alpha inspired maps

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6V9rJ251TaOZmFSN1ZuWW5yVE0/view?usp=sharing

each week/ day i will publish some maps inspired my the doom alphas.

Zerthex said:

each week/ day i will publish some maps

What about taking a lot longer time to make quality maps instead?

e1m1: Not as bad as I expected, actually, based on your recent history of posting lots of low-effort wads. Small and insubstantial, but not hopeless.

-- Many of the crates are misaligned, particularly in the first area.

-- Something to keep in mind with crates is the way they can be used to set up small leapfrogging puzzles. The way the crates are set up in the start room, it's actually possible to use the tiniest crate to get up to the 32x32 crates, and then platform across those crates to the 64x64 crates. It'd be nice if the player could then use a properly placed 16x16 crate to get up to those 64x64 crates and access a secret.

-- The big room is full of hitscanners and connected to the room prior to it with a 64-width door. That is just begging the player to doorcamp. Transitions from one area to another are an important way of shaping gameplay, and something you want to avoid is combining narrow transitions like this with the sort of monster composition and placement that encourages inelegant door camping. If you want to use a door or a door-like barrier, use a wider one, allowing monsters to approach past the chokepoint. In this case, I'd set up either a 256-width door or two adjacent 128-width doors (and of course reshape the smaller room to make that work), if I wanted a door. (The start room and the dark blue key room could then become chokepoints -- more on those types of connections later.) A 64-wide transition in this case should involve height variation -- a drop, or a lift (with the switch to lower it placed elsewhere in the room) -- so that chokepoint camping won't work. The pillars in that little blood pool are sufficient cover. If I wanted to change nothing about the map geometry but make the gameplay more engaging, I'd restrict the hitscanners' movement (for example by putting them on crates), so that they can't follow the player to the chokepoint, or I'd have them released when the player is already in the room, when running back to the chokepoint might be an exciting maneuver or somewhat unfeasible.

-- I like some of the structures you have designed, my favorite being the quirky crate stack with barrels and a soulsphere.

-- The blood pool seems to be an inescapable pit. (Unless the mapset is designed with jumping, but that would be strange for an alpha homage.) Inescapable damaging floor areas should do 20% damage, so that death isn't unnecessarily slow.

-- Most rooms are simple rectangles connected with doors. There's a window, which is good, and the exit room has a bit of shape to it. But experiment with more room shapes and more transition types between rooms and areas. Height variation is a useful way of connecting rooms to one another in more imaginative ways: steps, lifts, ledges, pits, et cetera. You can also connect rooms directly to one another without any sort of door or door-like opening, as if they are together a single complex room. Be creative.