Your mapping fears

That's probably one of the most common. I have so many unfinished maps on my PC. A useful thing to do is go playtest a random map you didn't finish and haven't played for a few weeks to get a fresh perspective on it. It's easier to see whats fun and what's not because it feels like playing someone else's map.

Losing x hours of progress(sometimes without ways to get it back), because builder crashed and you didn't save your work in time. Worse, if your work looked decent and promising. I can tell tons of horror stories about it from mine and other people experience. 

Just getting stuck without realicing what the fuck i'm doing wrong... get sad for days... and then when i come back, it was just that the seiling has no height...FUCK!

To see that my maps with cool concept in my head or on paper turn into something really weird ingame

Greatest fears :

_Getting that unpatched bug in DB that crashes and you can't save

_Not being able to make the map look like I thought it would look

_That one time were imps glitched through the ground and HB levitated, and a shotgun also disappeared fro some reason (never happened again though)

_Having the script error window pop up when I press the "playtest" key

2 hours ago, N1ck said:

Making a map takes a ton of effort and time, so what are some of the fears you have when making or releasing a map? The biggest one I have is the fear of spending days on a map and getting no appreciation on the thread. (no this post wasn't made to hype up a map I'm working on)

Absolutely. It's definitely good for the ego to get feedback from the community. I've not long returned to mapping since I was 20-something - I'm 51 now - so I've only released a few. I'd say that it's more important to map for YOU, rather than the feedback (though it is nice to get recognition).

31 minutes ago, Misty said:

Losing x hours of progress(sometimes without ways to get it back), because builder crashed and you didn't save your work in time. Worse, if your work looked decent and promising. I can tell tons of horror stories about it from mine and other people experience.

And this. I definitely recommend a robust online backup. I'm a coder by profession, so I tend to use git commandline and Github, but even an automated/regular backup to Google Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive could save these 'oh, fuck...' moments.

1 hour ago, Pechudin said:

Making it 50%, and then losing the enthusiasm. Also what you said.

Yeah. I have a really big one I started in March that I have this exact same thing with. I just wait for inspiration to strike and focus on other maps until then.

somehow accidentally deleting your entire project

I will once again make a room that is 2048 units wide with nothing to put in it. That's what happened with my first map.

Releasing it and having a lot of bugs

I dont fear about deleting the map because i save it on github repos, i make git commit regularely with the changes, but yes to releasing it and that nothing works. Or some so ugly bug, like happened with DIMWEIRD.pk3 on software renderer mode.

The good thing is that if its a bug, i can fix it :) the most of the times :|

Yeh i fear too that when its released nobody plays it or give feedback, but its literally the story of my life :/

I've been working on a megawad for about 2 years now and I fear that when I release it, no one's gonna play it. A lot of the earlier maps aren't super good because they're old, so I'm worried people will play the first couple of maps, then decide that the entire megawad is gonna suck and stop playing.

As for accidentally losing progress, that's no concern for me. Back up your projects, people! I use dropbox. I also back it up on a separate flash drive in case my dropbox gets hacked or something.

Unpegged door tracks are a M O R T A L sin. I also always have a small fear of lack of motivation and ideas, but when I do have ideas i have a fucking blast when mapping.

3 hours ago, N1ck said:

The biggest one I have is the fear of spending days on a map and getting no appreciation on the thread.

Or getting much less then one have imagined...
On the other hand putting a lot of effort, check and playtest your map like 100 times with no bugs and stuff and then let someone else test it just to find out you have a TON of jank in your map that never happened during your testing.

I've made a lot of maps now. I've found that, with experience, my fear fell by the wayside, but so did the excitement that came with it. Hold onto that fear and energy and use it to power yourself to greater things. When you're not scared that people won't play your maps any more, you've lost the investment that made making them so much fun in the first place!

4 hours ago, N1ck said:

The biggest one I have is the fear of spending days on a map and getting no appreciation on the thread.

8 minutes ago, Shawny said:

Or getting much less then one have imagined...

this pretty much are my fears as i dont have many replies on what i can improve or where my mapping fails then lost motivation to do more mapping, but actually working in a project with DmPhobos, but then again i still have my fear as my map05 im pretty sure is bad and i honestly dont know where are my mistakes.

Having good ideas but being too lazy to concretise them

This is more something that came with my experience with the Source Engine, but it was very possible that one minor mistake that's very hard to pinpoint can cause MASSIVE graphical errors or crash your game.

I'm glad I switched to GZDoom.

Since i am a Heretic mapper i don't fear getting not enough replies on the thread, i always expect none so each reply is super duper cool :D

I don't think i can call it a fear, but i am not a fan of having a cool idea and then when i put it in a map it doesn't really work :/

1. Making boring and/or repetetive level and room designs that are too similar to other sections of the same map or to different maps I've made. More specifically I'm afraid of making stuff like simple rectangular rooms with not much detail for example, or pretty much anything that looks too similar to most Doom 2 levels.
2. Making bad texture/flat choices that don't fit for the room I'm making, similar to that, using the same texture/flat too many times.
3. Similar to the above, using the default Doom Builder textures for Doom maps of STARTAN2, FLOOR0_1, and CEIL1_1. I avoid using them the majority of the time because being the default textures makes me feel like anything that uses them in my maps is just unfinished and is using them as placeholders, and I feel like anyone else that may play my maps will think the same.

However these 3 ones are more like perceived fears than anything else. The things I'm afraid of that are definitely very real are:

Losing motivation to work on a map halfway through and/or not having any ideas on what to do or make next, when I first began making maps around July 2019 I had no idea what I was doing, so much so that it took me literally MONTHS to finally make a working door*, but I at least had tons of motivation to keep working on maps and a lot of ideas. But around the time last year that I began to redo my third ever map that is now Lab Infestation, due to being too dissapointed with the original. I had began losing motivation and ideas on what to do next as mentioned in the original thread itself (Not because of being dissapointed with the original lab.wad though.). So now while I have WAY more technical know-how on how to make maps**, I have lost most of my creativity and motivation in exchange.

Rarely ever finishing my maps, if it's not because of the above mentioned two issues it'll be because playtesting is the most tedious and frustrating aspect of working on a map. To ensure that a map can be played from start to finish I have to play the map A LOT of times over. Every time I reach something making the player unable to progress, such as a room with too many monsters and too little health or ammo, I have to make that change such as adding more ammo and health, then be forced to replay the whole map until the next unbeatable section. This also means that I can't get anyone else to playtest my maps since nobody would want to play through a map, reach a room they can't progress past, tell me the issue, wait for 1-10 minutes for me to fix it, have me send them over the new version of the map with the fix, replay the map until the next unbeatable section, then rinse and repeat dozens of times over until they can reach the end of the map.

As a result of those two huge issues, I haven't released any more maps so far besides arena.wad and Lab Infestation since I usually never finish my maps. However I am planning on eventually releasing a small mapset of all the maps that I HAVE finished, which there's around 6-7 of so far.

These are all the mapping fears and issues I have that I can remember. Both the probably perceived ones and the very real ones that have prevented me from releasing any maps in about a year now.


*I did actually somehow make a working door on my very first and very broken map but I was unable to replicate it again.
**For example here is what the original version of my first ever working map looks like, and here is what my remake of it that I finished working on last week looks like.

Bad reviews, I dont give a f care the other's opinion, it's my project and I like it.

starting a new map is always scary for me--will it be enough to hold my interest?  will players enjoy it?  does it translate from the paper to the screen? etc., etc.

forgetting to give a door a tag, resulting in me wondering why said door not working or using a switch tag on a monster closet instead of walk-over and again, wondering why it doesn't work

23 minutes ago, TenenteZashu said:

forgetting to give a door a tag, resulting in me wondering why said door not working 

I do this so often that I don't even worry about it anymore.

If it doesn't work, then I go in and add the tag because that's always what I did wrong.

Compiling stresses me out. I'm so paranoid about loading the wrong map into the build, or using an old version, or just flat out breaking something somehow. This is why I back up every compilation so I've got something to fall back on if I complete bork something up. 

Spending months detailing a map and seeing players run past all of the detailed sections without even glancing at them... I guess that's what you should expect when making maps for a game with quick combat and where you run at lightning speed.

6 minutes ago, StalkerBlade said:

Spending months detailing a map and seeing players run past all of the detailed sections without even glancing at them... I guess that's what you should expect when making maps for a game with quick combat and where you run at lightning speed.

I tend to lament this a bit but I feel better knowing that it's there for people to notice if they choose to look around. it hasn't led me wrong yet.

My worst fear stems from when I used to use Deepsea.  Occasionally, whatever map you were working on in a wad would replace MAP01 when you save it.  So I'm always afraid I might overwrite something even when I'm using Doom Builder.  It's like a silent nagging fear.

Of course, there's always the classic "I'm never going to finish this because I no longer have interest in this shit."  This carries over to my gameplay mod work and music.  I need to sit down and finish something once the dust in my life settles, if it ever does.  And/or I pull myself out of severe depression.  Whichever comes first, I guess.

That I'll wake up... trapped inside my map!