Block01 is personnal project I made to practice my Level Design by creating a track in one of my favourite game: Trackmania.
The goal was to create a short (less than 1min of run) and a tiny map, playable at any level, with smooth transitions and with an hunting potential. Hunting a map means playing it a lot to try to reach a personal best time (PB) and/or the online world record (WR).
I wrote a document to trace the iterative process of the creation for this map, highlighting many details which a mapper have to think to create a great map on Trackmania. I also recorded some runs or problems I encountered while mapping.
But first, here is a look at the final map:
Main Roads
The first version of the track aims to create roads, turns, jumps, transitions... to constitute the whole map. It is the first but the hardest part of the map construction because we have to make sure that the map is fun to play and that all works correctly.
After being sure that the roads are pleasant to play, the next step is to place checkpoints where players can respawn. It is important to take care that each route lines or obstacles have to be doable at low speed from the previous checkpoint (launched or stopped) but also at high speed to be pleasant to hunt by best players.
There is no decoration yet because the focus is on the run experience.
Optimization
After building the roads and placing checkpoints, I played it a lot to figure out which parts of the map were problematics or unpleasant and did some modifications.
Before
This part of the race was problematic because this road was driven twice in both directions but checkpoints can only be triggered once! That meant that a huge part of the track was potentially avoidable with a shortcut.
After
I decided to add a road in the extension of the return path for two reasons:
1. The amount of speed accumulated for the second passage was forcing the player to drift or to brake.
2. By adding a checkpoint on this new road, it should solve the shortcut issue. Did it worked ? No. Let see why later.
This new road also changed the way to reach the finish line. We can now directly jump into the finish ring with a simple ramp.
Of course, many other micro-changes have been made to the map but I obviously can't show and explain everything. If I can give another example, the start of the track saw different routes and transition at the first turn as I wasn't satisfied with the smoothness of the transition and the speed built afterwards. You can see the difference between the original map and this version.
Before
This big jump has been removed because the landing was a bit too harsh and not really smooth.
After
The way has been redirect and replaced by a better road with a smoother transition.
Shortcuts
The fact that my map is concentrated in a tiny space can create shortcuts or different paths. Remember that checkpoints can be taken in any order.
By playing or mapping my map and after some pathfinding researches, I found shortcuts. Some were pretty obvious and some were really tricky to find and to reproduce.
Normal run - (54"175)
At 0:25 seconds, this is how the race was supposed to be played.
Shortcut 1 - (53"818)
At 0:26 seconds, two different ways are at the same height and this is pretty easy to cross from there with any amount of speed. Then later in the track, we could do a tricky jump at 0:38 seconds. Even if it's not perfectly done in the video, it is possible to reduce his time by few seconds using both shortcuts.
Normal run - (53"807)
On the upper central platform at 0:09 seconds, the fastest way to take the turn the checkpoint conserving speed is to do what is called a "bug slide".
Shortcut 2 - (49"946)
At the same time, at 0:09 seconds, it is possible to launch the bug slide by jumping far enough and at a good angle, so that the car turns around while drifting, passing through the checkpoint. Then we can reach by jumping from this height a lower main road, then taking 2 checkpoints side by side, and joining another road. Finally, we use the same shortcut we did previously to finish the run.
Others shortcuts ideas
The problem with that idea is we don't have any solution to get the checkpoint on the upper platform as we skipping the left road. But if a reproductible bounce or jump leads the car to the top paltform, it might be a huge shortcut if we take the same path as others known shortcuts.
This is the same idea as the shortcut 2 but the jump is different. After the jump, we can take the 2 checkpoints side by side then reroute below. It is way harder than shortcut 2 because of the complexity and the accuracy of drifts and jump.
Later in the run, we have to take the last checkpoint on the sand before finishing. I didn't succeed to get enough speed to jump in that road and jump in the finish line but with the previous idea, all the checkpoints could be taken and the time skipped could be huge.
This cut might be worth it if all the things I've done in this GIF were done correctly. Both jumps are really tricky and I didn't succeed to do a run that beat my best time.
As I don't want my map to be finished with a shortcut, I blocked or avoided each potential ones. Even if shortcut seems sometimes not worth with my tries, professionnal players would probably break WR time using one of them.
Decorations
After having mapped and placed all the checkpoints, it was necessary to decorate the whole map to give it a visual identity and to be visually attractive.
At first, I wanted my map to have every type of surfaces (classic, grass, sand, ice, plastic...) but since everyone hates ice surface in Trackmania, I opted to remove it from the list. 🥶
Finally I wanted my map to be the more pleasant in his transitions and his "drivability" and I didn't want to be restricted with my theme. That's why for this map, the theme comes second.
