Map Building Techniques

Im trying to make a doom wad, 4 episodes, 27 missions in all, while trying to go backwards like Romero did with doom 1, any tips and tricks I could get for this?

(P.S. I having my missions to go 1. Military base -5 missions

                                            2. Space Base - 10 missions

                                            3. Space Planet - 7 Missions

                                            4. Hell - 10 Missions

Do you mean techniques for mapping in general, or for making a megawad specifically?

If you're making a megawad, I imagine that you've already made several levels, right?

Important thing in mapping - make sketches first. It's not necessary to make one room and waste time on detailing it. It's better make a sketches of few rooms and then connections between them. Also add an outside area, or two. Then adjust the height of sectors. Later, choose the textures, items/monsters, adjusting brightness, actions, e.t.c. Sure, you can pick another order, but I'm offering my option.

Add windows, balconies, interconnections to spice up map design. Player must see what he is striving for. As example red key not just hidden in closet, but are visible through windows/cages, and player must find another way to reach it.

Hide monsters between crates, behind corners/columns and in unexpectable places (not just in front of player's face). Roaming monsters is always interesting, so map layouts can be made to help enemies to do that. It is better to put flying monsters somewhere behind the cliffs or behind sector objects, so they are can fly over and create nice effect.

Also check out the hotkeys of map editor, they can improve building a lot.

Oh yeah, the final comment from the person who himself released the megawad: don’t try this at home, especially if you don't have at least couple of your maps finished and reviewed by other people. In your case it's better to cut the number of maps, but keep 4 different themes to keep things fresh.

2 hours ago, Stabbey said:

Do you mean techniques for mapping in general, or for making a megawad specifically?

 

If you're making a megawad, I imagine that you've already made several levels, right?

ive made little dinky wads like but they're all like base themed

1 hour ago, riderr3 said:

Important thing in mapping - make sketches first. It's not necessary to make one room and waste time on detailing it. It's better make a sketches of few rooms and then connections between them. Also add an outside area, or two. Then adjust the height of sectors. Later, choose the textures, items/monsters, adjusting brightness, actions, e.t.c. Sure, you can pick another order, but I'm offering my option.

Add windows, balconies, interconnections to spice up map design. Player must see what he is striving for. As example red key not just hidden in closet, but are visible through windows/cages, and player must find another way to reach it.

Hide monsters between crates, behind corners/columns and in unexpectable places (not just in front of player's face). Roaming monsters is always interesting, so map layouts can be made to help enemies to do that. It is better to put flying monsters somewhere behind the cliffs or behind sector objects, so they are can fly over and create nice effect.

Also check out the hotkeys of map editor, they can improve building a lot.

Oh yeah, the final comment from the person who himself released the megawad: don’t try this at home, especially if you don't have at least couple of your maps finished and reviewed by other people. In your case it's better to cut the number of maps, but keep 4 different themes to keep things fresh.

So in your opinion I should just make normal wad and build up my knowledge of doom builder first?

16 hours ago, MetalDoomGuy said:

Im trying to make a doom wad, 4 episodes, 27 missions in all, while trying to go backwards like Romero did with doom 1, any tips and tricks I could get for this?

 

(P.S. I having my missions to go 1. Military base -5 missions

                                            2. Space Base - 10 missions

                                            3. Space Planet - 7 Missions

                                            4. Hell - 10 Missions

First, Romero didn't go in reverse when making his maps. This is a common misconception. What he did was FINISH E1M1 last. But he actually started it somewhere in the middle. I think E1M7 was the last map he made before finish E1M1 and I think he started with E1M2. I understand what you're saying about working backwards, but don't feel that you. I would say that not only do you want the opening map to be good, you also want the ending map to be good.

You'll have to find a mapping "protocol" that works for you. By that I mean that some people make rough sketches, while other people just open an editor and start drawing, and still others make very detailed plans. Find what works best for you.

Design around encounters and gameplay. Your room design should be informed by the encounters you want to stage. Don't try to draw things and then shoehorn encounters into them--that almost never works as well. You can do it sometimes, but for the majority of your encounters, you should design the room around the encounter, not vice versa. Look here for an explanation of good monster placement.

Don't get overly aggressive in what you want to do--especially at first. Take your time and improve your mapmaking skills. In fact, you may want to think about releasing these as 4 mapsets that you can combine into 1 large megawad later. The advantage to releasing them in smaller chunks is that you're more likely to get more feedback if you ask people to play 5 or 10 maps rather than playing 27 maps. You also likely won't get into the situation where you'll look back on your early maps and think "Wow, I'm so much better now than I was then--I have to go fix/replace those maps."

Otherwise, I support everything riderr3 wrote.

Okay, so it's general building techniques you want.

One that I recommend is after you get the basic architecture of your rooms done, test them with monsters. It doesn't do much good to make a phenomenally detailed and fantastic room with unsatisfying combat. You can get away with less detail if the combat is good, but if the combat is not good, excellent detail won't save the map.

I usually build levels a room or two at a time and get the combat feeling good, then I can add a little polish and move on to the next room.