How do people come up with map layouts?

[THT]

I know this is gonna be a lot different for many people, but personally I like to think of what my main set piece is gonna be. In the case of the map I'm working on below, it started with a dream where I'd imagined a long, straight flight of stairs, tunnelling into the earth on a massive scale large enough to suggest it wasn't built for/by humans.
Okay, so we're not always gonna have a crazy dream to inspire us, but this got me thinking about the effect a huge-ass staircase has on gameplay, and it turns out it's very hard to control your lateral movement when you're sliding down stairs in Doom! I decided that to make this interesting from a gameplay perspective, I'd leave fewer and fewer intact rails to keep the player from falling off and give a sense of entropy, and have a cyberdemon/archvile/etc. monster combo to make the most of the long, open spaces and challenging movement.  Unforgiving pits should have a way out, so I incorporated some hidden teleports to bring you back, and each of these in turn opens a little segments in rooms that were previously inaccessible.

Aesthetically, I went with a sort of Lovecraft vibe, and decided to make the whole place look like some kind of satanic retreat, complete with libraries and a dining hall, etc. with hidden dungeons that gives the place a sense of its facade being stripped away to expose more underlying evil the more you explore.
 


In this example you start in the enclosed space in the northern entrance, and nothing else is accessible besides the path to the stairs. From here you gradually unlock more and more of the level as you get the Blue Key in the "eyeball" to the south, opening the rooms with the spiral section which in turn opens the "optic nerve" of the eyeball into the eastern section. By forcing the player to travel through the stairs multiple times, and unlocking more of the items and segments of the level, you go from being a rodent amongst dinosaurs to being able to finally clear the Cyberdemon with a BFG and unravel every nook of the map...or not! It also gives seasoned veterans a chance to speedrun, but good luck! My overall philosophy with game design is that it should always make the player feel like they've discovered their own solution because it's more satisfying that way. Give them options like stealth VS. force, optional exploration off of a clearly-defined path. Otherwise you're just going through motions and that feels like work.

The process of actual layout is another story because, as you might notice, I'm running an old, semi-unstable editor from the MacOS 9 era because I've gotten to know the workflow, but I run into quite a few bad segments in playtesting, so it's been a process of tweaking it till it works without bugs, and it's all been pretty "organic".

 The two best things I can say, are:

1) Think of your level as one of those "marble mazes"; you know, the ones with a plexiglas case that you angle to move the marble around. Every monster is a marble and they're drawn to the player. The monsters should have free access to "flow" toward the player as you see fit for balance, being careful to design edges, objects, doors and ceilings to accommodate whatever monsters you want to funnel through. For large maps or ones with backtracking, this is probably the most important aspect after fundamentals like ensuring you have enough ammo/health/items to deal with the obstacles!

2) Design each room individually as a space and THEN connect them with doors and hallways. Start by defining your room's size and height, then detail it by adding vertices to reshape the outline and finally add details. I find working "out-to-in" like this lets you focus on details because the "macro" side of things governing "flow" are already laid out. It's a cube of ice waiting to be chainsawed up!


 
~~
This is my personal experience but hopefully it's good food for thought!

 

Edited July 24, 2020 by THT

[Hitboi]

From scratch?! ._.

[THT]

Yeah! There's probably like 50 hours in that one so far though...an old project I just revived recently. It still isn't complete but I admit I had a creative drought near the spiral room: "what the hell am I gonna make NOW?" I just started with a plain room with a gantry in the middle but totally scrapped it in favour of a big dining hall with dramatic lighting: those squares are pot lights and when you go into that service section to the far west, you emerge with those being the only points of light still on! I also made a little 8-unit-high lip around the entire room with fullbright lights and REDWALL as its background to define the edges in the dark. 

If I'd have thought, "I'm gonna make a giant level with all kinds of intricacies and I'm gonna put X here and Y here and the red key has to be HERE" then I'd have already probably lost my mind. Instead, just make a big, cool space you like the look of and figure out little elements to fill it. You'll notice there's only like 6 or 7 truly discrete blocks of space that are further chopped up, some of those are even just basic cubes too!

Another tip: dramatic lighting makes a HUGE DIFFERENCE in atmosphere. If your rooms look bland, think about making a neighbouring sector really bright, then map a beam of light coming out of it into shadowy places. My "dining hall" (western big open space) is super boring right now, but it's passable in play because the lights going out makes it a big unknown space. Right now though, the flow SUCKS because you don't need to enter 90% of the room. I'll be adding a room to the south of it, just to give you an idea where I feel it needs to expand. 

Edited July 24, 2020 by THT

[esselfortium]

1 hour ago, THT said:

The process of actual layout is another story because, as you might notice, I'm running an old, semi-unstable editor from the MacOS 9 era because I've gotten to know the workflow, but I run into quite a few bad segments in playtesting, so it's been a process of tweaking it till it works without bugs, and it's all been pretty "organic".

Woah, didn't think I'd see somebody using Hellmaker in 2020! I'd always figured I was the last person still using it circa 2006.

[THT]

4 minutes ago, esselfortium said:

Woah, didn't think I'd see somebody using Hellmaker in 2020! I'd always figured I was the last person still using it circa 2006.

HELL^maker YEAH! I found out how to emulate OS9 on OS 10.6.7. Once this computer dies I'm pretty sure HellMaker will die with it :(

[esselfortium]

8 minutes ago, THT said:

HELL^maker YEAH! I found out how to emulate OS9 on OS 10.6.7. Once this computer dies I'm pretty sure HellMaker will die with it :(

SheepShaver and Basilisk II run on newer versions of macOS (and Windows as well), so you should be alright there, though I'd say it's worth taking the time to get comfortable with a more modern map editor. (Currently I'm using Doom Builder in a Windows virtual machine on my Mac.) I was a holdout for a while in the mid-2000s due to a combination of platform issues and my own stubbornness, but newer tools have made my life a lot easier and allowed me to do things that would've been completely impossible in Hellmaker.

[THT]

Yeah I'm just stubborn, not sure I'd have time to learn a new tool but I feel what you're saying! I also like knowing my stuff is Vanilla-compatible but that's basically a fetish at this point. 

Thanks for providing your experience :) It's helpful hearing how you were able to adjust. I figure "hey, it's DOOM" but there's a lot of backend stuff you can do with source ports .Really though, I'd just like to be able to hack WADs with new sprites and textures but even that could expand!