baja blast rd.

Jack9955, please use search and the DoomWiki before asking a question. Asking questions is good but you had roughly a third of all Editing Questions threads in the past three pages of threads, which is really overdoing it and happens because you're asking many questions that can be trivially answered by looking up the DoomWiki page. Many people have complained. The Misc Editing questions thread was also made for high-frequency one-offs. So I merged them into this monstrosity. Let's try again this time using search and DoomWiki first and only then asking the question.

"I love the lack of self-consciousness about [Stickney Installation e3m1's] one-minute clear time. More of that please." 100 edit: I regret my typography choices already

Thanks for all the feedback (here and everyone on Discord). Full playthrough: (Getting map02's secret -- without climbing in Project Brutality! -- is a bit tricky and I messed up slightly at the beginning, but that's the general idea.) A bit of background: I had this Status Update loosely in the back of my mind while designing this. There's sort of a stigma where people associate 'lower-effort maps' with idealess content, just diversions from the Serious work. But on top of being snobby and annoying when that comes from players, and I think self-defeating and restrictive when it comes from mappers, that speaks to the lack of a widely understood "shortform mapping" format that is something more than the typical speedmap. It's weird. It would be as if all writing had to be books, and the "600-word post" didn't exist (or was only understood to be a "speedwritten book"). When that's silly because I'm sure people would agree that 600-word posts, despite being easily written (and rewritten) on a scale of a few hours, have a lot of value. To continue that comparison, a 20-minute speedmap might be more akin to a tweet. A lot of books find their genesis in originally shorter-form work, and there's parallels there in mapping. So any possible stigma against quickly made maps is in some cases a serious impediment to some people mapping (they end up quitting because without that it's harder to bridge the gap to longer-form maps). I found that 60%+ of the long maps I've made has started with me making a one-off exercise or speedmap and then deciding, "Hey I really feel up to making something more substantive," and dropping that and making something else (or using the small map as a starting point). So players who turn their noses up at speedmaps are enemies of creativity. :P :P So in a narrative set made in three hours (that has a funny ring to it) spread over a couple of days, I was playing around with some ideas related to maps made in hours being their own thing rather than simple versions of more ambitious maps.

So we have an inner void region like this. First draw your area standalone in that void. As long as you draw complete shapes you can also add design motifs. It's also possible to draw this in some other spot and then move it. Then connect it. A very crude connection is okay. Then tweak the shapes to your liking by inserting vertices on the linedefs and moving them around. Now that transitions make sense. (The highlighted lines there might be something like a metal pillar.) Here's with a rocky chamber. In other words: draw the area you want first, then link to it.

Atmospheric Extinction has three episodes of three maps each and takes maybe two hours to play if you're thorough. Arrival also follows the 3x3 format, with a broader approach to themes.

One point is that purely visual verticality is a good tool too. You don't need every plane to be traversable -- you can sometimes have a big pit, gated off by a barrier, or a high cliff that is purely decorative. Also, saying "fall back on turret enemies" has an odd ring to it because turret enemies are any enemy that is confined to a restricted stretch of terrain. Many possible enemy roles are turrets in some way and they are pretty dissimilar from each other. What sounds like it's happening is that don't know of all the turret variants so you're falling back on exactly one archetype of them. The most important way to use them isn't just raised perches and cliffs (even if that's what probably comes to mind when you hear the word "turret"). It's monsters that are elevated on pieces of terrain that you reach later. These are all from the same map because I remember it doing it well, but it's a common device in mapping. The two arachs in shot one and the chaingunner in shot two you eventually loop around to later. The arach in shot three is a good example of using pathing restriction with the steps to keep a monster at an advantageous position for it. The imps in shot four (which are also behind the player in that shot) you take a lift up to. A well made vertical layout tends to have many chances to do this. If you're finding yourself needing to exclusively place pillars, one thing to try is to split areas up in bigger ways, instead of trying to apply some small patches of height variation to a mostly flat area. Here's a cave area split into two planes, with steps taking you up (left) to the higher plane. Good spot for roaming-turret hybrid enemies on the higher plane. (Skilled artist.) Also note that if we have a narrow chokepoint (red) into this area would be fine because you'd have to enter the area more fully to engage with the enemies, which is a good distillation of why a lack of height variation greatly magnifies chokepoint issues. As far as traversing planes, lifts and teleporters and steep steps (and big drops and suddenly lowering floors) are all fine ways of getting from one plane to another. Don't taboo them. But not only are there a great variety of triggers -- like floors that raise up and raise down automatically, switches you can press to "toggle" a plane up and down, and more, which you can use for variety -- an important idea to know is that you also have the option to have smoother gradients between big areas by making the linking mechanism a full-blown area in itself. Here's a very tall chamber, with floor planes 384 units apart. If you wanted to design a set of steps, you'd have to make it pretty steep. But if you just happened to have an area there, you could have multiple sets of steps, multiple lifts, all taking you part of the way up. (This geometry is ugly but I wanted to do it quickly since it's just for a forum post. :P) Also it goes without saying that when you do this, you don't make an area pure filler, you have an idea for it, or better yet, find ways to bake this into the core design. My last (and most important) piece of advice would be to play maps that do verticality well because the best way to get a natural sense of ideas is to see them in motion. My main suggestions right now would be Mutabor and Altitude by tourniquet, and Nensha by RJD.

Merging them all (and any new ones) into one

It's only under rare circumstances (for example, community project development -> community project release) that you should start multiple threads for the same project, and never after a small update. A lot of people do the "add one map incrementally" approach and that would get very annoying if everyone had a new thread for each map they added. You can update the title, edit the post body, and replace the link. You can really exploit this map by using the narrow chokepoints to beat basically everything. The early archies are countered by blocking them with your body (which is actually interesting tbh). The cybie can't easily come out of its room so poke your head in, wake up enemies, and get its rockets to kill stuff. And unlike maps where infighting is fun, it felt to me like I was taking advantage of the setups' naivete. With a layout like this I'd rely more on traps and surprises, because if you have everything placed directly in the layout, they clump up and fight each other. Also I would try to use turrets (monsters that are placed on raised floors, in cages, etc.) which naturally can't wander into an exploitable clump. I liked the lighting and atmosphere.

great post, I wish more mentionations had this amount of detail

My biggest tip would be that enemy placement and health/ammo balance is all about creating experiences, not playing it by the numbers. This approach is better and even easier to learn too. Try to have some idea of how you want something to play and how you want the player to feel, and make something that creates that scenario (you'll get it wrong, so playtest it and then iterate on your first draft until you get what you're going for). "I want a very exhilarating fight where the player has loads of rockets and cells, and imps are spawning in, and the player feels in danger but they can't really die" would lead to a different health/ammo balance than "I want a very tense setup where monsters are lurking behind shadows and corners and the player hears alert noises but doesn't know where everything is and is clearly undergunned and has a rush of elation just to find the next weapon or green armor." A lot of people get in in their head that balance is all about giving the player some amount of health relative to expected damage and some amount of ammo relative to the HP of monsters in the map, but that's not really how it works and it's possible for a map to be 'perfectly balanced' by those metrics but have no gameplay appeal. Balance is more about shaping what the player feels like they can do. If you want to create a fun 'power trip' map but the player feels they can't unload, you haven't succeeded yet even if there's 50% more ammo than needed. Likewise, an evasion and resource denial map hasn't succeeded if the player can easily kill everything or if you overlook pretty basic infighting, nor has it if the beginning of the map misleads and the player runs out of ammo without even having a shot (for example by kitting you up with lots of pickups and having nothing after that and no way to tell). Also a second tip would be to never be too wed to one paradigm. You can learn the traditional 'monster roles' by the book, and use them efficiently to create threat. But then you might decide you want a fight where the player simply has a lot of fun blowing up imps that aren't especially threatening. Or you might use enemies in a non-standard way to create a specific encounter dynamic, like wedging a few harmless pinkies between a mancs and cg'ers as a buffer against infighting, or placing harmless zombies in front of chaingunners so there's a slight time buffer before when the chaingunners shred the player after they pop out of a trap. You're a beginner but that doesn't mean you can't think critically already. Think of enemy roles more as options you have, not rules or even guidelines to follow. I played your map and basically every enemy is encountered on the ground behind in front of the player, often behind a narrow doorway. The layout is pretty restrictive in some senses, because gameplay design starts with layout design. (With some paradigms, you work hard on having a good layout and then spend a relatively small amount of time placing enemies and you're already done. And that's not because the monster placement was an afterthought, but because the layout itself creates the gameplay.) If I had to work with a layout like this, I would use more turret enemies (monsters on ledges and perches, which means the player has to move out of the doorways to engage them). I would also create more setups that open up closets or teleport traps when the player is already inside of an area. A lot of people like placing more enemies in a more natural way, directly in the map itself, but the layout as constructed limits your options there. I would also use darkness and atmosphere to unnerve the player and mask enemies that would otherwise be trivially corner peekabooed (aesthetic and gameplay are related). Using those devices well is all about pacing. You might not want to overdo traps like that, maybe space them out at crucial moments. There are some moments where the player backtracks from one key door to another, and it's a common device but you could have a "backtrack trap," where a closet opens up for the player to fight monsters on return. There are a few moments that could be more intense. The blue key trap is very telegraphed and the player has a rocket launcher with healthy ammo, but out of those big closets come a total of two HKs and four imps. The best way to learn is to play maps you like and think about what they're doing critically, and try to remake aspects of them. The remaking part is powerful because you might think you understand everything just by playing it, but upon trying to remake it and having your attempt fall flat, you might realize you didn't really get many subtle details about it. Tacit learning is a thing, which is why people don't learn to ride bikes by watching a video and then assuming they know how to ride a bike -- you have to do it too, which goes for reading. If you find some advice in this thread helpful, play around with it in the editor. :P

John.wad

Sorry to hear that, hope stuff gets better soon

It's community practice that it's bad form to post edits of releases that don't provide permission to do so. .txt for myhouse: If you (general you) double-down by flouting the idea of asking for permission ("No i did not ask permission, fight me!"), then that's not even a case of a new member not realizing the norms. You know what you're doing. Also the modder was already making "just because" changes beyond the scope of allowing it to run Freedoom, so I would not characterize it as a "simple mod allowing you to run myhouse with Freedoom," but even if it were, you ask permission instead of trying to start a fight lol. The answer is either 'yes' -- or maybe the original author says no because they'd want to do it their own way / maintain it themselves (this possibility is why you don't charge ahead and do it even if it seems like 100% a good idea). So "petty" is a pretty odd take imo.

Didn't expect the switch to be the exit so I left by accident. Usually you want to mark those with some kind of 'exit' structure, like a little 32-unit by 8-unit exit sign. Replayed because the map is very short. A couple shotgunners were stuck. If you're testing a vanilla/limit-removing/Boom/etc. wad in GZDoom, that can happen because it's more permissive with enemy movement. Would also suggest turning off "circular things" if you're using it and your editor allows that change -- monsters are really squares in the engine, so circles will misrepresent their positions and make them clip into walls or hang over ledges even when the circle fits. (edit: Although looking in the editor, these hang over by so much that I'm not sure if they're meant to be unstuck anymore.) The pit spectres down below are awkward to kill and mostly factor into play with their infinitely tall bites, which won't happen in GZDoom with inf. height off. Tanking the damage is possible, but something you can do if you want the player to kill those is have a small lip of safe ground before the teleporter, because otherwise there's no reason to drop down. I avoiding killing the computer imps at first purely because that was fun to do. But I avoided killing the barons at the end because there was no incentive to do so and I didn't have any rockets left. It's tough for the secret chainsaw to be used on anything, so that might be a good spot for extra rockets instead. One thing the map is doing interestingly is that each room (that isn't a tiny annex) is attempting to have constructs in it, rather than rooms simply being simple shapes. Catwalk room, computer room, "key on a barrier you lower" room, etc. You also have the hang of the skyhack trick. (Also, being able to use the skies as cover actually feels neat in that room, even though it's not ordinarily a desired effect.)

Felt like starting a thread to talk about whatever maps I feel like talking about. So that's what this is. ("I Should Quit Mapping" by Brendondle, D5DA3 map28, 2023) The D5DA series -- Dubzzz's 5-Minute Design Assembly -- is both a pun on DSDA (Doom Speed Demos Archive) and a forced acronym, and the core idea behind it is that every map was made in 5 or so minutes (plus some grace period for testing). D5DA3 is the biggest one yet with 99 maps, which mathematically speaking makes it about three times better than most megawads. I'll be covering at least another map from this wad, because it is 'good'. I might cover some maps from other goodwads too. "I Should Quit Mapping" by Brendondle is a map in the newly re-enlivened category of Disorientation Doom (also see Her Love Just Washed Away by Maribo, which among other things uses untextured walls and the resulting HOMs to obscure your awareness of where enemies are). "I Should Quit Mapping" relies on rendering rules associated with a fake-underwater effect that seem to be port-specific (GZDoom and Eternity break the effect, DSDA-Doom doesn't and neither does prBoom+, although the latter is not compatible thanks to UMAPINFO use. You can only see enemies in the sector you are currently in, provided line of sight does not pass through some other sector. It just so happens the center of the map has a giant hurtfloor sector, so for 90%+ of the map you can't see what you are fighting, which includes a huge horde of revenants and hell knights and also eight cyberdemons you probably want to rush directly at, some time or another. If that sounds super fucked, it is -- although it's not particularly extreme for how fucked D5DA3 gets, which you come to expect when you see Dubzzz on the mapper list of a project multiple times. Here all of these factors take what might be an entry-level slaughter setup and turns it into a very thrilling crowd control and awareness exercise. While playing it I noticed quite a few unique mechanics, such as: - using the plasma rifle or rocket splash as 'sonar' -- where plasma balls disappear tell you where the horde or a cyb is - using your brief glimpses at where everything is to try your best to simulate where the enemies are 2-5 seconds in the future from that point - using the superfluous green armors in the corner as guide rules for the edge of the map - noticing cybies that you can't see by paying attention to what the mid-tiers you can see are doing (if they're walking at some odd angle from you a cyb must be alive) All of that is rewarding to do, so although it is a crude-looking horde setup in a standard Amongus layout, it has a good amount of Gameplay to it. The key to beating the map is trying to save one mega to divebomb each cybie closet with. It's not pretty but that buys you essential cushion against getting wiped out if you a rocket hits you. You're likely to take at least one. That constraint shapes the rest of what you have to do, like finding a good movement scheme for getting past the initial crowd without using every mega. It's easy to exhaust the megas and try to hold out at the top, but since the number of cybs is well calibrated thanks to Mapping RNG (every decision in a five-minute speedmap is luck), that leaves you with cybs scattered around the map and not enough enemies to kill them, making that a questionable approach. I went with a zigzag (light blue) -> horseshoe (blue) -> loop-around (purple) pattern for that first stretch. This drawing is probably not at all precise since the automap is completely hidden during play and it's hard to even tell what the shape of the layout is. There are some points of visual interest too; it's actually a pretty map in a weird way. A looping conveyor belt combined with a deep water effect changes the texture of the liquid you're submerged in every second. The evil eye switches go together well with the uniform water, and this "pure color with decorative props" style is an impressionistic look that has surfaced from time to time around the community, in one-texture restriction projects and in maps like Alien Vendetta's "Killer Colors" and JPCP's "My Fav." Here's a whatever first exit. Not pretty but I don't want to spend too long on this. The beauty of five-minute speedmaps is when they end up fun, which happens, you can spend 30+ minutes playing them, which is an amazing ratio of time spent to enjoyment produced. More people should try their hands at it. It doesn't seem reasonable that you can make anything in five minutes, but the learning curve is quick because each iteration is very quick. I a lot of appreciation for low-effort maps (on the scale of minutes to a few hours) and unreasonably high effort maps (years+). Both allow you to go places that the middle ground does not -- and the mindset that a map generally "should" take a certain amount of time, like a week to a couple months, is very limiting.