosters throw you up into the air but then you have super reactor and then you have slow-mos on the top uh so you can't just fly through the map so we'll just let's go play a few of these top uh top tines so depending on which booster you hit you're gonna fly through the air so this this map is really fun to play and it's a great visual as well um so it's kind of like gear inputs even change the outcome of app I don't know but it's extremely fun and the visuals look cool too all right so this map is uh was made for the North America cup uh it was designed for 50 laps and this was a top-down design meaning I was like we I want to build a volcano map where you're under the volcano and then you go out of the volcano and then back under it [Music] and basically want to see uh we'll play the first slap here uh so yeah it's like a 25 minute author time [Music] but yeah essentially you're you're driving through a volcano we have a custom magnet there uh item that I made and then you do this little turnover uh [Music] and then a NASCAR turn which I think it can be pretty fun and then this nice dirt turn there could be a little more scenery there um and then you're back Under the Volcano so I really enjoyed this one it's um and then this is kind of a risky part where you you can actually jump over that lava um if you have enough speed so like right here if you're going with a bunch of Swede you can jump right to that uh that part of the road and of course the lava you're just gonna fall through to the grass the next map is USA RPG so I was asked to make a map for the USA campaign so we got all the best mappers in the US to make maps for it and I was like I've been enjoying RPGs I want to make uh just maybe like a beginner level um RPG map with like 50 different checkpoints and so we won't show this whole thing but we had some really good players hunt this um aurel is a tmgl player so really cool to have map you know a map you will play by such great players um outside of track of the day but yeah it's basically a beginner level RPG map um and we'll go ahead and show this so this one I I wish I had more time to do the scenery for it um but it ended up having a fairly simple Vibe and um yeah if you like RPG Maps I I think it turned out pretty great the main criticism here though is when you this checkpoint uh you're supposed to bug slide off of the the blue and do a 360 and land uh on the red but you don't actually need to do the 360 it's kind of faster not to um so that's a bit of a bummer but it still ends up being really cool now we get to our story about the mapping theme exotic posted this they said do you want to enjoy the mapping family build a track that emphasizes one color of your choice and just making a great track make it fun to hunt and I knew that exotic had some of the greatest mappers uh as part of this mapping theme people that I wanted to collaborate with and work with on future maps and really learn from it and have those people you can bounce ideas off of um they even have some tmgl mappers and it's one to work hard on a map for it and try and make something great and and join the team so I picked the color pink and the reason I picked pink is because I wanted a color that was not built into the game that I would have to make a lot of custom items for to make a really unique Vibe but still use that vanilla scenery mapping Style so that here's the intro the map I made is called narashiko I put the Exotic um logo in there too I used a pink skin to drive uh the GPS we have this nice bounce off the finish here so this is the map um have a nice media tracker effect as well so this is kind of um really really proud of how far I've come uh in terms of like comparing this map to the very first map that I made um we'll show the GPS here as well so the main criticism or maybe my personal criticism for this map uh which is something I don't do a lot is when the scenery like you'll see you're actually driving on pink concrete when you are driving on the same color that is the scenery um like here you're driving on pink as well um I really want to do that because it was fun for the vibe of this map uh emphasizing the pink color but it does make it a little hard for drivers because it's harder to distinguish what's the road and what's the scenery but overall I really like how this map turned out uh the other thing is this drift you actually have to release if you're going too fast show where that is again so if you're a good player uh and you have too much speed you actually have to release at this one at this turn in order to make the jump and I actually put this little duck here to block uh you could jump straight from here to the finish so this duck prevents that and then forces the the risky to bounce off the wall so I wanted to make sure I didn't make the same mistake that I did in that earlier campaign map which is just forcing players to to bounce off the wall here so with that um we got some great feedback from exotic saying um how great of a speed Tech map it was and the final results were essentially exotic brought in five new members to the team that's my mapping Journey [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: MattDTO

Views: 6,988

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Id: o6EZUHpImOs

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 31 2022