How to make maps

awcmon, here is an old guide I've been sitting on:

Before you start:
Make sure you have the essentials:

   * Gang Garrison 2
   * Garrison Builder
   * Image editor of your choice

Personally, I would Graphics Gale for the wallmask and background, (More on those later) but there are alternatives like paint and pixen, to each his own. Most people have their preferences, but having a layered image editor is incredibly useful while working on detailed maps.

Process of Map Composition

This is more of an issue of personal preference, but here is the most common way maps are created:

   1. Create a wallmask
   2. Insert Spawns, intels/CPs
   3. Playtest, tweak wallmask until result is satisfactory
   4. Create a background
   5. Playtest
   6. Fine tune
   7. Repeat 5 and 6 as necessary

Create a test map
(Covering the basics for beginners, if you have some experience, feel free to skip this section.)

Right now you might be wondering what are wallmasks and backgrounds. A wallmask is essentially the skeleton of your map. It tells the game what a player can walk through, and what is solid. (fig 1) A background, on the other hand, is the flesh of a map, and is what the player sees while in-game. (fig 2) As stated before, most mappers start out with a wallmask, then work on a background. The advantage of this is that once a desirable map layout has been made, a background can be made and a completed map can be released promptly. The main disadvantage of this method is that the background is limited to the constraints of the layout, which can severely limit the aesthetic value of the map. However, working from background to wallmask leads to long sessions of tweaking, even for the smallest issues. Once again, it is a matter of personal preference, but remember to not limit yourself to one method only; experiment!

Hearing is hardly as useful as doing, so lets make our very own wallmask. Open up a image editor, and create a simple 20px by 60px rectangle (white inside with black lining.) Fill in the surrounding area with black. The most important step of making a wallmask, aside from getting a playable layout, is making it readable to the Garrison Builder. You do this simply by taking the lower left corner of your map and putting in a white pixel. Garrison Builder looks at this corner when it loads an image, the pixel in the very corner tells it what color indicates open space, and the pixel to it's right tells the Builder what color indicates a collision area. (fig 3) Remember to save your map as a .png file! For the purposes of this tutorial, name the map "testroom.png"

Now its time to open up Garrison Builder. The amount of buttons may be overwhelming, but for now we'll only need a couple for now. Click on the "Load Wallmask" button, then navigate to your map. Click on "Load Background" and just load up your wallmask again. (Outside the purpose of the tutorial, this is a fairly poor habit for wallmask creation. Don't do it) We are going to put in the spawns for both teams. A spawn consists of medicabinets, the two respawn entities, and team doors. The medicabinet, as it's name suggests, serves to heal damaged players. The first respawn entity is just a runner sprite; it tells GG2 where to spawn/respawn a character. The respawn room entity lets the game know where a spawn is. It is technically unecessary, as all the game needs is the spawn entity, but it removes the time it takes to change classes in the spawn, and is almost always included to avoid a break in gameplay. Lets go through this step by step:

   1. Place the red team doors on the right side of the map, with ~15 pixels of space from the wall.
   2. Cover every inch of the spawn with the respawn room entity.
   3. Place the medicabinets wherever you want within the spawn, although they are normally opposite of the spawn entrance, or in the middle of the spawn if there are multiple entrances.
   4. Put the spawn entities in. You only technically need one, but generally you try to place about three or four within a spawn.

(fig 4)

If you messed something up, right-click deletes the entity underneath it. Do the same thing for the right side, but with the blue entities, and click on "Compress into Background" If you want to try out your map, feel free to go down to the map hosting section.

Sorry for the huge block of text, hopefully its useful. I'll try provide the images if you don't understand a part.

(edit: would anyone be interested in me finishing this? It was supposed to be a megatutorial (covering different game modes, mapping theory, map hosting, naming semantics, reference statistics, etc))