Making a good break map?

[Ludi]

I tend to be a lot better at making large, sprawling maps segregated by smaller areas, as that's my preferred mapping style

 

 

In contrast, I struggle greatly with making maps that are tightly packed or contained within a relatively small area. For my megaWAD, I want to follow the Speed of Doom philosophy of having smaller, more explosive maps spliced in between monster levels that take more than 20 minutes to complete. This is a problem when you suck at making maps that function within a small space. I don't want the player to get overwhelmed by 30 large maps one after another, so some advice would be greatly appreciated :^)

[Kan3]

I could suggest you to create "transforming" maps.

Something like starting with a few compact rooms, that will expand opening new areas filled with monsters etc., as the player progresses through the level, transforming in the end those small starting rooms.
So that you can have a quite small and compact map, but even exciting.

The easiest example that comes to my mind is "Dead Simple" x)

I often end up make us of this "trick" cause I often miscalculate the width of large areas; when I finish with decorations and detailing, I find out that it wasn't really that open space I thought it would be x)

[DarkIceCyclone]

Wall lowering is one of the cheapest ways to make those maps. Well, I'm a newbie, but from what I saw in decino and other youtuber videos, break maps can also be just some humorous snippets or even just a map connecting two different maps (going down made by cyriak having a map completely built around just climbing the stairway to another lift. or microslaughters secret level also being break level. As it is a "Kill zombie man" and reveal a bunch of lost souls to get through so you can get 4 switches)

Edited November 14, 2021 by DarkIceCyclone