Tell me some mapping sins

[Senor Cacodemon]

Making a fake exit to an inescapable death pit of lava

[Alex S.]

9 hours ago, Snaxalotl said:

Here are things that come to mind for me.

 

-Unmarked Doors

-Inescapable Death Pits

-Not being able to 100% a level

-Harsh Flashing lights (Mainly flickering between pitch black and fullbright)

-Forcing the player to use the pistol for a full level

-Making secrets mandatory to complete a level

-Cramped environments that the player can get stuck on constantly
-Door Combat (Don't let the player hide in a door for every fight, you don't need a door for every room.

-Flat terrain (Good in moderation but try to mix up elevation periodically)

-Rectangular Rooms (Again fine in moderation but don't make every room a box with 90 degree angles, they often make a level look bland in excess)

 

And make sure you don't limit yourself by strictly following "rules", pretty much every suggestion has situations where they don't apply.

 

 

She's describing Eternal Doom III without saying it explicitly ;)

(Either that or the second hub of Hexen)

Edited April 17, 2022 by Alex S.

[Alex S.]

One thing that always gets me salty are custom pallettes that make the game's colors appear "washed out".

[Misty]

Not including cute animal pictures in secret areas, we can do better than that!

[DannyMan]

Don't do bad texturing choices

[Kyka]

Making teleport things not appear on every difficulty.

 

How do you manage to do that, I hear you ask? They are, by default, set to appear on all difficulties.

 

Easy, I reply. You do your difficulty settings on a map, and then, while adding new things to a map (such as a teleport thing,) you grab an old thing and copy and paste it and change its number from, say, 2004 (plasma gun) to 14 (teleport thing.) Great right? Much quicker than going through a bunch of menus, right?

 

Except that plasma gun was flagged to only appear on easy. Busted teleports for everyone.

 

Way back in my early days here, it was actually @Creaphis who helped me figure out and troubleshoot this issue. All the sector/linedef tags lined up. I couldn't figure out why my teleporters weren't working. As a side note, what ever happened to that guy? Good guy.

[Mr. Alexander]

Major mapping sins:

 

- Too much ammo. If the player leaves the level with more than zero ammunition, then clearly you went easy on them.

- Overpowered weaponry. Doom's shotguns are the greatest video-game weapons of all time. Put them at the end of the map right by the exit, to let the player know they've earned them.

-  A palpable spirit of fair play animating the player to overcome any challenge. If you were a demon from Hell, the source of all evil in the universe, why would you give any ground to the Doomguy? Set him up to fail at all times!

- Door opens with the wrong color key. Come on now.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

4 hours ago, shinola said:

NOT playtesting (or getting someone to playtest) your map(s) from start to finish.

Very fine taste in music, fam. May your bowery always be electric.

[pcorf]

1 hour ago, DannyMan said:

Don't do bad texturing choices

 

DOORTRAK

FIREBLU1

FIREBLU2

GRAYTALL

ZZWOLF10

CRATINY

Edited April 17, 2022 by pcorf

[pcorf]

- Hot starts (where you are forced to fight many monsters as soon as the map begins, if I have monsters in the start room I usually have them facing backwards like in MAP01 Entryway, MAP02 Underhalls, etc).

- Unmarked key doors, or blue key doors with LITEBLU4 = yuck.

- Lack of ammo (ammo is more important than health example Crusades by Richard Wiles).

- Inescapable pits.

- Lack of secrets (in my point of view you need at least 2 secrets, some of my Zone 300/400 maps have no secrets because of the restrictions)

- Over non-linearity, you find the key but it takes forever to find the key door because it is poorly placed. Same with mazes. This can also be a problem with city maps so that is why city maps require extra planning when designing them.

- Some forced ambushes, you get trapped in a room after grabbing a key and the bars take forever to lower after you have killed off the monsters.

- Cacodemons and lost souls in small cramped areas, they are much better in larger and taller areas.

- Where you are forced to backtrack.

 

When I was younger I used to commit a lot of these mapping sins, esp backtracking and the infamous Whispers of Ctrl+V.

Edited April 19, 2022 by pcorf

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

I think it's a sin that considering Doom is out for nearly 3 decades with bajillion custom maps made, and we still don't have consistent rules for texture/flat usage. Sure, mapping is more art than science but it would be nice having some ground rules, making the default texture usage consistent over wads.

Spoiler

 

•  If a switch is not pressed yet, it should be obviously not activated. Lit up in red, lever up, or off. When it's activated by pressing/shooting, it should go green, lever down, pushed-in or light up. "But what if I'm turning something off by pressing it?" I'd still suggest following these rules because if I see a switch that's already green, I move on without much thinking. That generally means SW1 with the exception of SW1PIPE. SW1PIPE is a mistake, fight me.
• Then there's teleporters. I'm cool with using somewhat unorthodox flats like FLAT22, as long as it's obvious what it is. But how about we make all GATE1-3 sources and GATE4 destinations?
• If you make a death pit, please make it 20 dmg, regardless of what flat it is. And/or have a place in it for self-telefrag so the player doesn't have to wait ages for it to slowly tick down from potentially full stack. Also, damaging water is BS.

 

 

 

Edited April 17, 2022 by HrnekBezucha

[Zulk RS]

I just realized that I have been putting doors in every room. Now I like Door Combat but the thing is... it has not occurred to me that you can connect rooms without doors. I should keep that in mind for future mapping endeavors.

[BaileyTW]

1 hour ago, pcorf said:

CRATINY

that right there is fighting words

[yakfak]

don't punish authors with ground rules lol
it was bad enough in the era of "op? op? i found a texture misalignment"

[Naarok0fkor]

Not mapping for a week...

[BaileyTW]

2 minutes ago, Naarok0fkor said:

Not mapping for a week...

taking a small break from mapping and then that small break turns into 2 months and an unfinished set of maps ;-;

[vdgg]

Using W1 teleport lines in monster closets. Always always always use repeatable WR teleport linedefs.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

1 hour ago, vdgg said:

Using W1 teleport lines in monster closets. Always always always use repeatable WR teleport linedefs.

In all monster closets? What about this scenario - you move through a room, a nearby wall slides open and monsters start pouring out. On the wall opening is W1 monster teleporter trigger that puts one of them behind you. Still a bad idea?

[vdgg]

[trying to use accurate wording]. The reason of my previous post was noticing experienced mappers, such as eschdoom, use W1 teleport lines, in which a monster may not teleport because at the moment of crossing the linedef the teleport destination is occupied. If a monster is in a closet that does not have connection with the map, it will become unkillable in random situations. I swear I saw eschdoom putting a WR linedef in a closet with 5 monsters and a W1 linedef in a closet with 1 monster, as if it were more expensive to use WR linedefs or something. 1 monster - still use repeatable trigger in order to make the monster show up sooner or later.

 

If I understand your scenario, all monsters have access to the map once the walls have lowered, and are killable, regardless of the teleport line working fine or randomly failing, so in this case it is fine.

Edited April 17, 2022 by vdgg

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

3 minutes ago, vdgg said:

[trying to use accurate wording]. The reason of my previous post was noticing experienced mappers, such as eschdoom, use W1 teleport lines, in which a monster may not teleport because at the moment of crossing the linedef the teleport destination is occupied. If a monster is in a closet that does not have connection with the map, it will become unkillable in random situations. I swear I saw eschdoom putting a WR linedef in a closet with 5 monsters and a W1 linedef in a closet with 1 monster, as if it were more expensive to use WR linedefs or something. 1 monster - still use repeatable trigger in order to make the monster show up sooner or later.

 

If I understand your scenario, all monsters have access to the map once the walls have lowered, and are killable, regardless of the teleport line working fine or randomly failing, so in this case it is fine.

Oh yes, if the teleporter is otherwise not accessible by the player, WR is definitely the way to go. And use multiple WR lines behind each other to make absolutely sure monsters don't get stuck in there. I asked just in case it's something I'm not aware of.

For every new-ish mapper interested in teleporters here, BridgeBurner has an amazing tutorial on youtube, and there's also a great one here on DW. Teleporters are much more tricky than it seems at first.

[Killerratte]

Speedmapping

[NiGHTS108]

More huge pet peeve than sin but I despise when mappers use the keycards and skulls inconsistently for no good reason, like make up your mind man c'mon

[out_of_service]

Seeing as I am a huge fan of maps from those '94 era shovelware discs I forgive you all for your "sins".

[Dusty_Rhodes]

4 hours ago, pcorf said:

- Hot starts (where you are forced to fight many monsters as soon as the map begins, if I have monsters in the start room I usually have them facing backwards like in MAP01 Entryway, MAP02 Underhalls, etc).

- Unmarked key doors, or blue key doors with LITEBLU4 = yuck.

- Lack of ammo (ammo is more important than health example Crusades by Richard Wiles).

- Inescapable pits.

- Lack of secrets (in my point of view you need at least 2 secrets, some of my Zone 300/400 maps have no secrets because of the restrictions)

- Over non-linearity, you find the key but it takes forever to find the key door because it is poorly placed. Same with mazes. This can also be a problem with city maps so that is why city maps require extra planning when designing them.

- Some forced ambushes, you get trapped in a room after grabbing a key and the bars take forever to lower after you have killed off the monsters.

- Cacodemons and lost souls in small cramped areas, they are much better in larger and taller areas.

- Where you are forced to backtrack.

Hot starts can be fun, but I definitely prefer the Entryway style. Backtracking is also way better when there's traps. Even better, open up new routes to have completely unique areas instead of backtracking.

[NuMetalManiak]

The big one for me since I see it when doing wiki stuff: make sure important things, especially teleport destinations and keys, are available on ALL DIFFICULTY SETTINGS: easy, medium, and hard. Some levels I know of like MAP27 of D2INO are unbeatable on certain settings because certain things weren't flagged properly.

 

I mean sure you can get creative to this but make sure all settings are accounted for.

[pcorf]

4 hours ago, NuMetalManiak said:

The big one for me since I see it when doing wiki stuff: make sure important things, especially teleport destinations and keys, are available on ALL DIFFICULTY SETTINGS: easy, medium, and hard. Some levels I know of like MAP27 of D2INO are unbeatable on certain settings because certain things weren't flagged properly.

 

I mean sure you can get creative to this but make sure all settings are accounted for.

 

It can be easy to make this mistake so always double check your teleport destinations, keys.

[DynamiteKaitorn]

Mis-aligned textures and using flats as wall textures or wall textures as flats.

Both look ugly when used in that fashion (on SOME occasions it can look fine).

[Martin Howe]

15 hours ago, Mr. Alexander said:

- Too much ammo. If the player leaves the level with more than zero ammunition, then clearly you went easy on them.

- Overpowered weaponry. Doom's shotguns are the greatest video-game weapons of all time. Put them at the end of the map right by the exit, to let the player know they've earned them.

-  A palpable spirit of fair play animating the player to overcome any challenge. If you were a demon from Hell, the source of all evil in the universe, why would you give any ground to the Doomguy? Set him up to fail at all times!

I can't tell if this is sarcastic or serious :)

But for me, a shotgun is an essential tool and should be near the beginning, one should always be able to build up a stock of ammo as the game progresses and insanely hard challenges take all the fun out of the game. In short, implement difficulty levels, including changing monster types and by that I mean fundamental behaviours; for example, replacing a vile on UV with a baron (can't resurrect enemies and you can evade their attacks) on HNTR.

 

In short don't exclude casual players who want the game to be fun when providing for hardcore nutjobs who like being surrounded by 1000 cacodemons in a darkened room with bars that come down when the monsters appear.

[magicsofa]

Wasting the player's time. That's not to say maps should never be long or slaughter-y, more that authors should try to be somewhat considerate of the fact that many players don't have 5 hours to sink into a single map. You shouldn't have to rely on a slowly lowering grate in order to challenge your player.

 

[SplinkWizard]

Not accounting for texture size in a map. I had to redo multiple areas because I make certain walls too big which greatly limited texture use.