Minimalist Challenge

Speaking of ultra-minimalism with that design, I give you the Best Map In The History Of Forever! God help me.


In slightly more serious news, here's v1.5 of UAC Budget Cuts, improving on visuals, fixing some constraint violations (doh!), and tweaking balance a bit more.


Also, NoisyVelvet has sent me a snapshot of his map's layout with some gameplay. If he doesn't plan to continue, I'll try to finish it off myself at some point, time permitting. Seems worth salvaging; it's surprisingly spacious and good flowing, constraints or not.

Tuxlar said:

Speaking of ultra-minimalism with that design, I give you the Best Map In The History Of Forever! God help me.

Blue door is red-locked, otherwise nice. With some more height variation and better texturing than default STARTAN, I believe it might be seriously good, even - at least for the concept.

This looks like a cool idea. I'll give the rules a more careful read later and see if I can get a playable map out of it.

scifista42 said:

Blue door is red-locked, otherwise nice. With some more height variation and better texturing than default STARTAN, I believe it might be seriously good, even - at least for the concept.

Noted. Also fixed it to work properly with constraints, but the SMM use is a bit less oppressive, as a result. Still accomplish their intended purpose, however. Left it un-textured, to emphasize it's ultra minimalist-ness (and totally not because I'm a lazy ass).

I'm going to look into making a better reference guide for building common structures within constraints, soon. Might shave off some of the learning curve.

Tuxlar said:

Noted.

It still needs a bunch of archviles to be challenging. I guess you're not familiar with gggmork's mapping? :)

I'm going to look into making a better reference guide for building common structures within constraints, soon. Might shave off some of the learning curve.

Do you think it's worth it, given the low interest in your project? I ask, not imply.

My map is in (slow) progress, because I need to waste a lot of time between the occasions when I get to mapping. (Actually sorry, I'm not glad for being ineffective / lazy / whatever.)

scifista42 said:

Do you think it's worth it, given the low interest in your project? I ask, not imply.

Interest != value. Minimalism stands on its own, besides.

Anyway, it's a reference, not a tutorial. Should have done it properly right from the start.

Alright - I believe you do it great, if your focus is "value". Keep up the good work!

scifista42 said:

Hey, Tuxlar, once again. I know that you didn't support this idea, but would you allow these 10 custom textures to be used? I've just whipped them up in a graphic editor. All are 96 units wide, obviously, and the last one is the original Doom patch itself.

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Hey, these are nice. "Always" thought Doom could use 96 wide doors. Might vary the usual monsters' wander-patterns around doors a bit. Mind if I use some of them, or are they project specific?

@Soundblock: Feel free to use them for whatever purposes you want, you don't even need to credit me, because I only let GIMP to resize the textures. :) Grab them from the updated download link on page 2, containing 16 textures in total.

scifista42 said:

@Soundblock: Feel free to use them for whatever purposes you want

bonus

I couldn't force myself to finish my techbase map yet, so I made this speedmap at least:

It's a recreation of Doom's E3M1 (Hell Keep) within minimalist restrictions, as accurate as I could have done. Why? For science, and because I was idealess, and because I felt like wasting time this way. It took me a couple hours and I was also looking at the real E3M1 in an editor. I actually made it close to the original, except that I added a chaingun to the start for faster gameplay, and a radsuit in the blood pool.

Plays on Doom 2 MAP01.

https://www.sendspace.com/file/fnsac6

By the way, Tuxlar, if you're interested in minimalist-like mapping approaches and principles, I can recommend you to check out the works of Jazzmaster9. Namely 32 over 32, Another 32 over 32, Innocence, Innocence 2, Innocence 3. Jazzmaster's style is very distinct, full of "minimalistic" tendencies, but doesn't feel restricted. It rather feels like if the author can't help himself, so that he keeps repeating still the same basic elements. But the maps are aesthetically varied enough, and fun to play, anyway.