What stresses you out about being a mapper?

[QuaketallicA]

9 hours ago, Roofi said:

 

Whether I put a deadline , I never release anything.

lol

[Tangra]

I look at mapping as a fun hobby, but it does start to feel like an unpaid job when i get overambitious with my goals and "deadlines". Thankfully, I've learned to deal with that, so it no longer affects me. At the beginning i wanted to make a megawad in less than a year, now i want to make a megawad no matter how long it will take, i just don't care about the time now, and that removed all the unnecessary pressure. If i don't feel like mapping today or this week, i just don't. I don't think about the maps and the work that awaits me, my attitude is "it will be done, when it's done". It's not due to laziness, it's a way of dealing with the burnout, because i can't create anything when i'm burnt out, so instead to pressuring myself like before, setting a goal of completing a map in 5 days, i just wait for the right time to keep working on it... and the right time is when i'm having fun and feel relaxed while mapping, instead of feeling like unrewarding work.

[Barondante]

The internet has sometimes affected me in some ways before where there's so much amazing stuff coming out every day

that it's like why bother doing anything? Why make a lego project, build something, learn a language  or get into a hobby

when hobbies are so professional and in some ways already monetised. You kind of can lose the joy in gaming when you were

playing with friends at say a fighting game like Tekken, then seeing just how good the real Tekken gamers are.

You see the passion, dedication and sacrifice of these people and it can put you into a real passive mode.

And not just Doom but just to be real here, doing ANYTHING you lose drive when you begin comparing yourself with others.

 

Now I think the way to counteract this is that you have to realise if you can't do something for it's own sake, then you're in big trouble.

And most who do these things well, you will kind of see that even without the internet they would have done these things anyway.

I saw Doomkid saying he used to draw maps mimicking the automap in copybooks before he ever got an editor to make levels with.

That's genuine enthusiasm. The way the internet works it kind of encourages you to get into things, but there's only so much time and

you can only do so much. I tend to vale those things I've been interested in and following on my own or would follow without it. 

 

When I play Doom it reminds me of being in college and getting it running, and kind of playing something no-one else I knew was

really into, playing games like Sonic Robo Blast for instance, it just blew my mind there were these cool projects that were outside mainstream

gaming. Although Doom is mainstream. It brought me back to first playing Doom as a kid and being mesmerised all over again, and

something also about getting Doom to work, learning how to even run a wad etc etc, all these little things were a lot of fun

and brought back some ownership to gaming for me.

 

So I find the more I stay with Doom, the more I enjoy the challenge, and learning things and enjoying it; and it was originally something

for me that was kind of just fun. And that's how I see it, fun. So I will in the spirit of fun make maps most likely, and keep engaging with it.

But yeah if anything were to stop me it's this negative attitude. Once "why bother doing x as you are so behind" sets in", it is just a bad way to be.

 

[Koko Ricky]

What stresses me out is that I've been mapping since 2012 and still don't understand a lot of the basics, and have been ridiculed on here for being a slow learner (it's possible there's an undiagnosed cognitive dysfunction at work). It makes me rather upset to see someone post their first map and it's a very technically accomplished UDMF wonderland; meanwhile, after a decade of experiments, I can barely mod for limit removing and have gotten confused a number of times while using UDMF.

Edited April 19, 2023 by Koko Ricky

[EANB]

Accidental linedef skips breaking the map.

[dyshoria]

I posted a wad called "when the devil takes hold" it was my biggest project and it was a partial conversion but one guy commented on the post

[Matthias]

Honestly, what stresses me out a little bit is the pressure on quality that is caused by the endless competition here.

 

Someone makes a megawad and someone else makes a better one and another person makes even a better one... The community pushed the quality that far that maps from 90s looks very empty and barren, while today's maps are so big and detailed and creative and look so professional that you don't have any chance to reach such a level of quality. Some megawads are even so complex that even some modern games can't reach such level.

 

I remember when I started making my maps 15 years ago and I though they are quite good, but then I played Alien Vendetta and Kama Sutra and they were so great that I suddenly felt like I should delete my maps and give up. Later on I learnt how to make maps similar to AV and KS. I reached similar level of detailng and creativity, but then AV and KS were already very outdated by that time. So again... my maps were meh. You will never win this race. When I check Cacowards each year, I am only suprised how far the borders of what is possible in Doom were pushed further again. Look at projects like Lullaby. Who would though we will have such a magawads like Lullaby 15 or maybe even 10 years ago? Sometimes I feel like I mastered how to write a sentance while the rest of the community is full of Stephen Kings.

[Somniac]

11 minutes ago, Matthias (LiquidDoom) said:

Honestly, what stresses me out a little bit is the pressure on quality that is caused by the endless competition here.

 

Someone makes a megawad and someone else makes a better one and another person makes even a better one... The community pushed the quality that far that maps from 90s looks very empty and barren, while today's maps are so big and detailed and creative and look so professional that you don't have any chance to reach such a level of quality. Some megawads are even so complex that even some modern games can't reach such level.

 

I remember when I started making my maps 15 years ago and I though they are quite good, but then I played Alien Vendetta and Kama Sutra and they were so great that I suddenly felt like I should delete my maps and give up. Later on I learnt how to make maps similar to AV and KS. I reached similar level of detailng and creativity, but then AV and KS were already very outdated by that time. So again... my maps were meh. You will never win this race. When I check Cacowards each year, I am only suprised how far the borders of what is possible in Doom were pushed further again. Look at projects like Lullaby. Who would though we will have such a magawads like Lullaby 15 or maybe even 10 years ago? Sometimes I feel like I mastered how to write a sentance while the rest of the community is full of Stephen Kings.

 

I do sympathise with your viewpoint, but IMO its important to try not to compare yourself to others. Easier said than done I know, but if your maps now are better than the ones you made before, you're moving forward and that should be celebrated, even if by just yourself. Context is important too, AV is how old now...22 years? I think it still looks brilliant. If AV released now, it'd probably still get a mention in the Cacos as a great neo-vintage vanilla set because the levels are still fun and challenging, especially because vanilla WADs will never not have an audience it seems.

 

I do get what you mean though, 10+ years ago I had all the time in the world to make maps but I never did, which is something I regret a lot actually, so sometimes I think where I would be now if I had started earlier. So I'm making up for lost time and catching up, in a way. I admit that I have to remind myself a lot not to draw comparisons between my own work and the stuff that inspires me, sometimes its very easy to do so. Again, easier said than done I know.

[TheDanMarine]

38 minutes ago, Matthias (LiquidDoom) said:

Spoiler

 

Honestly, what stresses me out a little bit is the pressure on quality that is caused by the endless competition here.

 

Someone makes a megawad and someone else makes a better one and another person makes even a better one... The community pushed the quality that far that maps from 90s looks very empty and barren, while today's maps are so big and detailed and creative and look so professional that you don't have any chance to reach such a level of quality. Some megawads are even so complex that even some modern games can't reach such level.

 

I remember when I started making my maps 15 years ago and I though they are quite good, but then I played Alien Vendetta and Kama Sutra and they were so great that I suddenly felt like I should delete my maps and give up. Later on I learnt how to make maps similar to AV and KS. I reached similar level of detailng and creativity, but then AV and KS were already very outdated by that time. So again... my maps were meh. You will never win this race. When I check Cacowards each year, I am only suprised how far the borders of what is possible in Doom were pushed further again. Look at projects like Lullaby. Who would though we will have such a magawads like Lullaby 15 or maybe even 10 years ago? Sometimes I feel like I mastered how to write a sentance while the rest of the community is full of Stephen Kings.

 

 

one interesting way of getting around this is to do challenge maps that limit you intentionally, like say a map that you can only use projectile monsters or a map where you can only use a specific list of five textures. not only will your ego have a good excuse to latch onto if it doesn't turn out good, you're also far less likely to be compared to others unless they were similarly limited.

[lubba127]

high standards for myself, community reaction, or just not receiving comments or reviews.

[Kwisior]

1 hour ago, Matthias (LiquidDoom) said:

Honestly, what stresses me out a little bit is the pressure on quality that is caused by the endless competition here.

Sure, some might be better at this hobby than you at the moment, but keep in mind that AV and KS are some of the most beloved mapsets ever. Reaching their level is quite the achievement in and of itself.

 

Also you shouldn't treat mapping as a job and 1-up your previous work all the time, some of the most revered mappers know this (for example Skillsaw). Skill in mapping comes with experience and you're getting that experience. Have a vision and make it work to the best of your abilities. That vision doesn't have to making the most groundbreaking amazing beautiful masterpiece ever, you'll go mad with this sort of thinking.

Edited April 20, 2023 by Kwisior

[Eon Toad]

As a new mapper, mostly it's time management and resisting the temptation to join every community project I see.

[Naarok0fkor]

...WAD revenue sharing...

[Kwisior]

1 hour ago, Eon Toad said:

As a new mapper, mostly it's time management and resisting the temptation to join every community project I see.

It's good to be active in community projects, I see it as good way to build some skills. The tricky part is not making bad maps, but I'm sure you have that covered.

13 minutes ago, Naarok0fkor said:

...WAD revenue sharing...

You get paid for your WADs??

[Naarok0fkor]

1 hour ago, Kwisior said:

It's good to be active in community projects, I see it as good way to build some skills. The tricky part is not making bad maps, but I'm sure you have that covered.

You get paid for your WADs??

No, but with all the heart & time everybody puts into our work, we all should get rewarded...

[Matthias]

Quote

You get paid for your WADs??

 

I was thinking about this recently. It's normal to have Pantreon when you stream games on Twitch or you do funny stuff on TickTock. It's normal to accept commisions for making music or graphics. But accepting donates for making maps - for some reason - is not a thing. And that even though you could work on your project many hours a day. Weird.

Edited April 20, 2023 by Matthias (LiquidDoom)
typo

[yakfak]

nowadays i don't get stress so much as mmm getting the energy to map out of nowhere

then realizing i didn't have an idea, only the urge to open the editor and draw like
a set of triangles and some 64 pixel indents

then place some pain elementals for the nostalgia

and then close it all again with a big fairytale princess sigh

 

when i did have the power to make a map completely the stress was carrying the idea in my head even when i wasn't in the mood to draw lines

so many of my things have been conceptually big (even if they're not massively complicated or lengthy by really epic standards) that i had a lot of internal arguments with the part of myself who wanted to sabotage them

 

 

and lost \o///////

[TheDanMarine]

28 minutes ago, Matthias (LiquidDoom) said:

 

I was thinking about this recently. It's normal to have Pantreon when you stream games on Twitch or you do funny stuff on TickTock. It's normal to accept commisions for making music or graphics. But accepting donates for making maps - for some reason - is not a thing. And that even though you could work on your project many hours a day. Weird.

 

I have a feeling the major problem with the commission idea is that doom mapping is simple enough that the majority of people just... make the maps. like, if you can draw it out on grid paper to show your idea to someone with more experience with you, well, you've done half of the actual work already. I can see the patreon model working out if you put out good maps on a regular basis.

 

there's also the fact that quite a few of the really, really good mappers usually go on to make their own games they charge for, so the need for alternate revenue streams is probably lessened a bit by that.  

Edited April 20, 2023 by TheDanMarine

[Kwisior]

1 hour ago, Naarok0fkor said:

No, but with all the heart & time everybody puts into our work, we all should get rewarded...

What did you mean by "revenue" then?

1 hour ago, Matthias (LiquidDoom) said:

 

I was thinking about this recently. It's normal to have Pantreon when you stream games on Twitch or you do funny stuff on TickTock. It's normal to accept commisions for making music or graphics. But accepting donates for making maps - for some reason - is not a thing. And that even though you could work on your project many hours a day. Weird.

I think it has something to do with Doom mapping being a niche and free hobby. The commision idea also takes away the individuality and creativity of it, as most do it for fun or passion. No one is allowed to tell you what damn maps you should make!

Edited April 20, 2023 by Kwisior

[xScavengerWolfx]

As a novice mapper myself i think the biggest thing that stressed me out the most is balances of enemy, health, ammo ect ect. I've this issue mostly with placement of enemies and everything else, if let's just say for example i place a pinky in a monster closet with some lost souls in it for easy/medium for hard i would do a cacodemon and some barons. Now the issue with that is i have to make the closet big enough for them to come out of and not have then get stuck in there, and i have to remake a room in order for the trap to even work. Another issue is how much health and ammo is too much. Like the time of writing this i will have a map for my Ultimate Doom megawad finished but i'm including this in because i am suffering from it right now. My map E2M3 for the mega wad i'm dealing with too much health and ammo, I don't want the player being like there in a power fantasy nor do i want the player to feel overwhelmed and powerless. It's those kinda things that are hard as a mapper as soon you finish making the map.

 

Another issue i have is manly not getting enough feedback. I really feel like no one wants to give me honest feedback on my maps so i can get better and learn form the mistakes. I mean sure everyone has a life outside of the internet i get that but i feel like my mapping skills and hard work is getting over shadowed by other maps that are like "Yo check this out! I made a map in Doom 2 UDMF format to make insane stuff with a 30+ year old game engine" Like that's cool and all but what about my maps? What about letting me know what i should do to make them better. It just pains me to see that my hard work is getting over shadowed by other peoples wads and stuff.

 

One last thing that really really stresses me out is: Is it good enough? This has always been a real thorn in my side since i've started mapping two years ago (i know my thing says i joined in 2020 but i didn't start mapping until march of 2021) a good example of "is this good enough" is when i had to redo a map and make a secret map for the community project called Theme-GAWAD #1. I remember i did map 03 and it was good in my eyes but after so many flaws with it and bugs i tried to fix it but i got real pissed off at my self and said "Fuck it! i am going to start from scratch!" so i spend a week remaking it and also having two more months fixing the issues and getting it cleaned up for the mega wad. Map 31 on the other hand i did while fixing map 03. But now i asked myself "was it good enough?" the answer was it was good enough because they really liked it and they wanted it in the map set, just had to fix the issues and get the bugs cleaned up in it.

 

Overall those are the main things that stress me out about mapping. Right now i'm at the part in my Ultimate doom mega wad for ep. 2 is the "is it good enough?" stage. To me so far yes but. Yes i think it's good enough but will it be good enough leading into the next map? That is also another question you should always ask yourself while mapping.

 

Hope this good enough i feel like doomkid ranting about the good ol days of dooming. Even though i got into doom around late 2015 early 2016.

[baja blast rd.]

1 hour ago, xScavengerWolfx said:

... Another issue is how much health and ammo is too much.

Spoiler

 

One idea that I like to use with resources is that Doom operates more through thresholds of security than adding up how much damage you expect the player to take throughout the map and counterbalancing that with health/armor. And placement and timing can matter more than resource quantity. 

 

A very simple example is that in a map with many dangerous cybers roaming about, giving out basically limitless medkits, to the point where you can't see the floor, might not really count as "too much health" because a cyber rocket can just one-shot the player if all they top out at is 100 health. 

 

So with balance it helps to think about the danger level of the opposition first. There are a lot of hard maps that give out megaspheres like candy but don't feel like power trips because you are so fragile in such maps, where 'one soulsphere per fight' would be downright tight. Conversely I'm sure people have played brief map01s that have nothing but zombiemen and imps, where even going without green armor and having just a few medkits throughout is comfortably enough because the map would be borderline "no hit"-able as long as you were trying to do that.

Then you can ask what amount of health and armor feels "right" against this opposition. Like, what isn't quite scarce, isn't quite power-tripping (or alternatively what is, if you want to go for either of those). 

 

(I'm kinda picturing a map here so you have to change around values to suit your own image.) You said an Ultimate Doom e2m3, so let's say I rarely want the player to be one-shot by shotgunners (the map's main threat, which there are plenty of) but I want them to have to play reasonably well. The way I might accomplish that is by making it easy to have 100 health, but not higher, but to spread out green armors such that taking too much damage will have the player without green armor for a bit. I might spread the stimpacks and medkits out so that it's also not really obvious that the map is sneakily generous with health.

 

So something like 50-100 health + 0-100 green armor might be the most common "state" for the player to be in. (Anything above that might be secret.)

 

The neat thing about stimpacks and medkits is that they top out at 100. And armors don't compound. So don't really have to get it perfect. You just have to think about how dangerous the map feels relative to how much H/A you have decided to make easy to have. How punishing it is (is the player one or two big mistakes away from having no green armor for a long time, or is that not possible based on the map's threat profile). Balance is a combination of various factors like this -- how player status and monster threat combine to create a feeling of how dangerous the map is at that time. A few extra unused medkits isn't really going to change the health/armor range the player exists within.

 

If you have a range in mind, you also want to make sure nothing betrays that. Like, recently, I played a map where I constantly was hovering around 25 health (as low as single-digits at times), and where individual health bonuses were satisfying to come across. But just about every dangerous setup, which in this case was mostly revenants and hitscanners, could be fled from (which also felt scary because it was a dark map -- even aesthetic design can technically be part of the psychological feelings of balance). It was very obvious the author was conscious of that and tried to avoid putting you in a situation where you absolutely had to tank forced damage from hitscanners, for example.

 

Health balance is also about dictating what is dangerous and how. I have made a cybie fight and placed not only a megasphere (which was handily enough), but after some testing, also stimpacks and medkits afterwards, which seems unnecessary -- but the whole idea is that I noticed in this fight that at the very end, something like a stray random surviving chaingunner could feel disproportionately dangerous, even more dangerous than a head-on confrontation with the core threats earlier, and I decided that wasn't elegant, so the extra health was to taper off the danger of those enemies. This health going unused would again not mean much.

 

With ammo, a similar "threshold" type of approach applies, where it's not about "do I have exactly enough ammo to kill everything, and not much more" arithmetic but something more like how the player is allowed to play / enjoy themselves. Let's say I'm making a Doom 2 map with plenty of dangerous enemies and the RL as the main weapon. One question I might have, let's say in a setup with two archviles and some backup, is "Do I want the player to use the RL freely -- to not care if they fire off 10-12 rockets to kill the two viles -- or do I want them to use a more measured burst of rockets, more like 4-6, and then switch to another weapon because that is a bit more exciting here?" What is right or not, and thus the map's ammo balance, simply depends on what I'm going for with the fights (and other fights). There's no 'right answer' in a vacuum. Your map has a BFG -- is it exclusively for dangerous enemies (or a telegraphed pure fun use), or do they get to BFG the occasional less dangerous enemy without regret (and again you probably won't want to break your own promises)? 

 

There's an idea people sometimes pick up which is that shells and bullets can be common and rockets and cells should be rarer, but really, it depends a lot on what you choose to normalize based on the map's threat profile and how you want the player to play. You absolutely can decide to make a map where the player can coast on rockets or cells or both. Nova 3 map10 is a good example of a map that is "balanced" for inf. RL without being a full-scale slaughtermap. For its (few) dangerous setups it just uses two archviles where you might normally use one, six close HKs where otherwise there might normally be 2-3 -- and the fact that you have 20-60 rockets at all times feels right because until you get the BFG, you should be using RL in all the dangerous fights and the excess makes it so that you can miss. More "balanced" RL would just make it so that you'd bore yourself shotgunning the map's least dangerous tanky enemies to always have a rocket cushion for the big fights. Or alternatively, you can make a map that has, like, three rockets, but the rockets all feel like nukes that do an immense amount of destruction (maybe it's a map01-type map with lots of imps and zombies again). 

Ammo balance is also inseparable from placement and conveyance. For example if a plasma rifle with cells is perched on a visible nearby location, the player is factoring this into their impression of what the map allows them to do, so they might be more empowered to use ammo more freely earlier, knowing they will get all that; or some players might hold off on killing something tanky with a weak gun knowing that they could get a stronger weapon at some point (one might hope :P). Appearances also matter. A lot of beginner maps run into an issue where the maps feel unbalanced because they scatter something like shellboxes haphazardly all over the place, and you have 46 shells and run into two more boxes ??? -- where if the mapper put an equivalent amount a 'stockpile'-like location, the player might think, "Okay the map is intentionally saying I get to use the SSG a ton here," and no one would blink even if it had the same amount of shells. (Although artful chaotic scattering can be done too and contribute to a "you get to use lots of power ammo" feel.) 

I guess the common thread in these examples is that balance is not really a general idea; it's something that intersects with the specifics of how the player can play, how they feel like they can play, and what situations they might get themselves into. If you think up specific details about how you want your map to possibly play ('possibly' because you're really designing for stuff that might happen rather than writing a script), and what you want to avoid, then balance gets easier to reason about. 

 

Playtesting comes in handy of course because if you're constantly under- or over-equipped, you can adjust for that, which is an obvious thought. But the less obvious idea is that it's just as useful for a map to be robust against possible under- and over-equipment, for some occasional excess or stinginess to not be a negative, because you'll never design a map that plays out exactly the same way for everyone (unless, uh...it's all on damage floor and you're sprinting to the exit on a timer or something). So that's why I think ranges are useful to think about. With balance it's just as useful to ask, "Okay, what doesn't matter?" You finished with some extra bullet boxes, does that actually hurt the experience (for example negating some tension) or does it not matter. Maps that can be "gamed" are not necessarily bad, because that might be an alternate way of having fun. 

 

 

Oh my god this post got long.

[xScavengerWolfx]

On 4/20/2023 at 4:40 PM, baja blast rd. said:

  Hide contents

 

One idea that I like to use with resources is that Doom operates more through thresholds of security than adding up how much damage you expect the player to take throughout the map and counterbalancing that with health/armor. And placement and timing can matter more than resource quantity. 

 

A very simple example is that in a map with many dangerous cybers roaming about, giving out basically limitless medkits, to the point where you can't see the floor, might not really count as "too much health" because a cyber rocket can just one-shot the player if all they top out at is 100 health. 

 

So with balance it helps to think about the danger level of the opposition first. There are a lot of hard maps that give out megaspheres like candy but don't feel like power trips because you are so fragile in such maps, where 'one soulsphere per fight' would be downright tight. Conversely I'm sure people have played brief map01s that have nothing but zombiemen and imps, where even going without green armor and having just a few medkits throughout is comfortably enough because the map would be borderline "no hit"-able as long as you were trying to do that.

Then you can ask what amount of health and armor feels "right" against this opposition. Like, what isn't quite scarce, isn't quite power-tripping (or alternatively what is, if you want to go for either of those). 

 

(I'm kinda picturing a map here so you have to change around values to suit your own image.) You said an Ultimate Doom e2m3, so let's say I rarely want the player to be one-shot by shotgunners (the map's main threat, which there are plenty of) but I want them to have to play reasonably well. The way I might accomplish that is by making it easy to have 100 health, but not higher, but to spread out green armors such that taking too much damage will have the player without green armor for a bit. I might spread the stimpacks and medkits out so that it's also not really obvious that the map is sneakily generous with health.

 

So something like 50-100 health + 0-100 green armor might be the most common "state" for the player to be in. (Anything above that might be secret.)

 

The neat thing about stimpacks and medkits is that they top out at 100. And armors don't compound. So don't really have to get it perfect. You just have to think about how dangerous the map feels relative to how much H/A you have decided to make easy to have. How punishing it is (is the player one or two big mistakes away from having no green armor for a long time, or is that not possible based on the map's threat profile). Balance is a combination of various factors like this -- how player status and monster threat combine to create a feeling of how dangerous the map is at that time. A few extra unused medkits isn't really going to change the health/armor range the player exists within.

 

If you have a range in mind, you also want to make sure nothing betrays that. Like, recently, I played a map where I constantly was hovering around 25 health (as low as single-digits at times), and where individual health bonuses were satisfying to come across. But just about every dangerous setup, which in this case was mostly revenants and hitscanners, could be fled from (which also felt scary because it was a dark map -- even aesthetic design can technically be part of the psychological feelings of balance). It was very obvious the author was conscious of that and tried to avoid putting you in a situation where you absolutely had to tank forced damage from hitscanners, for example.

 

Health balance is also about dictating what is dangerous and how. I have made a cybie fight and placed not only a megasphere (which was handily enough), but after some testing, also stimpacks and medkits afterwards, which seems unnecessary -- but the whole idea is that I noticed in this fight that at the very end, something like a stray random surviving chaingunner could feel disproportionately dangerous, even more dangerous than a head-on confrontation with the core threats earlier, and I decided that wasn't elegant, so the extra health was to taper off the danger of those enemies. This health going unused would again not mean much.

 

With ammo, a similar "threshold" type of approach applies, where it's not about "do I have exactly enough ammo to kill everything, and not much more" arithmetic but something more like how the player is allowed to play / enjoy themselves. Let's say I'm making a Doom 2 map with plenty of dangerous enemies and the RL as the main weapon. One question I might have, let's say in a setup with two archviles and some backup, is "Do I want the player to use the RL freely -- to not care if they fire off 10-12 rockets to kill the two viles -- or do I want them to use a more measured burst of rockets, more like 4-6, and then switch to another weapon because that is a bit more exciting here?" What is right or not, and thus the map's ammo balance, simply depends on what I'm going for with the fights (and other fights). There's no 'right answer' in a vacuum. Your map has a BFG -- is it exclusively for dangerous enemies (or a telegraphed pure fun use), or do they get to BFG the occasional less dangerous enemy without regret (and again you probably won't want to break your own promises)? 

 

There's an idea people sometimes pick up which is that shells and bullets can be common and rockets and cells should be rarer, but really, it depends a lot on what you choose to normalize based on the map's threat profile and how you want the player to play. You absolutely can decide to make a map where the player can coast on rockets or cells or both. Nova 3 map10 is a good example of a map that is "balanced" for inf. RL without being a full-scale slaughtermap. For its (few) dangerous setups it just uses two archviles where you might normally use one, six close HKs where otherwise there might normally be 2-3 -- and the fact that you have 20-60 rockets at all times feels right because until you get the BFG, you should be using RL in all the dangerous fights and the excess makes it so that you can miss. More "balanced" RL would just make it so that you'd bore yourself shotgunning the map's least dangerous tanky enemies to always have a rocket cushion for the big fights. Or alternatively, you can make a map that has, like, three rockets, but the rockets all feel like nukes that do an immense amount of destruction (maybe it's a map01-type map with lots of imps and zombies again). 

Ammo balance is also inseparable from placement and conveyance. For example if a plasma rifle with cells is perched on a visible nearby location, the player is factoring this into their impression of what the map allows them to do, so they might be more empowered to use ammo more freely earlier, knowing they will get all that; or some players might hold off on killing something tanky with a weak gun knowing that they could get a stronger weapon at some point (one might hope :P). Appearances also matter. A lot of beginner maps run into an issue where the maps feel unbalanced because they scatter something like shellboxes haphazardly all over the place, and you have 46 shells and run into two more boxes ??? -- where if the mapper put an equivalent amount a 'stockpile'-like location, the player might think, "Okay the map is intentionally saying I get to use the SSG a ton here," and no one would blink even if it had the same amount of shells. (Although artful chaotic scattering can be done too and contribute to a "you get to use lots of power ammo" feel.) 

I guess the common thread in these examples is that balance is not really a general idea; it's something that intersects with the specifics of how the player can play, how they feel like they can play, and what situations they might get themselves into. If you think up specific details about how you want your map to possibly play ('possibly' because you're really designing for stuff that might happen rather than writing a script), and what you want to avoid, then balance gets easier to reason about. 

 

Playtesting comes in handy of course because if you're constantly under- or over-equipped, you can adjust for that, which is an obvious thought. But the less obvious idea is that it's just as useful for a map to be robust against possible under- and over-equipment, for some occasional excess or stinginess to not be a negative, because you'll never design a map that plays out exactly the same way for everyone (unless, uh...it's all on damage floor and you're sprinting to the exit on a timer or something). So that's why I think ranges are useful to think about. With balance it's just as useful to ask, "Okay, what doesn't matter?" You finished with some extra bullet boxes, does that actually hurt the experience (for example negating some tension) or does it not matter. Maps that can be "gamed" are not necessarily bad, because that might be an alternate way of having fun. 

 

 

Oh my god this post got long.

God damn, i come back and see a wall of texts being thrown at me lol. I will read this mammoth when i get a chance.

 

Edit: I got around to reading it and i will comment on the play testing thing. Yes i agree play testing your maps are always the best because there are time when i work on a wad and i go through to make sure there's no bugs or game breaking soft locks, i tented to make notes on "i think [insert enemy name here] is too much" or "well i like the combat flow but i think i should add another stimpak here just in case the player get's too beating up". Also having it balance out is a must recommended for any mappers starting out, having the right balance is helpful but man can it be mentally draining sometimes. Good example of this would be my first plutonia wad i made called Hidden Congo Facility. That was my first attempt at making a plutonia wad using UDMF format and oh man the balancing for that was so rough but i did it.

 

When it comes down to it i always playtest my maps before i move on to the next one because i want it to be good and not be one level having like 79 monsters in it and the next one 5000 monsters.

 

Edited April 23, 2023 by xScavengerWolfx
Finally read the massive wall of text.

[Lizardcommando]

You have an idea for a map or a mod, but you struggle for months to even start it, but when you eventually begin working on the project, you realize someone else had made the thing you wanted to make but 50x better, so you stop and never work on it again.

[Hawk of The Crystals]

Having dozens of projects on the backburner that all end up dead before the cycle continues again.

[Lizardcommando]

Yeah. I'm with you on that. The majority of my projects eventually end up being canceled or on permanent hiatus.

[HorseJockey]

I have a whole external hard drive full of half finished projects, allot of them are almost complete levels. I keep telling myself that I'm going to dust off the drive and fix them up for release but I usually only ever get as far as loading them up, reminiscing about making them and then unplugging the drive.

[TheDanMarine]

reminds me of that old saying about how the last 10% of anything makes up 90% of the actual time spent making it. 

to be fair, unless you really like going over every small detail and making it perfect (which most people don't) the end of map making is by far the most tedious part. 

for me at least, it tends to go: "align texture, align texture, add texture that I thought was there but is missing, move that vert so the texture fits, align texture, align texture, oops that door doesn't work need to fix that linedef, align texture". it's just fixing a bunch of tiny mistakes over and over.   

[Captain Toenail]

• When floor and ceiling sectors overlap in annoying ways, especially if you want to make something interactive on the floor like a lift.
• When the map develops annoying blockmap bugs, seemingly at random.
• When you have to use dummy sectors in vanilla mapping to get floors to stop at specific heights.
• When you make a cool ceiling portal in ZDoom but it bugs out in the software renderer.
• When you want to script something in a ZDoom map and there's like five different functions in the wiki for the intended effect and they all act slightly differently and you have to investigate them all for the correct one (functions for spawning actors especially).

 

 

 

 

 

[Crazy_Deer]

This is literally my first map but, I can already tell that whatever I'm picturing in my head, the map's not gonna be nearly as good

[Kwisior]

10 hours ago, Crazy_Deer said:

This is literally my first map but, I can already tell that whatever I'm picturing in my head, the map's not gonna be nearly as good

But an actual product will certainly be better than just a thought in your head.