dobu gabu maru

Boy oh gee wiz do I wish Back to Saturn X E3 would come out soon

Making decent progress on my next puzzle map, hopefully it'll be finished soon

I've appropriately named my zekhmet puzzle map

Panophobia Dev Diary #1: How is there a name for "Fear of Running Water" and "Fear of Fabrics", but nothing for "Fear of Being Paralyzed"??????

Coming up with some different puzzles for Boom, and as I'm writing them down in a document I check some of my previous notes, and the only thing I wrote for one puzzle was:

Life maze?

What does this even mean

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I'm at that phase with my current map where I'm near the end and I have no idea if I hate it or like it.

Here's an update on where my personal projects are at for anyone that cares. These are all the maps that I'm seriously considering working on, and hopefully nothing else gets added until all of these are finished. The amount of projects I have are especially embarrassing.

Single Maps

• Los Números del Diablo (for [REDACTED]) - Needs difficulty tweaking and playtesting.
• Paralyzed! Restrained by Artificial Alignments (for zekhmet) - Core fights and blueprint are done, just needs a loooot of fleshing out, and a looooot of tagged sectors.
• [REDACTED] (for [REDACTED]) - Only have a paper draft of it, shouldn't take too long to create due to project limitations, but will be a pain to get "right" since the concept & puzzles require precision.

Projects

• Panophobia - Ah, the big boy. I need to finish "The Fear of Making Choices", as well as the first secret map in the set, as well as remaking the final map in the set. That's three really big maps that require months of work. Afterwards, I have to update three maps to make sure their gameplay is up to par ("Fear of Water", "Fear of Darkness", "Fear of Meat"), find someone to replace "Fear of Being Alone", and ideally someone to replace "Fear of the Past" as it feels too much like a traditional Doom map. For anyone keeping count, out of the non-intermission maps, that's 8/17 total maps that need considerable work, with four of them needing to be started from scratch. I think if I could probably find someone to work on the "Fear of the Past" map I'd get back to working on Panophobia, as losing the map originally slotted there was a big blow to my motivation.
• Stalking Death - The first map of Stalking Death needs to be properly balanced but its layout has been done for a while. The third map needs a major area designed for it (a red brick fortress with multiple floors) as well as the cavern system finished. Second and fourth maps only have scraps, and will be left unfinished when I make the WIP thread for it. I'll only consider working on those maps when everything else is off my plate. Part of the appeal of Stalking Death for me is I can work on it without wringing my hands over quality and nuance, so I'm trying to save it for when I get burnt out on other stuff.
• Exuviae: Odyssey - I need to playtest one map before the WIP thread can be created—which I haven't done yet because the map is so long and exhausting. The project aims to be six "central" maps, and only the first three will be completed when the WIP thread is made. The thing that's stopping me from working on the other maps is that I haven't found textures for the last three "Exuviae" experiences. I know what the fourth map's gimmick is, have a loose idea for the fifth map, and know what the final battle will be to the sixth map. I have a visual concept for each map in my head, although the last one seems impossible to create in Doom as-is... it'll likely require a LOT of Boom trickery (find me a way to animate lungs in sector form—not textures—and we'll talk).
• Merciless - 12/32 maps are done, 8 more are slotted but incomplete, the other 12 are up in the air. Still no concrete plans to even release a beta of this (it's not great), but the closer it gets to being completed, the more serious I'll become. The only reason I'd want to release it is that the final map is so tremendously sadistic that I can't help but want to see what others would think of it.
• God is a Hunter - The project spawned from "how would I design a Hell Revealed Post-Mortem map?" and boy howdy is it a foul bitch. I have half of an unfinished map and the project is aiming to be three maps total (one prologue, two core maps). If I can find a cool concept for the last map (or another famously hard map I'd want to re-imagine), maybe I'll return to it. Could be a single map release, honestly.
• Robincry - Half a map done out of six total (sensing a pattern, hm?) Unlike almost everything else on this list (barring Panophobia), I 100% plan to finish this, because I love its concept and aesthetic. Only thing that's really kept me from working on it more is I worry people will really dislike its peculiar brand of gameplay... but what else is new?
• MNENMA - Only have two midis so far and the idea for two maps, one of which came from a dream. Honestly, don't expect this project to ever really materialize, as it'd require too much work to properly form. Maybe if I became a millionaire or something.

I'm a long, loooooooong way away from even starting this, but I came up with a neat title image for MNENMA, should I ever make it.

Been working on some more maps for Merciless and it's been fun to design an encounter, playtest it, and then go "what's the most annoying thing I could do here" and implement it. Almost all community projects I work for I tone down the assholery but here I'm feeding all my evil inhibitions like a little gremlin after midnight.

Well shit, I guess this thing is a full blown project now

Putting a map together and crossing stuff off my Doom Ideas document, and I come across this and uhh...

??????

Been trying to think of how to improve the layout of this fight. One "square" represents a 128x128 playspace, the black blocks are solid walls, and the red blocks are lava (5/10% damage). The original version is at the top, while a variety of permutations are below. The original layout works fine, but it doesn't stop the player from circle strafing the entire time, even when enemies emerge from the outside. The general gist of the fight is that the player fights imps and HKs once they enter the room, then two viles emerge from the middle, then a swarm of imps come out from some closets along the walls. Will have to sleep on this one and contemplate it with a clear head.

Is working on a Tic-Tac-Toe system (Noughts and Crosses for you brits) in Boom clever, or is it beneath me?

YEAH THAT'S RIGHT.

I'M VERTICALLY ALIGNING FIREBLU SO THAT IT TILES PROPERLY.

NO I'M NOT UPSET.

I'M NOT.

Finally reached the halfway point on Merciless—roughly 16 maps to go, 3 of which need to be made from scratch. Here's to hoping the other half doesn't take like 12 more years!!!! !! ! !! !! ! !!!!

Made a voodoo doll blueprint for one of my maps, since it was getting really complicated on the overhead view and I had to replicate it a couple of times. It's essentially a GBC Zelda-esque puzzle where the player walks across certain sectors and then hits a switch, and the path they walked will raise. I make it so that in order to progress, they'll have to raise a specific number of sectors

Here's the mechanic in action (gif)

Here's a solution that'll come in handy several months from now:

_ ↑C _ ↓C 🗙 ↓C _ _ ↑B

↓A _ ↑B _ 🗙 _ ↑A ↓B _

PM if you wanna playtest a cryptic monsterless map. Think The Given but less The Witness and more Fez.

Looking back on it, I have no idea why I signed up for TNT: Revilution because I've always felt that Evilution sucks ass and have 0 interest in seeing a sequel to it. Probably the most inexplicable decision of my Doom career lul

My Panophobia laundry list is set! Now to actually start working on it...

Drafted up two more maps; the left layout is for UDINO E4M8 "Unto the Cruel", and the right layout for Marcaek's next project. Been trying to work with less rigid room layouts (ie they don't adhere to the cardinal directions), and maps that take less than like an hour to beat :P These are among the last community maps I'm going to make for a looong while, so hopefully they turn out well.

In case anyone is curious how I make puzzles, this gives a little insight into my insanity:

The DB picture is of the puzzle in question; on paper I usually start with a "solution" in mind and work backwards with how I want the player to achieve it. In this case I was trying out different platform heights (listed as 1-6) and attempting to come up with ways for the player not to achieve the solution by any other means. This requires serious consideration regarding where each of the corresponding six "platform raising" switches are placed, as I want the player to find only one combination that works. Given how versatile and speedy Doomguy is too, this is can be quite vexing to figure out, since strafing allows the player to skip over surprisingly wide gaps. To get this properly working I had to use a one-way drop for two switches, make one switch unavailable if a different one is hit, and place one switch in a pit that requires you to hit it three times to escape. Fun stuff.

Currently working on a map in which the player isn't ever allowed to physically move and it's not as easy as I thought it'd be. Currently trying to puzzle out how to force them to fight monsters, and what else I can do besides just teleport them around everywhere.

These were two of the draft sheets I used while making my last puzzle map, Perplexed!. The top section had me trying to figure out what ways I can gate the player from reaching the exit as well as all the mechanics I had planned to thwart the player. Originally I thought about gating off the tower of hanoi switches in each section, since if the player completed that, they'd be able to exit the map. I ended up deciding against that however, since it would more or less offer a "suggested path" to the player, since they'd see certain switches as easy to hit and others as much harder, which would naturally make them want to find a way to the hard switches. So instead I broke the exit up into two sections (move the tower of hanoi to the middle & raise the flunnies), and found ways to incorporate the mechanics into achieving both ends.

The bottom of the sheet isn't my original draft of the map, but instead the outline intended for the in-game map. There was a lot of text so I had to find ways to shorten everything and try and represent concepts by their in-game visuals instead of their names, which was interesting. It was way more dificult coming up with the "step by step" guide on skill 2, since I barely had room to write in a 256x256 space, and had to leave off most of the details (like leaving the blikblok facing east if you go to exit).

This was definitely the busiest map I've made to date, and part of the reason why I didn't go out of my way to really spruce up the visuals and add a lot of unique lighting is that I spent foreverrrr planning and writing dialogue that I was done with the map by the time it all worked.