Hello, I am new!

[Thimble_Tack]

I would just like to say hello to this community. My name is Ryan (Thimble_Tack) and I used to make minecraft adventure maps back in the day, and I have fallen in love with this game. I just had one question for other map devs out there.

Before I invest a lot of time in a map, if you could go back and give yourself any word of advice about map making, what would it be? 

[Phantom]

Try something small like a survival map first unless you feel ambitious of diving into something big. I sometimes reference this for scripting command details http://hammerwatch.wikia.com/wiki/Editor .

I also recommend giving this first editor setup a go too so you can have your editor folder setup to edit http://hammerwatch.com/forum/index.php?topic=2026.0

I would also put this console.XML in editor folder after so you can have some console for debugging purposes http://hammerwatch.com/forum/index.php?topic=2074.0

you can also extract the campaign by pasting the campaign.hwm in the editor folder, make a shortcut of the ResourceExtractor.exe then add the parameter map campaign.hwm in the shortcut then run it. This will extract the levels of the campaign for you to see the layout of it as references.

This tool is also another useful resource for helping generate .xml files for custom doodads, enemies, tiles, items. Hammersprite http://hammerwatch.com/forum/index.php?topic=2081.0

[Hammeron]

"back in the day"

hahahhaha your funny man

[Hipshot]

You should really try something small first, cause a lot of people start large projects, not realizing that it is a huge amount of work making a good HW level.