Shipping a Marketplace map is more work than people expect. Shipping three in a year without burning out the team is a different problem entirely. Here's the toolchain we use to keep the polish high and the process sustainable.
Three pillars
- Blueprints — every map starts as a one-page brief before a single block is placed.
- Automation — we lint structures, behaviour packs and scripts on every commit.
- Weekly playtests — the whole studio plays the WIP build on Friday.
Blueprints
A blueprint is short on purpose: one page, three sections — premise, loop, ending. If we can't fit it, the idea isn't ready. Blueprints go through a two-day review where anyone on the team can push back. Only then do we touch builder tools.
Automation
We run a small linter over every behaviour pack commit that checks for the things we've burned ourselves on: orphan entity refs, unbounded tick loops, duplicate sound keys, structures larger than the Marketplace limits. It's prevented more late-night panics than I can count.
Playtesting
Friday playtests are non-negotiable. Everyone on the team plays, everyone takes notes, and we ban solo-play notes until the debrief — it's too easy to confuse 'I didn't like it' with 'players won't like it'.