Fonze

Borderlands 2 and TPS were super fun times, especially with a group. Never played the other games of the franchise but I've very fond memories of those two. Highlights go to playing as claptrap: spent half the time firing entire clips in fractions of a second, half the time running into battle like a mad interplanetary ninja chatterbox punching everything to death, and half the time being left hanging on high fives! Truly the most doom-like experience of modern shooters 🙃

I wanna know why the caco voted no on liking itself. Poor guy's always smiling but nobody asks how he's feeling 🥺

There are a ton of things addressed in the main post that are all a culmination of many small learned pieces coming together to form what the answers to them would be. Additionally, there are many ways to design stuffs so one question can have many viable answers. I'll share my insights, but these are of course nowhere near the only or best way to do things. They just work for my niche preferences. That said, I always liked enemy placement so I'll tackle that side of things, but ultimately you'll need to just play a lot of wads while thinking about how and why the author did the various things they did. It also helps to just make some weird and wacky stuff to play around with new encounter ideas. Anyway: Open spaces can be a scary thing to work with as a new mapper. A tip that always helped me was empathy. Empathy for the player and for the monsters. On the player end, you need to be able to anticipate what a player will be thinking, and learning the subtleties of doom design communication to draw their attention where you want it. Theres an old example thats floated around for a long time on this and i think its a good one: imagine opening a door. There's a room on the other side. You begin to enter and monsters pour out of every orifice, so you back up and door camp, and the encounter becomes a mess. Imagine that same scenario, but this time there are some key supplies or a big ole shiny in the middle of the room. Given the reductive nature of this scenario maybe that won't "fix" the issue for all players, but it will lightly encourage all to at least consider entering it anyway. It's a subtle tool that can certainly have no effect if used ineffectively, but can also make all the difference in the situations that need it. And there are lots of little design tips like that which all combine to make a larger picture of things, but the key is learning how to communicate with players, and the key to that is empathy. On the monster side, it always helped me to think of each monster and "life" in their shoes, insofar as the life of doing an idle dance until some rowdy player wakes them up, then walking in that direction and battling like a pokemon. Additionally, what (situations lead to) roles can they play and what roles do you need them to play? Monsters will always do slightly random things, like when they decide to shoot or what direction they walk in when they reach a point they want to change direction, etc, but they will always generally be consistent in groups as well as in their overall behavior. Take some time to poke around with them and learn their roles, their strengths/weaknesses, how they function in a group setting, if they have a good retirement plan, if they can cook a good spaghetti like my dear mama mia used to... the important stuff. Joking aside, think of all the enemies as your little chess pieces; the board/map will play and feel very different depending on how you place those pieces. A silly thing perhaps, but also don't discount silly and niche setups. Some of the most memorable set pieces are those that are quite niche and specific. Don't be afraid to throw down a hundred zombiemen or a horde of bulls just because. Sometimes an enemies role is to be a meat shield, and thinking of them outside of the box will get you many miles of interesting designs. Getting back on subject, it also helps to separate groups of enemies to keep them from infighting too much, including using turreted positions for particular monsters and different attack angles for others. Knowing what can infight with what and how their attack patterns affect where they can safely shoot to/from is very helpful for that. And sometimes it's best to just add a few more enemies on ground level to "replace" those who will be shot by turreted mobs and go off to hug a wall. Even simple solutions can be good ones. The biggest thing is just thinking of how your decisions will impact a player, all going back to empathy. And of course to test it vigorously yourself. It's also good to look at how big your enemy groups are and if they're able to be effective in the role you wish them to serve. Try adjusting numbers in your groups up and down to find a good middle ground for them to be effective. A lot of mappers recommend doubling and halving group sizes to get a quick feel of things and I find it to be a decent enough way to go about it as well. For more open setups, I like to make a big ole shiny to draw the player in first and foremost so I can have a rough idea of where I estimate them to be. I also constantly keep note of player weapon options. From there, I look at the room shaping, where are turret positions, where are goals/sub-goals for the player to go to, etc. That informs me of where I want pressure to come from, and I can shape that into my desired enemy composition and encounter design with player weaponry in mind. I tend to like and thus gravitate towards setups with pressure from multiple angles, but that pressure can come in many forms and the more out of the box you can think the more pieces you'll have to work with on that front as well. Health/ammo/supply deprivation is an easy one to think of, as are some big ole bigguns and turreted monsters, but pressure can also come in the form of simply fighting for space or doing an action to escape with any amount of timing to it, etc. Kinda a lot of rambling here... stuff I wanted to say and have forgotten amongst the rambles, but I'm not better able to more concisely address the larger things without getting lost in the weeds so here is this post. Hopefully it's helpful 😃

It's a one map wad, but for those who enjoyed NRFTL, Ed C's Smothered Hope struck a similar chord for me and iirc felt around the same level of difficulty. Can def recommend them as a mapper to look into.

Love some Chris Hemsworthless 🥰 Seems like a plausible fear to have, but also I think that there's no money to be made in totally killing the interwebs so it'll prolly just remain as bad as it is now, but less easily identifiable. So a little worse. I think it'll get a little worse than now.

Yeah it's good to take a step back and look at where we've been every now and again. I know my time doing twid's for you wasn't super long, but it was fun times and I appreciated and still appreciate that opportunity back then. Glad you still making what time you can for the hobby 😃

Bob check your glasses I see texture misalignments in the screenie you posted! 😋 Joking aside, it's always cool to see maps from the stone age of wad dev. Being able to make anything decent back then surely must've been tough, time consuming, or both. Wad looks cool and it's great to see you still reviewing 😃

Hi, this is factually incorrect. You're making a strawman out of your own projected laziness. Some of us have made maps with all difficulties being different experiences. Generally the unwaveringly assumptive attitude on display here is what gives mappers pause when considering alternative approaches. It was mostly a joke, def not a viable approach for everyone. But hey maybe give it a try on a throwaway speedmap some time 😉

All of the maps are bad cuz they don't have enough rockets. Well, except for e2m8 and e2m9: e2m9 is already perfect and e2m8 has enough rockets, but not a good enough situation to use them. Perhaps turning the outside area into a tidal pool of zombiemen or adding more lost souls would liven it up... 🫠

Hey it's my entire doom mappying career! 😂 I was gonna type a big thing about my experiences with this mindset, the literal "fuck you fonze!"s I've heard while people play my maps on their hardest difficulties and parrot that I don't make difficulty settings despite the fact that I actually always put a lot of effort into each difficulty setting (and that by that logic they could get the same experience but easier on ITYTD anyway...), how that's soured my experiences with the hobby to the point that I started putting in quick exits to my maps and making more and more areas optional, or that it's among the things that has driven me away from mapping for doom... but I think that's been done to death already so instead I'll type a big thing addressing more the larger picture. I think we must consider the room with hopes like this. That attitude seems at least to my observations to be most prevalent with newer and younger doomers, in large part because that's what the iwads teach us difficulty settings are, and that's what introduces most of us to the game in the first place. Additionally, we've all played wads without difficulty settings and one oopsie takes away 10 atta bois, as the saying goes. Plus, doom is an old game; nostalgia and stubbornness to resist change go hand-in-hand. Given all these, it's no surprise that even some older doomers hold the traditional fomo reasonings behind the uv-or-bust mindset given that they may have been burned in the past before. Or even just that they believe in their reductionist view that "mappers generally only ever remove the hardest monsters for the lower settings." Carrying on the thought, the doom mapping scene is very much one of following favored authors and being unfamiliar with many others, so it's additionally not totally unreasonable to see people give into the fear of the unknown wrt new mappers (to them) and difficulty settings. And of course all the macho bullshit and e-peen measuring... again, more likely to be prevalent among young men who don't know any better yet. That all said, idk how one would go about combating such a mindset. It will never die out. I suppose half-jokingly, I like the idea of reversing the difficulties. Let HNTR be the new UV with ITYTD as a medium, then make HMP a more toned down or just differently-experienced medium and UV easy 😋 Then we could have more pwad nightmare demos! Joking aside and more realistically, it would take a concerted effort from most of the varried, fragmented and often opposing communities to fight against it and it would only ever barely hold its ground, as can be seen by the number of people who have agreed for a long time that it's wrong and yet the thought survives; thrives even. I guess all we can do is just vent occasionally and let the echo chamber work to feel better about the perpetual situation 😉 In the end, from my limited perspective of niche-ness, it's better to have a small few people who appreciate your maps than to try to appease a bunch of people who can't even utilize the tools you've already given them to have fun. Just try not to take the "fuck you's" and "this map sux" to heart. Maybe it's silly to do so, but if it helps, wear reviews like this as a badge of honor 🎖 🙃

I don't think this is pedantic at all. In fact, I think this is the biggest crux of the confusion. "Mod" is ubiquitous with "user-created modifications" in a lot of modern games as you stated, which yes, can include just new maps. Same reason the nexusmods website also hosts user maps and makes no distinction between the two types of content (or any types of mods, for that matter). Perhaps even more confusing when mods are wads, and vice versa. I get that in a doom sense, it may seem to make more sense to keep the distinction of "map content" vs "gameplay mod content," especially given there are lots of valid reasons to seek specifically "maps" over generic "mods," and to that end I think the idea of keeping them in different sub-forums for easy visibility by potential players is a good one (tags to prevent title bloat also good idea!), but to ignore the shift in paradigm for "mod" to mean "user-created modification" is to ignore the evolution of language elsewhere. While there will always be posters who get it wrong, I think it's logical and understandable to mistake "mods and resources" with "this is where you post your creations." So yeah, long-winded way of saying "I agree" but we get there eventually ;p Oh also, it may make slightly more sense to have all purely discussion threads in the "doom general" area. The wad discussion subforum would not be out of place under the general umbrella, and that further layer of separation could help to distinguish "large forum section where creations are posted in smaller subcategories" from "large forum section where creations are discussed generally but maybe also specifically." Idk the distinction between "doom general discussion" and "wad discussion" seems smaller than that of "wad releases," "mods and resources," and "wad discussion."