What wads most affected your map-style?

What I mean is, everyone has been influenced by a map pack or level and had incorporated its ideas or elements, or derived new ideas from their concepts, into their own maps.

What are the wads that particularly influenced your map design the most? BYHAE and some maps from 1024CLAU influenced my idea of what a map is, and I like the detailing of BYHAE though I don't like to go to that extent, and some of the base concepts from Claustrophobia had some impact.

What about your influences? Please don't say Doom or Doom 2, that's pretty much all of us here.

https://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/74034-3-wads-that-influenced-you-the-most/ - My answer is in there.

Probably the Master Levels from PSX Final Doom. As far as community releases, I always enjoyed Scythe's clever levels. Kaiser's Doom 64 stuff is very good too.

Well shoot. I forgot to look this up before making a new thread.

Missed the other thread so just wanted to add my own lil' history for the record.

I mentioned it elsewhere but I was mostly inspired to get into mapping thanks to the works of Paul Corfiatis and Phml. Immundum was the first map I ever started but I planned my "debut" on Doomworld to be a bleak and oppressive slaughtermap that slowly unfolded as the player fought on, wanting to inspire the same kind of awe I felt the first time I played Mouse. But as my style developed, I became more inspired by my contemporaries and the wads I played, so I wouldn't say there's specific wads I try and emulate so much as mapper attitudes I like to adopt at times: mouldy's chaos, cannonball's spaciousness, Steve D's hitscanners, skillsaw's fluidity, monti & joe's texture recklessness, etc. Almost everything I play has some effect on me, and it's always fun to try and change/expand my style beyond what I find comfortable.

Phobos - Roger Ritenour
First time seeing realistic settings in Doom done in a convincing way. Most of the visuals would hold up today.

Inferno - Chris Lutz
The sense of scale was overwhelming - I still go back to this map-set for inspiration.

Sacrifice DM - Afterglow
Afterglow was a top tier mapper in the late 90s / early 2000s. The Sacrifice maps were not his best stuff, but the influence they had on me at the time was pretty profound.

Greenwar 2 - Various
I was working on a DM map-set, played Greenwar 2 then dragged the pack I was working on to the recycling bin. Not really out of some sense of defeat (well, a little) but more inspired by this new-found level of mapping abilities I felt tremendously inspired by.

KZDoom 1-8 - Kurt Kesler
Kurt was a mapping machine. I haven't played these in a while, but at the time I remember each of his releases notching the bar up higher.


Artica series - Cyb
In the same league as the Kesler maps - most of the ACS whoring would probably be considered passe in this era, but they were really exciting to play when they came out. I consider these maps to be the peak of the first crest in the brave new world of Zdoom editing.

When I first started mapping in early 2000s I didn't have an account here, and I rarely finished anything I made. But I lurked on these forums for a while and checked this site twice a week for /newstuff chronicles so I could check the screenshots and imagine what it would be like to play doom on new levels.

I remember specifically admiring the work of Tormentor667 and AgentSpork, which helped me to realize how important texture alignment was and how easy it was to detail. It wasn't until I started playing Scythe 2 that I felt like I could make things people would like to play. The maps were good looking but the detail was simple enough that it didn't look to difficult to make something that could compete with it.

Ive gotten inspiration from gothic deathmatches, vrack, alien vendetta, and ultimate simplicity. Lately its mostly been Doom 2 and Plutonia.

Violence. For me this set mastered the balance between nice colors and consistency. it is a great source of inspiration.

Scythe is my absolute go to WAD when I am in need of inspiration and referencing.

None in particular really. I'll emulate some things from various wads, or levels. But those are really minor I think.

I've played very few stuff, and finished even less lol
But some stuff outside of the original DOOM that I take as influence:

Scythe - It's the first 32 level PWAD (tbh, I think it's the only one) I've finished. Amazing job, very addictive gameplay.

Erkattäññe - Made me realize that you can make many really interesting stuff with very little resources. Also a good lesson to how to make some nice abstract environments.

Plutonia - Very interesting settings, very interconnected layouts and badass monster placement.

Dark Souls - Yeah, it's a game and a not wad, but it showed what kind of game I actually like and helped me improve my notions of Level Design.

BTSX. No match.

Crossing Acheron and Dante's Gate - Dr. Sleeps early maps were some of the very first maps I played after going through the crap on those shovelware CD's. So I was influenced there to start mapping in the first place.

The Darkening 2 - The nice architecture alone got me into wanting to make better designs and I think the custom textures set me off on creating textures of my own.

Straying outside of Doom, I have to say the maps in Blade of Darkness were an inspiration and such maps as can be found in Thief Gold, like Down in The Bonehoard.

1) Scythe, for its small action-packed maps

2) BTSX, for showing me what vanilla mapping is capable of.

3) Eternal Doom, for showing me that large maps can also be fun (for me at least)

No particular one. Each one of my maps is influenced by a different wad.

Back to Saturn X is probably the #1 answer for me here, since it's the first wad where I had a consistent feedback loop for my work, which helped me shape my style and learn my strengths and weaknesses. That's where I learned what a "pavera map" was: wide spaces with lots of room to move, and a connected, round-about layout that lets the player guide freely like on a racetrack.

Of course that style has changed as I made more maps, and Doom 2 the way id Did is the wad where I learned the style of architecture that suits me as a mapper. Simple, bone-headed, and abstract is the name of my game. I don't dabble in small details (at least, not nearly as much as my contemporaries), and I love drawing scenes that are memorable without really tying to anything that you would see in real life.

Finally, I think that working on The Adventures of Square is where I learned that I'm best when I'm coming up with outdoor areas and caves. This was the first time I made a map that took place almost entirely in a large cave system (A Miner Inconvenience), and it probably won't be the last time (once I actually get back into making maps).

This is a very condensed answer, as there are many wads that influenced and inspired me to create maps the way that I do. I like to cite rf's Mapgame as the wad that made me think about doom mapping in the way that I do, but there are definitely countless others.

Notable wads to influence me:

- Scythe 2
- Ultimate Simplicity
- Going Down
- Congestion 1024
- Doom Episode 1



Notable projects that I have been part of that influenced my style:

- Stronghold
- Skulldash

For me it was:
Doom 1 and 2 (mostly doom 2)
Doom 64
Finaln Doom: Plutonia (even though i could barely play it without dying)
Ultimate Torment and Torture
DoomTwid series
Scythe 2
Epic 2

Final Doom has most of my all-time favorite levels. Well of Souls invisible bridge blew my mind when I first saw it. For unofficial levels I'd have to go with both DTWID megawads, every level has effort put into it (exept the boss levels, they suck)

Pavera said:

I like to cite rf's Mapgame as the wad that made me think about doom mapping in the way that I do, but there are definitely countless others.

Can't believe I haven't come across Mapgame before, what a treat.

For co-op and SP, I was pretty much most influenced by Later Doom1 maps, Doom2, TNT and Scythe. I like the oldschool stuff. Honestly though, I've gotten inspiration from loads of sources, both old and new over the years. UAC Rebellion was inspired by the big fat flop that was Doom Rampage Edition, for example. It can come from odd/bad places.

With regards to deathmatch, all of the awesome maps I compiled into duelpak.wad, aside from the few that are mine of course. To me these are like the "scythe maps of DM" in that they're all pretty clean-but-oldschool in texturing and feature small but very clever interconnected layouts.

A new hellspawn by Lilwhitemouse.

I liked the use of zdoom features to improve the usual "hell infested base", adding some puzzles and new enemies.