What's your "mapping style"?

[AtticTelephone]

Title says all, what's your mapping style? Is there anything notable about your mapping? I have no idea what to say about my maps, I guess I'm not experienced enough to really have a mapping style yet.

[KeaganDunn]

Ribbiks has always been my inspiration, both visuals and gameplay which he excels at putting together. I learned the Boom format from his maps.

I'd say my style is similar to his work in Sunlust/Stardate 20x6, albeit not as sadistic due to my skill level at the moment. I often like putting encounters together and doing difficulty balancing more than anything else when mapping.

[Juza]

I love early 2000s megawads like Alien Vendetta and KSutra, which to me have this charm and pattern in their designs. So naturally I make maps that seem to mimick them.

[Kurogachii]

While making my wad "Operation Last Resort" i adopted an "Arena" style of Gameplay, every door opens an area with a new and different challenge, it's tough but fair, it's all about balancing and not overpowering the player.

 

Now, about the visuals, i'm not sure to be honest, i want to be different but not experimental, just a good level of detail and texturing with some good eye-candy, romero's rules of design can only take you so far, i just do what i want and not copy someone else's homework lol.

[Misty]

To be honest, I don't really know. I tend absorb mapping influences from all places and maps I tend to play. I'm happy to say at least that most of my shared maps privately or in public gets quite warm reception with some suggestions and criticisms to improve. As one of my friends tend to say - better compare your old levels with new ones to see how you improved through months and years. I'll leave my mapping style judgement and quirks for others to analyse. 

[HQDefault]

I'd honestly love to see a series of just a level designer dissecting the mapping styles of various community members.

As for me? Well, it's hard to say because I'm still new-ish to Doom mapping and most of my current mapping style is seen in Spectacle Creep, which is of course a remake, so you're only getting part of how I do things.

 

I have established a few things though, not all of which I've had many opportunities to really put into practice:

-Indoor areas stay orthogonal, outdoor areas stay freeform. I like using 45 degree angles for my man-made stuff. Partially because it's easy, partially because I feel like architects wouldn't want to use that many bizarre angles. But in outdoor spaces I don't need to worry about aligning I-Beams, so I just go nuts.

-I have a mild fetish for reflective surfaces in UDMF. I put them on every liquid, I have little puddles on the ground, I have shiny polished floors, I love using 'em. They look so nice for so little effort.

-I absolutely never do the misaligned texture secret. Never. It's too easy to spot and too simple these days. Even a different wall texture is a little better.

-You have to earn your Super Shotgun. It's nearly as powerful as the rocket launcher and it almost completely negates the need to use the regular shotgun.

-I heavily rely on loops in my maps to try and give a sense of non-linearity, and minimize the number of dead ends a player encounters. I try really hard to give the player freedom as to where to go without turning it into a maze, and I find that the fastest way to make your map a maze is with a bunch of dead ends.

-I have a tendency to use sector lighting in unconventional ways. I love UDMF's ability to give surfaces independent light values, and with that I spend a lot of time trying to get the light balance on each part of a room just right. That and I also will frequently use light in outdoor areas to indicate a change in elevation. This is probably most obvious with my work on "UAC Pacific Northwest".

-My maps tend to be pretty small and cramped. This is partially because I'm just not good at scaling, but also because I like congestion maps. Fights tend to feel pretty samey if they can be overcome by just circle strafing. There's a weird thing in my mind where I see a wide open space I put in a map and my brain is like "bro it's empty" and it just feels wrong.

-One of my core philosophies when detailing is to give the sense that there is a world beyond the confines of the map. I partially mean this in an "environmental storytelling" kinda way, but I also mean this in the literal sense of "I don't want to turn to my right and see the endless void." It kills my immersion. (Unless you're Super Mario, then you're in an abstract acid trip dimension and you can do anything)

-Because of this I wind up making a lot of out-of-bounds areas. This is partially a habit I learned from my time in the TF2Maps community, because this is a detailing practice they did all the time. "Blank wall? Turn it into a fence and have some trucks dropping stuff off behind it." Really expands the world.

 

EDIT: Also I use the doorstop texture way too much

Edited March 30, 2021 by HQDefault

[PeterMoro]

I get ideas in my head and try to put them into a normal sized map but the map always comes out huge and grand feeling.

I try to make memorable and immersive locations.

[Arbys550]

My style is slaughtermaps that are sometimes over-detailed. My indoor visuals are inspired mostly from Sunder and Death in Excess, and my outdoor visuals are partly Sunlust inspired, partly my own twist. I think I've developed somewhat of a signature outdoor style over my career.

[Z0k]

i dont know what my style its, i just map whatever i come out from my mind

[SiMpLeToNiUm]

I'm much less concerned with finding out "my style", since I imagine such a thing is a bit artificially limiting when I think about what it means to apply such a term to myself and more so with determining what "brain stew" I must have to concoct within my own mind in order to focus my mapping juices; what my "process" is, so to speak. I echo a lot of the sentiment in here with really not knowing what my style is, and I think that's okay. I don't know that searching for one's style is really something to be encouraged so much as the means and devices used in the creative process as a whole. If you find yourself gravitating towards one type of gameplay or aesthetic focus, perhaps it's a function of whim and not necessarily that this is some rigid design philosophy you're now supposed to limit yourself to. Experiment and always be refining and defining what your own creativity means to you rather than what it looks like from the outside.

[LordEntr0py]

I naturally fall into designing wide-open spaces with a lot of detail. But current project is for vanilla, so it's a good way of forcing me out of my creative comfort zone if I want to avoid those dreaded overflows.

[Gwarl]

13 minutes ago, LordEntr0py said:

I naturally fall into designing wide-open spaces with a lot of detail. But current project is for vanilla, so it's a good way of forcing me out of my creative comfort zone if I want to avoid those dreaded overflows.

Oof having seen your maps you're gonna have a hard time with those sector limits

[Bridgeburner56]

All the lines

[Major Arlene]

BRIGHT COLORS MAKE BRAIN GO FAST

[yakfak]

sandy style except with more cupboards
and neat freak tendencies to put support3 around everything which i have to get rid of

[Vladguy]

Minimal decoration. Ammo and health placed near corpses. The 3 doors with two requiring keys.

I'm a newbie mapper.

[LordEntr0py]

2 hours ago, Gwarl said:

Oof having seen your maps you're gonna have a hard time with those sector limits

First thing I did was crash Chocolate Doom.

 

Hopefully I've got it now though. Have since discovered the visplane/drawsegs viewer in UDB and learning to push the limits safely.

[MFG38]

I guess I could call my mapping style experimental to some degree - I like experimenting with new gameplay concepts on a regular basis, the latest of those experiments being Death is a Dish Best Served Fast. Other than that, I just slap down lines and see what comes out. I do have some bad mapping habits that I've been doing my best to learn out of lately, namely when it comes to how I build my layouts and how they flow. With the latest mapset that I'm working on, I've adapted a style where I give myself an hour to speedmap the layout of a map and then do everything else - I find that it's helped greatly towards making the layouts flow better and be more "open" (without being too confusing to navigate).

 

Funnily enough, I've been mapping for roughly 12 years and I'm only now recognizing those bad habits and teaching myself to learn out of them.

Edited March 30, 2021 by MFG38

[inkoalawetrust]

My mapping style is drawing random rooms and shapes until I make something that I consider to be good enough. Sometimes I may replicate something like a decoration from a map I played or have seen (Though never a full room or anything like that.), the closest thing I've got that comes to an inspiration is Extermination Day and probably Lost Civilization too, but that's partially because I usually try making semi-realistic maps instead of abstract mazes that only exist for gameplay purposes.

Edited March 30, 2021 by inkoalawetrust

[Deadwing]

Badly designed maps lol

 

I like designing clean plutonian maps, maximizing monster placement with very few enemies and an extra focus on non-linearity. Usually my maps tend to be very poorly detailed, which is something I'm working on with my next project, but still look a lot messy to me. They also are usually shorter than normal, although Exomoon is mostly composed of larger levels.

Edited March 30, 2021 by Deadwing

[magicsofa]

I try to make nonlinear maps that somewhat feel like a real place. Not as in realistic looking, just that they should seem like there is more to the story than just "oh hey a demonic structure." I want the player to feel like they are exploring something that has its own history, rather than cleaning out an arena that was specifically built for them. Don't always reach that goal but to me it's sort of the "sweet spot" in Doom levels. As for how I actually end up mapping, about half the time I have an idea for an actual structure and I try to build it, but the other half I just start drawing and then make it work. Sometimes I think it can be helpful to forget about the specifics of what kind of room it's supposed to be. Instead, I'll just outline the area I want the players and monsters to be able to traverse, with as many twists and nooks as I desire, and then ask myself "ok, now what could this be?" And the answer is, a crate storage room!

 

1 hour ago, LordEntr0py said:

Hopefully I've got it now though. Have since discovered the visplane/drawsegs viewer in UDB and learning to push the limits safely.

Make sure you have "open doors" checked... and be careful with lifts, or moving floors and ceilings which can reveal even more visplanes to the player. It really sucks to put lots of work into an area only to realize the lift down to it crashes the game...

[nrofl]

I think what makes people memorable mappers is if they have their own style or a different take on one. That being said mine is rather generic. But I do try to make my maps feel like a place as I think it immerses the player more in the atmosphere. If a linear level doesnt have those features that feel like the map branches off (An inaccessible outdoor area or a few broken doors for example) It feels more like a gauntlet made for doomguy to run through than a demon infested facility.

[Stabbey]

- I tend to like a lot of clean lines in the structure.

- My maps use a lot of switches, and usually all three keys.

- Infighting is almost always something I encourage with my monster distribution, as that keeps the combat feeling more random and therefore fresh and interesting.

- I don't provide many large cell packs, only small. This keeps the player from being able to spam the strong energy weapons. I give a decent amount of small packs, enough to keep them useful, but rarely enough to hold down the fire button.

- I'm fairly generous with ammo and health.

- I try to go for the unexpected in terms of traps to keep players guessing. I do try and be "tough but fair" and avoid a lot of the cheapest surprises like instapops and distant chaingunners/arch-viles.

- I'm not above some gimmicks.

- I like trying to figure out how to create a cool effect using only standard Doom actions (as in not scripts).

[jazzmaster9]

I don't really have a style, I really make shapes in the editor and form combat around it. IMO its not really necessary to have your own unique style as long as you can create an Engaging encounter and experience.

[Pechudin]

Unfinished. That's my style.

 

Jokes (and 5 unfinished maps) aside, my maps are small and relatively linear. I struggle with nonlinearity and am too controlling of how the map is "supposed to play" (hence linearity). My most nonlinear map was a contribution to 128kb challenge, a map I am somewhat proud of.

 

My maps also tend to represent realistic places, and I am often struggling to stop myself from using generic techbase or office space textures.

 

Gameplay wise, I like to always have the player under pressure, and not have too much ammo. I like it when I need to use Berserk or Chainsaw to save ammo for later encounters. I like the RL + tight spaces.

Edited March 30, 2021 by Pechudin

[The Almighty Egg]

Trying to make realistic levels with what I can with the vanilla format.

Build engine levels were always an inspiration for me.

[pcorf]

I aim for realistic environments but in the Doom style, sky usually always the same height within a certain area and get some of my inspiration from Dr. Sleep and the Casalis plus the iwad maps. With my current projects that I am working on I am trying to avoid backtracking (even in linear maps because you'll revisit an area to avoid the backtrack) and minimize symmetric layouts (a big issue when I was bored while making WOS in the past), have far more interconnection, no inescapable pits, secrets are important and the occasional usage of sector specials such as lights going out or crushing ceilings, you'll see that more in the Doom Odyssey sequel next year. Gameplay wise I aim for a difficulty similar to the iwad maps and I am not a slaughtermap fan. I rarely design drafts on paper and if I do it may be just one or two small areas. And with me been a musician, original music is important too.

Edited March 30, 2021 by pcorf

[DooMAD]

Mainly starting projects, running out of ideas and then leaving them to gather dust.

 

I normally just start with a theme or general aesthetic.  Start throwing some textures around, see what looks good.  That's definitely not to be taken as advice, though (unless you want to use it as an example of what not to do).  Maybe if I started with a layout and a better overall concept of what I was trying to make, I'd be more likely to actually finish something.

[posterfig]

I've only made one map so far but I'd say my biggest non-id influences this early on would be skillsaw and Ribbiks. They both have a knack for chaining quick, surprising encounters together in quick succession which I find tremendous fun and not too difficult to emulate.

[BrassKnight]

This one is a bit difficult to answer for me but I'll try my best:

 

-I don't draw my maps through a sheet of paper and I usually plan as I go with the map I'm making. 

-one common thing about all my maps is that a lot of the time, they're pretty tight because I just dont like designing very large sectors. I don't know.

-I often try to minimize backtracking as much as possible or giving the map a sense of nonlinearity (maybe? im not sure) by adding loops or alternate paths. My later maps always had at least one.

-I really like fast paced gameplay so I try to add it in my maps but sometimes it doesn't work because often times, people who play my maps take it slow at first.

-Symmetrical layouts, I'm trying my best to try more asymmetrical layouts.

-Decoration and aesthetics looks somewhat amatuerish?

-Pressure. Lots of pressure. (example: there's 3 hell knights blocking the path to the exit making you push back but there's lots of chaingunner turrets to the opposite direction)

-I use monsters to my advantage to point the player in a certain direction. (previous point)

-I don't mind using gimmicks sometimes.

-Some experimentation, I try to do something new with the stuff I have (I'm in Boom format and I'm still learning it so there's probably going to be a lot if I plan to make one again).

-I either give a ton of ammo and supplies or barely any, there's no in between. I'm bad with balancing this.

 

There's probably more but I'm going to stop there for now.