hellbound short doom ll wad

this is a custom doom wad i made. its pretty basic but if you want to make it better you can reply to this thread. note i tested this with zandronum

add more information and screenshots and read this too. 

I hope that you don't mind harsh critique, because that's all you're going to get from me.

If you want to make good maps, then you should really fix these issues:

- Every room consists of like 3 textures and all of them look extremely bland because of that.

- The plasma and chainsaw secrets aren't hidden at all. So why are they secrets? Especially since it's pretty hard (or rather boring) to fight many high level monsters without the plasma.

- All encounters are very random - you just threw a bunch of monsters into a room, not caring about how fun the combat would actually be.

- There are missing textures and misalignments all over the place.

- There is literally no reason for the yellow door to be behind the blue one. Remember that usually the fewer doors you make, the better.

So my advice for you would be to try out a few different community wads, and analyze how they are made, and what makes them good. Also read some mapping tutorials, tips and tricks.

thank you so much for your input it really means alot I will try to make as much improvements to the map as i can  

Here is a one-click download link instead of several.

I agree with everything Lorenz0 said. I'll add a few things.

• The yellow door does not even actually require the yellow key.
• Doors don't always have to be 64 or 128 wide, but if you use a traditional door texture and don't use its standard width, that usually requires some basic trickery of splitting linedefs.
• I thought the teleporter was a cheap way to avoid backtracking
• Besides a few tiny steps (all of which are missing textures), there is no height variation and no light variation

I also agree with everything Lorenz0 said.

Hellbound is the name of a famous megawad - I'd advise using a different name.

2 hours ago, Lorenz0 said:

Remember that usually the fewer doors you make, the better.

Doors are typically good for two things:

To control the flow of players and monsters through the map.

To restrict when a player can enter a particular area (primarily keyed doors and switch-activated doors).

I generally agree with what Lorenz0 and HAK3180 said. These are other suggestions I would add:

Put doors in small insets in the wall. This will allow you to use different heights of doors without the room having to be completely the same height as the door. This will help with increasing the verticality of your level.

Resist the urge to use the cyberdemon in every level. The cyberdemon doesn't need to make an appearance in every level.

When you've added different heights to your levels, use monsters on those different heights, because that will add to their threat, as well as to the variety of the level.

I don't understand how the cyberdemon ended up in the snake floor room, especially looking at your layout.

With regard to the criticism of monster placement, I suggest you read through this:

It's essentially a tutorial about monster usage and is written by two highly respected mappers and contains contributions from several other well-known (and award-winning mappers).

Remember, encounter design is what will ultimately make or break your map. It can be the most beautiful creation aesthetically, but if you just have haphazard monster placement with no thought to how the monsters will interact with the player, it will not hold most people's interest for long. On the flip side, if you have well-thought out encounters, people will remember that.

Wow......... erm.... okay I REALLY don't want to sound like a cruel jerk but this was horrible.

1: Why were the plasma secret and the chainsaw secret not hidden behind a middle texture? I just walked over and grabbed them and BOOM! Secret!

2: A TON Of missing texture/mis-textured walls. In quite a few locations you forgot to texture the walls near the floor as well as one of the imp traps in the marble room the walls inside said trap room uses the standard STARTAN2 texture.

3: The door track textures aren't meant to be used for 32-wide linedefs. 8-24 is the accepted range (under 8 can work but not all of the texture is used).

4: Texture inconsistency. I went from a brown base to a gray base to a marble castle to a gory hell room within the space of 5 or so minutes.

5: Secrets and mandatory items are NOT meant to go together! The map is ridiculously hard without the plasma ammo.

6: Texture mis-allignments. The computer walls in the gray base room has a minor off-set error meaning what looks like a computer is instantly cut-off due to being wrongly off-set.

7: The cyberdemon boss room lacks any pillars for cover, armour, health OR ammo

8: You can skip right past the cyberdemon boss.

9: Missing textures to indicate a teleporter

10: Almost every room uses the EXACT same ceiling texture, with only the boss room using a different texture (which might I add doesn't tile very well).

11: Any reason for a blue door infront of the yellow door?

and finally 12: Lack of detail in any of the rooms.

Again, I just want to give criticism and not full-on abuse. These were complaints I have with the map. Fix them (or at least most) and this map would be far better to play. (I'd happily give it a second review) :)

2/10