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Introduction to Mapmaking

Editor-less WarCraft: Orcs and Humans.

Back in 1995, Blizzard Entertainment supplied their second RTS game with an editor for people to make their own playgrounds. This was something fans had wanted to do with WarCraft: Orcs and Humans before, but been unable to. The editor for WarCraft II is able to give users the power to create their own maps for the game, with custom terrain, unit & building placement, unit & building attribute editing, spell editing, etc.

For those who are new to Blizzard games such as Warcraft III & StarCraft, or just do not know what exactly a "World Editor" is; it's a powerful program that Blizzard created to allow the players to use the very same tool (well, almost) that Blizzard used to create the game levels/maps. The World Editor has evolved over the years, and what started out as a simple map editor, has turned into one of the largest creators of several popular maps that we now see today throughout the WarCraft & StarCraft community.


The World Editor
The World Editor, allows the user to edit an already pre-made map and to place units (i.e. Marines/Orcs/Zerg/Undead, depending on the game) anywhere on the terrain or lets you make your own brand new map. The user is also given the ability to edit the terrain on the map, like changing grass to snow, dirt to sand, plains to rivers, and even add cliffs, lake islands or mountains to the creation.

With the advent of StarCraft and later Warcraft III World Editors, users were able to customise their maps further by adding 'triggers' to allow them to set whatever conditions for victory or loss that they wanted themselves, instead of a predetermined rule that you lose when all your buildings are destroyed. These triggers allowed users to create miniature cinematics, RPG-like mini-games (some quite seriously designed), the popular "Tower Defense" games and many more.


Today's Generation of Mapmaking
Now, 14 years later, there is a huge mapping community of thousands of people who love making maps, or playing the custom maps made by others. The World Editor has helped map makers create unique custom map games such as DoTA (Defense of the Ancients), TD (Tower Defense), Kodo Tag, Who's The Alien, Changeling and many many more!

With StarCraft 2 so close to release, we are preparing once again for a new World Editor released to the mapmaking community, enabling us to create even more maps with new ideas, strange ideas ideas and all of our favourite games from the past.

This article is looking at the past games that have used Blizzard's World Editor, and will give you a bit of history on the actual programs. We'll start with one of Blizzard's earliest games to ever use a Map Editor: Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness...



Page two guides you through the history of Blizzard's map-making editors, up until StarCraft 2.

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