Mapping Headaches: the Stress of Uneven Talent Progression

[obake]

You have a big personal project you're working on, alongside small projects from the community. Because of all of the experience you get with the smaller projects, your talent grows. Then you notice as you've become more experienced, that your big personal project looks amateurish in comparison.  What do you do? Keep the older maps the way they are, which will inevitably make them stand out as less polished than the newer ones? Take the work to update them, saving the good bits and trying to fix all of the problems? Remake them from scratch, or put them in the bin entirely?

 

As a mapper who has experienced this, it is a pain. I have several maps done for the UAC Enterprises: Rebooted series, but looking on them now, they are not up to the level I would like them to be. But after having put so much work into them, I don't want to have to scrap them, either.

 

I call this uneven talent progression. I ask that mappers (especially the most experienced) give their thoughts on how they deal with this issue. What do you personally do in this situation?

 

 

[esselfortium]

This has come up a bunch during BTSX, though in that case it was less about concurrent side projects and more about BTSX itself just taking several centuries. The oldest textures in the set dated back to 2009 or earlier, and a number of the early texture sets were updated or completely remade (sometimes two or three times!) because they were noticeably amateurish and I was always wanting to avoid using them. Some of E1's door textures and tekwall textures underwent several complete remakes before I settled on the ones that were actually released.

 

The same thing happened with some of the maps -- E1M13 "I'll Replace You With Machines" was the oldest BTSX E1 level, starting in 2009 as a texture test, and E2M10 "Eureka Signs" originating as my texture test map for e2. Both maps grew into sprawling monsters and were effectively "finished" for a while before I realized I wasn't satisfied with them from a layout perspective or a visual perspective, and that they just didn't stack up to the other maps in the set, so they ended up getting pretty drastically reworked into much more interesting levels for the release.

 

I have a lot of old unfinished projects aside from BTSX, some of which haven't even been posted about, I think. When I've come back to work on one of them again, there's been a choice to make between "do I want to preserve this as it is, warts and all" or "do I want to ship-of-theseus-paradox this into something better". I usually end up doing the latter, taking what's there as a starting point and gradually reworking or replacing it one piece at a time until I'm satisfied with it. It's easier to justify all the extra work to complete something if it's built on a base that I'm satisfied with, rather than something that feels clumsy and outdated. On the other hand, though, if something is 95% done and just needs to get across the finish line, it's probably smarter to keep things simple and let it be something of a historical artifact, and just concentrate mainly on that last 5% and anything that seems particularly egregious.

[Kappes Buur]

 

It's the painter's syndrome which afflicts most of us: When is a painting finished? Only in our case it is a map.

 

At the time I'm sure that you thought your maps were excellent and accordingly published them. But now, with hindsight and acquired knowledge, you feel they are not up to your present standard. I wouldn't fret too much about this. What is in the past is in the past. 

 

But if you wanted to rework the maps, who could stop you. Maybe they will be completely different by the time you finish them.

Edited September 18, 2020 by Kappes Buur

[Nine Inch Heels]

Not that I'm much of a mapper, but my method is to just put the maps to rest, learn from them, and do something better next time I feel like it.

 

I don't see much value in going to back to relics of the past, unless it's some release that got major attention and still has "active" players in need of an urgent fix for a big problem.

 

I think the idea of looking back and finding one's own first baby-steps wanting in some way, and then feeling like that needs "fixing" is a weird and slightly negative perspective. I'd prefer to spend time looking at the progress made, rather than the shortcomings of the past. Which I guess is a weird way of thinking about it, because you'd still compare old to new, but through a more positive lens, let's say.

 

Scrapping the maps to re-use the better bits later? Okay, doesn't sound too bad, but doesn't as good as improving on the better ideas you had in the past when you build something new, in my opinion anyway.

[Xyzzу]

I've already begun scrapping maps, taking them as they are, finishing and releasing them one by one to /idgames. It's a great enough feeling to have done something and show it to the (Doom)world, ready and playable. Plus, by releasing these scraps, I can see how far I've come as a mapper and it's quite motivating to me to finished my much-better-in-comparison project! c: 

 

I don't bother getting maps up to speed with my other ones; I don't have nearly enough free time to work on my project as it is. At least with several maps outta my hair, my project is now shorter in length, which in turn makes it more digestable for players, heh.

[John Wheel]

I haven't done maps for anything, but I have been around webcomic circles for more than a decade and this question pops up often there. Our answer is always to keep going forward instead of redo the earlier stuff, because that turns into a vicious circle. If you go that path it's too easy to rework everything again and again because some parts will always look worse than others, and that gets you stuck.

[Soulless]

Ive decided to not rework my "old" maps, which I wanted to use in a map set, but instead working on newer ones.

I feel that those earlier maps are what they are, and the result of the skills I had at the time. I prefer to invest my time in something newer and probably, better.

 

 

[Deadwing]

Well, Moonblood is a mix of reworked old maps with newer ones. And the conclusion I got was that even when I've improved and reworked the old maps several times, they still weren't as good as the new ones. These levels, even with smooth gameplay and "cool detailing", still didn't have a good and solid concept, and each one felt like a "copy" from each other, bar few exceptions.

 

I guess reworking the old material might be a good idea if you see there's a strong concept and potential behind it, if not, better try something new or replace the old that doesn't work well anymore.

Edited September 19, 2020 by Deadwing

[Lorenz0]

I have experienced this a few times. My first multi-level project, NoMonochrome suffered quite a bit from inconsistencies in quality. Back when I released it, I made a very poor decision of dumping two of the worst maps in the wad at the very beginning, which was a good way to ensure no more than 5 people play the wad. I should have just gotten rid of those maps.

 

Alienated was my second big project, and this time I made sure to smooth out some of the worse parts to achieve a better result. I needed to retexture or remake entire areas or combat encounters quite a few times.

 

And I think that's all you can do in a situation like that to be honest. Just redo the parts you're not happy with, and if there's too many of them, you're probably just better off removing the map from the project, and making a better one instead. After mapping for enough time, you'll get good enough that everything you make is at least decent.

[Major Arlene]

I've already experienced this with Dancing in the Abyss and Near Death Experiences, honestly as long as the maps are functional and playable, at this point there's no reason for me to go back to them because I'll never get the rest of the maps finished. Feature creep is 100% a part of this, especially with UDMF- it's the joy and bane of our existence as UDMF mappers tbh. Sometimes once the map is done you've just gotta let it go- having released few maps on my own it's definitely scary every single time but a simultaneous relief.

[joepallai]

I am currently in the process of reworking two 20 year old maps (one finished and unreleased and one partially complete), and while it's fun to revisit something you were once proud of and attached to; it's a pain in the ass to get it right.   Be willing to take an axe to large sections is all I can recommend.   

[SilverMiner]

As I grow in mapping, I don't get my old maps reworked cuz every map that had been finished once in the past to me is a coherent stuff and I simply can't touch it. If I retouch a finished once map, I feel that I'm doing something wrong and just wasting my time that I could use to do my new maps. If I want to release my old maps, I release them as is, saving an image of "myself of the year 201X".

 

But I feel myself right when retouching my relatively new maps (2020), particularly if there's an experienced mapper's advice on what to do so that the map becomes much better.

 

EDIT: By now, I'm creatively exhausted and just reading Doomworld's topics.

 

 

Edited September 20, 2020 by SilverMiner