Finish your first map small

Almost everyone's first map is too big. Thirteen classes, eight bosses, a save system. Two months later they quietly stop.

It is not willpower. The hard parts of map making are all at the end: win conditions, players leaving, restarting, everything that breaks once more than one person is in the room. Start big and you run out of energy before you ever meet them.

Finish a small one and you meet all of them once. A problem you have met once takes hours the next time instead of weeks. That is what finishing teaches.

• Aim at ten minutes of play. Play time, not build time.
• One enemy type and one win condition. Adding is always available later.
• Test with more than one player from the start. Most of the bugs only exist there.
• Write the good ideas down and leave them. They are the second map.

Then publish it. Watching people play it in a room is a different experience from testing it alone, and it is almost always the thing that makes someone build a second map.