Dead points

I love Doom mapping. It's soOK I DON'T NEED TO EXPLAIN WHY.

But with a lot of the maps I make, I hit what I call a dead point, where I've worked hard to bring the map to where it is, so can't bring myself to retry, but also don't know how to continue with it.

I have so many (Unfinished) wads on my drive that it smashes the 1,000s and only about 47 are downloaded.

Do you experience this?

Yes it is a term that we go by called mappers block. It's similar to writers block, when you're in the middle of a story and you don't know how to continue it.

Similar threads popup all the time. My best suggestions are to pick up a different activity so that you can think about it subconsciously, like walking or watching a movie. It could even be playing doom or watching demos for inspiration.

It also helps by planning your maps before you start them. For me I like to create the starting room and the exit room first before I do anything else. Then I draw basic shapes for all the other rooms. At that point I have a visual cue for what my map is going to look like. Then I can proceed on details and thing placement.

Hope this helps

hah, this happens to me on a daily basis.

last couple of weeks i mapped every day and usually in the evening i'm just burned out and can't think of anything that i could build. usually i just do more polish to the map, tweak some scripts or the decorate file.

planning or a definite goal can help. like, take a piece of paper and a pen and draw a rough sketch of your map. or, like, do a reinterpretation of an existing map from any game that you really like.

to me personally, planning does not work. it really helps when i have a definite goal. sometimes a small idea is enough to start something. my current map for example just started with the idea of creating a trap wall (a wall that acts like a door with monsters behind). however, if you start with only one idea, at some point it may become hard to continue and finish a map.

if you want to map more professionally, nothing goes without planning though. you have to finish your project at some point. you can't just start over again and again. ironically, john romero did not plan his maps for doom. he used an iterative process, like i do as well, where you build, playtest, iterate, playtest, iterate etc...

i think everyone has their own methods. it certainly helps to plan and have a goal but imho, it's not a requirement.

True story. I'm also have few unfinished maps on my hard drive. When that long ago I was planning to create maps for ZDoom, without even knowing the basics of Vanilla Doom! Then I threw it, and that only recently took up the maps and now I want to finish them for Vanilla Doom.

Now, I have enough mapping knowledge for Vanilla Doom/limit removing.

I stick to these rules: Level should be with a variety of terrain elements. Reasonable arrangement of enemies. Intuitive secrets. Properly aligned textures.