Wads you gave up on...

[The_SloVinator]

Any particular wads you gave up on in the past?

If so, what are the reasons?

[NaZa]

Do you mean our own creations we stopped working on, or WADs we started playing and just never finished?

[dmslr]

[deleted]

Edited August 14, 2019 by dmslr

[Magicana]

I never really give up on them. I'm having a bittersweet relationship with Sunder at the moment (Map03). Previously it was Sunlust on HMP - It took me 6 months to beat Map 30 (On and off every so often - Fuck that Hell Knight/Imp trap). and similar time for maps 24-29. But I never give up on something.

[baja blast rd.]

48 minutes ago, NaZa said:

Do you mean our own creations we stopped working on, or WADs we started playing and just never finished?

 

Not only would the former be far more interesting, it would also be appropriate for Wads & Mods. So good judgment would roll with that regardless. 

[DynamiteKaitorn]

I was working on a vanilla DooM II project, to be a sequel to my "Another DooM 1 Dumb Remake" WAD but I lost interest by map09. I had already given it a restart but I can't find any motivation to continue mapping for DooM II vanilla for now... so I went over to Heretic. :P

[SchwTrdLeenW]

The first Hell Revealed right after MAP23, and not because MAP24 or the WAD itself are too difficult.

Maybe i'm just a spoiled kid because i mostly play all the high profile, community acclaimed WADs, and thus have no idea what terrible designs and ideas do exist out there. But from my standpoint, the final room of HR MAP23 was the single worst moment i've ever had with anything Doom related. Nothing about this encounter is good or entertaining in any way, and i'm pretty sure it was 100% intentional because it is just unthinkable for me that anyone who has ever played Doom 2 would think about this as a good idea, let alone a (for his time) high level speedrunner and mapper. It seems like an intentional dickmove, it kills any flow, joy and excitement this map had to offer, and have absolutely no interest in playing any map by Yonatan Donner again.

Maybe i'm a bit hypocritical, but this final room is such a collosal failure gameplay-wise that i'm beginning to question how anyone could have left it in the WAD like it is, with the exception of intentionally pissing off the player.

Edit.: Seems like i misinterpreted the threads title, sorry.

[Deadwing]

Many of my earlier projets didn't got finished or didn't became what I wanted.

The reason is the same for all of them: Lack of gameplay/level design knowledge, getting burnt out and quickly getting out of ideas.

 

- eclpse was my first project and it was meant to be an megawad, but it ended up having 19 levels after a lot of iterations.

- After that, I started a eclpse prequel which was meant to be 11 level long wad but I formatted my pc and only the first three remained.

- I decided to scrap the project as the first Discovering the Hell series, which got 9 maps at total, I guess. 

- But its sequel was planned to have 25 maps with lots of new enemies and in the end had 18 (or 19) too.

- Afer that, I've started Nevasca and the maps got progressively better, and I was able to finish the later projects. Some levels or projects I had on my mind didn't past the paper phase though.

 

I guess I've commited every mistake an amateur mapper could do with its first projects: Starting a megawad, going to GZDoom and add crap when you don't understand well the gameplay or how to make good layouts, and isolating myself from "the word" without getting any feedback until I got a frankenstein done.

Edited August 14, 2019 by Deadwing

[yakfak]

I had been planning a megawad which would have been one big, weird map after another. spidersilk and nato were the first two levels in it and making those was so exhausting that I called the whole thing off. working title was "drawing down the moon" but other people have taken over with the moon imagery since, giggle

 

ps I'm still so proud of nato with its abstract siege warfare and total uncomfortability but I don't think it has ever been beaten saveless. there's no demo on dsda for it and I've hardly ever seen anyone talk about the level. it's very spiky and unapproachable and you're so underpowered yet being attacked so thoroughly the whole time it's hard to work out what to do next so it will probably stay consigned to secrecy!

[Phobus]

Oooo...

• Takeover
  • ZDoom mapset that was going to make heavy use of the features available back in 2006.
  • I'd done a decent-sized linear techbase section where you, amongst other things, interacted with a computer system to solve puzzles (including one used to rearrange vertical stacks of crates to make stairs you jump up in low gravity), climbed a ladder up to a horizontal support which you used as monkey bars and fought zombified scientists.
  • I'd also made a volcano with ashes and sparks that blew around in an upward current that threw you to your death if you lost your footing.
  • This was deleted, and the basic introduction was used for the first (and only map) in the second Tiny Pack.
  • I think I just ran out of steam here. It was ambitious and I wanted easier to stuff to finish.
• Tiny Pack 2 (and beyond)
  • Continuing on from the first Tiny Pack, I was going to make loads of bite sized ZDoom levels that told little five-map stories.
  • I never got round to carrying on after TINY5, though, so just packed it up as the Tiny Double Pack and that's been in various other collections since.
  • I think the ambition of it all ahead of me was just too much to keep going with. I wanted to do some stuff that would've needed major art assets that I don't have and couldn't reasonably make.
• The Justice Pack
  • Carrying on from Justice - Infernal Mechanics and expanding on White Light: 2010 edition, I was going to have a temple map with possessed monks lead to the arena from the latter, also telling the story of how you came by Justice in the first place. I was then going to do a decent follow up to Infernal Mechanics to make better use of my resources.
  • Cancelled because my artwork was crap and I just never worked on it enough.
• Virus Episode 2 and 3
  • Despite making all of the enemies, weapons and stuff for these episodes, I never worked on the better, more complex textures that I wanted and didn't find a source to use instead. As a result, I never started on the maps.
  • I still want to do more with the enemies, but I have to keep fighting off the ambition to try to improve the artwork, as I'm still no kind of artist.
• ZTrain
  • I briefly tried to host a ZDoom community project to make a fun little train map inspired by Enjay's train map.
  • I set some pretty strict rules to make life easy (carriage size, DECORATE restrictions, etc.), somebody immediately broke all of them with the second submission, so I said I wouldn't accept it. That caused some backlash, so I fucked the whole thing off.
  • I still want to make a train map, but can't get straight in my head how far I want to stray from Enjay's original.

There's probably some other stuff. Plenty of community project submissions that never took off over the last few years, certainly, although I try and salvage what I can from some of those. I'm in danger of never finishing Warpzone II, Bigger Woodchip, Escalation III (or beyond), Suicide Missions (last year's NaNoWADMo) and Darkened Heart at the very least. Triacontathlon is a super slow burner, too.

[Loud Silence]

Never gave up on any WAD i have played. But there was one single level WAD, which made me think about giving up: The Eye by @mouldy. However i have finished it on UV without freelook or any other non-Doom things.

[Havoc Crow]

Years ago (sometime around 2008?) I worked on a ZDoom mapset taking place inside a spaceship. I think I made about 2-3 maps before I got bored, and later somehow lost the wad file.

[Walter confetti]

Quite some maps I made are still locked in development hell from years, but I never give up on anything that I made or played...

[Novaseer]

My first WAD, Titan's Pass (titanpas.wad), I gave up on because I made the WAD file inaccessible by incorrectly implementing a custom monster, after I'd already made 11 of the 17 maps I intended to create for the project. I started work on a (better, but still kinda bad) remake by the name of ttnpasv2.wad, but a texture glitch (which magically fixed itself when I re-checked the WAD file recently) halted my progress. After those failures I started work on a smaller mapset (7 maps instead of 17) by the name of Depths of Insanity (depths.wad), which was released on August 14, 2018 as my first public WAD (link can be found here.)

After that I immediately started work on a sequel, which is still being worked on whenever I feel like it as I post updates every now and then to the Post Your Doom Picture megathread (and I erroneously posted the 7 map demo of it to the wrong subforum). Depths 2 ramps up the map count again from 7 to what is intended to be 21 (and 16 are done so far.)

During the development of these 'major WADs', I started a few side projects which never saw the light of day (or really much work at all past the times I started them,) by the names of testwad.wad, infernus.pk3, overdriv.wad, wipwad01.wad, rpentmap.wad, nv_tsar.pk3 and nv_supernova.pk3 (in chronological order.) Out of these, rpentmap.wad was the most developed (the project was a single Hell map, which ended up about half done before I forgot about it) and nv_supernova.pk3 was probably the most interesting, as it was intended to be a total conversion.

I also started the ill-fated Iconography CP a few months after Depths' release. To be fair, the project remained semi-active for about four months, but has been largely forgotten by now, I feel.

 

And yes. Every. Single. One. of these were UDMF. That's just how I roll.

[DMPhobos]

If we're talking about wads you were working on and eventually abandoned, i got plenty of them (and even talked about them some time ago hehe), i'll share a couple of important ones i worked on before joining dw, all GZDoom mods since that's what i used to work at the time.
 

First one was a survival mod, it was heavily inspired by the book 'First Blood' (The rambo novel) and i wanted to have a mod were you would get chased around the mountains and you had to hide and find the proper time to hit back the soldiers looking for you. I made some substantial work on it, you could loot bodies for items, use stealth to sneak behind enemies for an insta kill with the knife, soldiers would investigate noises and if you used your guns too often or made too much noise, it would alert every enemy and you had to go into hiding to get away, also you could hide in darkness and it would affect the vision of the enemies when they were looking for you. It was a pretty cool concept but in the end i had no idea how to make it a coherent mod and eventually i gave up,

Some screens from the old thread
 

Spoiler

Doom of the dead, i worked on this zombie apocalypse mod a loong time, first going from a 'open world' survival were you had to survive a couple of days on a city, then i changed it to an 'arcade' survival mod. Lost interest quickly as issues started to pile up, and realized that zombies were boring
 

Spoiler

 

F-Zero doom, i tried to recreate f-zero using gzdoom, i managed to get something working, but it was buggy as hell and i couldn't recreate the sense of speed the games are know for without making huuuuuuge maps... so yeah, it was a cool proof of concept and i event tested in multiplayer once, but it was too problematic to work with
 

Spoiler

 

 

Edited August 14, 2019 by DMPhobos

[The_SloVinator]

On 8/14/2019 at 12:00 PM, NaZa said:

Do you mean our own creations we stopped working on, or WADs we started playing and just never finished?

I completely forgot I posted this topic. lol Too much stuff to do & this flied over my head.

 

Late but I meant wads you played & gave up on. But I guess now it's also the maps you were making & gave up on.

 

I should actually think about posting such thing before I actually post it. smh

Edited September 8, 2019 by The_SloVinator

[galileo31dos01]

Typically I prefer to finnish the wad/map I start and call it a success from my part, but if I leave a wad it has to be because it destroyed me. Italo Doom was an example, I didn't want to keep faceplanting the floor with what wasn't feeling like learning anything, but certain kind of extreme gameplay is just not something a keyboarder like myself would work out without dying every 5 seconds, so that is for another time. Another megawad I quit was Hordes of Chaos X, for Heretic, which was a huge letdown after reading so much praise for it. Granted, it had some "hard" parts, by virtually putting you in the middle of ophidians or other shit in cramped relatively little rooms, or plain bad gameplay with block lines everywhere making every single encounter ineffective, not to forget boss maps that lasted forever. Still in the list if I want to return, since the last episodes looked slightly more palatable. 

 

That's all I can think of right now

[Horus]

On 8/14/2019 at 7:10 AM, SchwTrdLeenW said:

The first Hell Revealed right after MAP23, and not because MAP24 or the WAD itself are too difficult.

Maybe i'm just a spoiled kid because i mostly play all the high profile, community acclaimed WADs, and thus have no idea what terrible designs and ideas do exist out there. But from my standpoint, the final room of HR MAP23 was the single worst moment i've ever had with anything Doom related. Nothing about this encounter is good or entertaining in any way, and i'm pretty sure it was 100% intentional because it is just unthinkable for me that anyone who has ever played Doom 2 would think about this as a good idea, let alone a (for his time) high level speedrunner and mapper. It seems like an intentional dickmove, it kills any flow, joy and excitement this map had to offer, and have absolutely no interest in playing any map by Yonatan Donner again.

Maybe i'm a bit hypocritical, but this final room is such a collosal failure gameplay-wise that i'm beginning to question how anyone could have left it in the WAD like it is, with the exception of intentionally pissing off the player.

Edit.: Seems like i misinterpreted the threads title, sorry.

 

Yep that was some awful design, I hated that too. I persevered, but only map 24 & 25 were worth persevering for imo.

 

I give up on megawads early where I can see I am not going to enjoy them, Eternal Doom being a prime example.

[Yugiboy85]

Oh boy, here goes: 

 

-a planned sequel to my E1M8 remake. It would have been an E2M8 remake. In fact, my plan was to remake the boss maps. I started e2m8, not so long after finishing e1m8 and well, i lost interest in it real quick tbh. Glad i didn't go through when i look back upon the e1m8 remake i made haha

 

-a space map for gzdoom with uac ultra textures. I had done quite some work on it and managed to make some interesting rooms and all but ultimately, i lost motivation to go through. It was too ambitious for me at the time so, i gave up and nuked it. 

 

-Fortress of misery. Boy do i have some history with this map. It started out as a submission for the dwmp2015 but ultimately, it got too big and i really liked what i was doing with it so, i went on and decided to make it a standalone. I had all those crazy ideas and actually managed to make quite a hefty map and all but, it eventually got to a point where i just could not go through with it. It was yet again, too ambitious for my own good and i just wanted to make something simpler. It was at this time that i just gave up on zdoom/gzdoom mapping and started mapping for boom (prboom+) exclusively. I must admit i miss this map though. I still have it in limbo on my hard drive, it's in a state where i'm not even sure if it's cancelled or not. Sometimes, i have some ideas and all but heh, i never end up adding them in. 

 

That's about it. I have other projects i decided to abandon but, they were never made public so... although, i do remember making a demo of 7 maps or so for a megawad i was starting, with scythe 2 textures and all. I released it back then under the name "Death_demo" or something, it was even before my first upload to the archive (e1m8remake). The link is dead though and it's on an old hard drive i don't have anymore. If anyone maybe remembers it? it was released under my previous name: the_trigger

If you somehow have a copy of it, i would like to have it, out of nostalgia mainly haha. But, i think it's just wishful thinking at that point. 

 

 

[Spectre01]

I have plenty of maps stuck in dev hell which is one of the reasons I largely stopped mapping for the time being. To anyone familiar with my Skindustrial series, you may notice that District from dmp16 is followed by Core (Sector 3) in dmp17 and Sector 4 in SlaughterMAX. So what happened to Sector 2? That was abandoned in early '17 after an obscene amount of wasted hours. I just didn't feel like it was clicking visually or gameplay wise. The better sections were remade for S3 and S4.

 

Another one is a map I didn't finish in time for Mayham Orange. It was an underground Scythe-style orange hell cave where I couldn't decide if I wanted the geometry full of smooth curves or chunky and more angular.

 

The last one with major progress is a cemetery level planned for dmp18. I went with limit-removing format to record a demo with -longtics, which created some technical difficulties in what was a lock-in heavy map. I also took a step back to get an objective outside look at the gameplay. The map largely consisted of small, high-impact set piece encounters following the magic "know exactly what to do or die repeatedly" formula. I realised that I found it enjoyable largely because I was the author and knew the intended strategies. It wasn't the type of map I would even like if it was made by someone else.

[Z0k]

well its basically my story:

 

Neptune R - Basically it was some sort of strife wad in doom, UAC is now a company banned by the goverment because the tragedy have made in earth and moons, but they still want to do experiments, for their security hire mercenaries (gray marines) it resumes basically in going to maps, and shut down UAC bases. at some point UAC would make a mistake by launching a missile opening a gate in neptune and then would be Marines vs Mercenaries Vs Demons and in the end the classic you vs demons. i lost interest on it but also was a good wad to learn Zdoom features. the map i liked the most here was factory (map06)

 

Gherenew - it was my second wad for Heretic (and using the same name of my first wad) i made it to have hubs, and its not a fashion story or something as everywad of heretic is somehow cannon as corvus it still traveling between worlds until he reach his homeworld, im going to remake this wad but not so soon i have better ideas for the remake which i hope you guys would like. but for now the project its put in rest and wait until it return after im done with darkmoon and complexe16, i gave up after i made the swamp maps, because i feel the swamp map needed a better way to end since the fortress in middle of a big void mist in the swamp takes like the 50% of the map? but despite the lazy decision i was planning to add an undead warrior as boss there. but never got the sprites, but also this wad were made when heretic in gzdoom format or even heretic in hexen format was a thing so pretty much there wasnt a lot of stuff for heretic have now realm667. my favorite map here are the catacombs (e1m5 i believe) i still love how the waterfalls and the caves looks here.

 

Those two are the projects i was working but finally gave up. there still my third wad which i used for hell maps only but its not like i was planning to finish it so i dont know if i should count it but just for the curious: RFTH

 

and a fourth wad which was my first wad, but you dont want to play that one, no no no as a first project wad called dm_neptun its filled with monsters without control and novice mapper mistakes, it have like 18 maps? 21 maps? i dont remember but its a big mess it was fun in coop though

Edited September 10, 2019 by Z0k

[Capellan]

As a player, I fail to finish far more megawads than I actually do complete.

 

As a map-maker, I've failed to finish (or in some cases, even  start) a number of maps I have said I was going to do, but there's not usually any especially exciting explanation as to the reason: just a lack of motivation to continue (or, as noted, to start) at that time.

 

Once I stop working on a map though, I pretty much never go back to it.  A multi-map project, yes, but an individual map, no.

 

[Ancalagon]

I only came here to say eternal doom cause I couldn't find the exit but the thread turned into unfinished mapping projects.