baja blast rd.

Map Name: Carina Particle Accelerator Author: rd Music: rd - Far From Home and Lost Comments: I really liked the base textures I saw in screenshots, so I felt like making a map for this. Riffing on the starbase theme that Synami is going for, as well as her use of hexagon shapes. Screenshots: I wanted to do a 1-hour speedmidi and I still have a bit of time left for that, but I'm tired. I'll probably submit a version 2 with a bit more work on the MIDI.

map11: Sarcophagus Very good map. Styled after the Circle of Death, it's a progressive arena map, but it's also a lot more than that. The dark atmosphere is <3, with the flickering lights and the drops to nowhere and those impossibly tall bright CEMENT structures at the end, which have stuck out to me in screenshots as the megawad's most compelling image. The timing to the waves of combat is organic: cacos and PEs eventually rising from a deep abyss to reinforce what's already there; a red key trapped with tripwires so far away from it that I didn't realize they were connected and just saw a vile and other stuff coming at me for unexpected reasons. Long maps often need to make sense -- because if a long map is completely baffling in some way, you might get lost -- but I'm noticing that very short maps appeal to me more when they mystify me in some way, even in small ways like that, leaving certain things about their mechanics unexplained, despite their inevitable simplicity. The lighting effects are some of the best parts of the base Doom toolkit, and sometimes I think of it as as foundational as doors or lifts -- that maybe a beginner class would treat it as a first-class "fundamental." The most unexpected part of the lighting ensemble here is the way the stairs at the very end flicker, as if enchanted somehow, around all those corpses and blood splats. Why do they do that?

Glad my favorite entry in the Tetanus franchise made it to the Unity port.

don't have the energy to list a lot this time, maybe next time

A few stray thoughts: It might sound boring but you can always get better at learning from other maps. The skill ceiling for that is really high. I keep finding myself improving at it despite not being a beginner. Often the best road to improvement is not trying to find some arcane advice but to figure out how to get even better at what you consider "basic." On that note: If you haven't already, you might want to try remaking a map you're learning from -- so closely that it would be a very obvious homage that you probably wouldn't be comfortable releasing as your own work. There are so many lessons you can pick up that way that you would you miss simply by looking at something very closely and analytically. If you don't feel like putting that effort into a whole map, take an area or two and try it. "Height variation" is kind of the answer, but that doesn't quite get to the bottom of what is happening. Since you brought up Valiant's moon maps, let's take a closer look at map26. What you might notice about it is that the entire layout is ledges, along with the spaces between those ledges. You might not think of them as "ledges" from an aesthetic POV, but functionally that's what all the rocky outcroppings and techy buildings that serve as platforms are. This effectively quarantines just about every monster into its own "zone" (with the exceptions being the flying enemies released throughout the map, and some stray roaming enemies in the lower levels). That makes all of those monsters turrets/snipers from some other vantage point in the map. But you probably don't think of all the enemies of the map as snipers -- because you can easily access their spaces and fight them closer-up. There are very few enemies for which that isn't true. So there's kind of a "have your cake and eat it" dynamic where the map gets to control all the enemies as if they are snipers, but retains the fluidity of open-plan combat. And that all comes down to the layout, the way it is made of chunks/sections that are connected to each other in ways that the player can pass but monsters can't. (This doesn't give the player much of an advantage -- because all the ways of getting up to a section are guarded, whether that's by traps or simply by the mancs/arachs firing projectiles at the player as they're getting close. Also half the map is damaging floor.) You might notice Valiant and Ancient Aliens does that a lot. It's not simply "height variation" because understanding it as that would suggest turret spam, which is kind of one-dimensional way to do it. It's kinda more like the most common type of monster is a "half turret" -- a roaming monster if you're on the same bit of terrain it occupies, but a turret if you're anywhere else. Not every map does it that way, but the key pattern: designing features that keep roaming enemies to their own "zone," without them needing to be snipers. (Which again doesn't mean that snipers are bad but that you ideally wouldn't have to rely entirely on them to do this.) That's why some authors are so fond of ledges and catwalks (check out Pavera's Arrival for examples on that). Fonze brings up a very important, underappreciated point here. Imo in all of Doom's bestiary, the spider mastermind is the best spaghetti chef.

Put them between flat markers (like F_START and F_END) before converting.

there's broken sectors switch to "Make Sectors" mode and click on the six sectors involved, and that should fix it

Cold Front, El Viaje de Diciembre I agree and think it's important to understand that when people complain about low difficulty it's usually a roundabout way of saying "I didn't find this exciting/engaging." So the root preference those comments is not a problem with low difficulty. Violence (another recommendation) is one of the most universally popular wads on Doomworld and it's not hard at all, but no one really calls it "too easy" because it's good at being exciting and surprising.

megawad is a cool-sounding term so people gravitate towards it. even Romero wanted to brand SIGIL as a megawad. so shorter releases would attract that talk if they had louder names than "miniwad" and "episode replacement." lone wolf release gigachadwad episode enlargement odyssey replacement Texaswad

thanks for the playthrough and thorough notes! the compliment for Slime Girls means a lot (especially having noticed which other wads you've loved). :)

<3 Angles is a very good way to put it! As visually appealing as the designs are, the layouts are clearly thoughtful in how they allow enemies to behave. There are setups where like an enemy closet will be released in another room as part of a trap, and the monsters will fluidly path over into the room you are, rather than pooling up somewhere or being caught in geometry. Hints at designs being remade for that reason too. It's one of those reminders that very well thought-out gameplay is not just about setpieces and difficulty (and I say that as someone who has no problems playing wads like Abandon and the Stardates), and that easier-leaning gameplay can still be very well thought-out instead of being purely about satisfaction or player empowerment. I'm going to try to do more of these reviews. It's one of my favorite formats. The first three (Mutabor, Sunlust, and JPCP) were wads I had really wanted to write something about for a while, but my plan is to pick slightly more obscure wads from this point on.

Way 2 Many Dead Guys (Beta 1) by Urthar 5 Boom-format maps for Doom 2 Urthar is best known for his efforts in the style of Quake, but the unfinished W2MDG remains my favorite work of his. It was formative in my love of Shapes in Doom. Every map is built around its own shape motif, like looping semi-circles and triangles with beveled corners. The nonorthogonal architecture is designed to accommodate Doom's standard texture lengths, and this sometimes required multiple attempts* at areas to get right. Outside of that, the overall craftmanship is strong. Urthar gets how the stock textures work together, finding far-flung combinations and unusual recontextualizations that jell. The best are creative composites, like BROWN96 and BROWNGRN being combined to form a grimy dirt-caked wall. The texturing and detail, combined with the shaping, gives the set a sleek, futuristic sci-fi character. It evokes a modernized early Doom 2 starbase not so much through greatly increased detail as through amped-up stylization. Maps two to four, despite not being large, have an expansive character and wondrous mystery to them -- with secrets and dark side areas that lurk behind windows and gratings. The level design is consistently smart in how objectives are broadcasted, and in the subtle ways you can transform the environment. The creepy atmosphere hits the strongest in the dark sewers and empty back alleys -- or when odd shapes recur close-by at different scales like fractals, which creates the vibe that maybe the world was twisted into these forms. Fans of easier wads will appreciate how Urthar prefers using lots of Doom 1 popcorn enemies, and how Doom 2 enemies like revenants are treated with reverence, as if a group of three can be a mini-boss encounter. The abrupt hell finale is the clearest sign of unfinishedness, but even in this form W2MDG is very worth a play. *source of dev pics (what do you mean that "W2MDG" is cheating to lower word count I'd never do such a thing)

Good mapping is all about what you want to see in a map. Coming to a better understanding of that and just asking yourself "What do I want?" a bunch, whether about the map as a whole or individual areas in that map, can be pretty powerful. Play wads and pay attention to what you like. Other games can be good sources of inspiration too. Be careful about tips like "inescapable pits are bad" or "platforming is bad" if you've ever come across those, because avoiding specific people's pet peeves is not a good way of improving at mapping, and a lot of good ideas intersect with people's pet peeves. People who rant are not worth appealing to either; there's better demographics to appeal to than angry dudes on the internet, like cute girls. I don't know what stages of design these screenshots are taken or what exactly you're going for, but it seems like you have lighting in at least one of them, so maybe try playing up the lighting contrast more. Don't be shy about mixing darker (128 and below) and brighter (176+) in a room, with or without ramping up between dark and bright. You're in a wall in screenshot #4 -- I thought the sky was glitching out first. Those Doomguy hedges (?) are incredible. Guessing these areas are unfinished, but I like how some motifs seem to recur in different areas, like those 'pools' and storage areas. Having some design motifs that show up in various places, maybe with some variations between them, is pretty good for cohesion and sense of place.

Doom: The Middle Ages

Responding to the title question, not the poll question. This goes for longer mapsets in general, but I try to avoid burning out on them by being willing to take breaks and not force myself to play them day after day until I'm done with them. It isn't uncommon for me to take a weeks-long or even months-long break in the middle of playing a wad. I find that doesn't hurt my sense of progression or immersion at all. If anything it strengthens it because the mapset "lives" with me for a longer time. This doesn't happen because I get tired of wads. It's more just a fundamental rejection of playing constantly day after day as the "proper rhythm of playing". It's kind of like in making art, sometimes you take days or even weeks off from what you're working on because that's just...what you do, that's how it's meant to be worked on, the rhythm isn't "do this every day." Rushing through a set out of obligation has pretty much always been a bad experience for me. I try to avoid using playlists for myself because I find they encourage that "checking something off a list" mentality that I want to avoid. A couple recent notable examples: - Eviternity 2 (very good megawad obviously, still haven't played map30 or all the secret maps) - 10x10 Project (one of my favorite wads ever, I took a 3-month break after map07) - name redacted (the author and I have been friends for a few years, and I find her so wonderful that it kinda makes playing her wads in a timely fashion feel besides the point -- would rather talk to her :P)