Advice for rooms and shapes

[Soupcan pyro]

Hey, so can anyone give me some good advice for room shapes and map layouts? It feels like some of the rooms on my map feel a little simple or square. And when is the point where the room shape is too messy or complex

 

[DRON12261]

I probably can't give a 100% answer to that question. But...
 

The layout itself should work primarily for leading/progressing the player by level. I take it you are asking for the visual itself. If so, the layout itself doesn't affect that, the detailing of the room itself inside does. Make a point of interest on the locations that at least a fraction of a second, the player's eye can latch, but do not overload the frame, and also do not forget the background component, which the player's attention is not emphasized, but together they strongly influence the perception and emphasize these same points of interest. Choose a certain setting on the location and, most importantly, a certain color scheme for texturing, so that the frame looked harmonious, not overloaded. Do not forget to work with lighting and play with contrast. If you do not like straight walls and flat floors and ceilings, add volume, unevenness. For example, tiles are missing on the floor, lamps are sticking out on the ceiling, wires are hanging down, walls are layered, things like that. If you look at a lot of other wads with a good visual, all of them in their foundations often have the usual straight, near-square forms. But it's the filling, texturing, and lighting of these square locations that does all the magic.

It's hard to give exact working advice on this, you need to experiment and pick the best options in your opinion. If you don't know how to set up your location, play other wads, look at the work of your favorite mappers, analyze what they emphasized. Anyway, any person's creativity is based on their own experience obtained from any other sources, including the creativity of any other persons.

[Chezza]

Hmm a shape. How about a circle?

 

Ok a more useful idea. Think vertically. Even if you have a large square room, experiment some ramps / steps to go on higher levels. Some thin walls with windows to shoot may mix it up some more as well. This may give you more opportunities to play with monster and secret placement as well.

[baja blast rd.]

There are some pretty excellent good layouts that are surprisingly orthogonal. So I'd second DRON12261 on not necessarily feeling it's obligatory for a good map. 

 

But it's also worth trying stuff so trying to play around with more creative shapes can be pretty valuable.

 

My usual layouts are pretty unorthogonal, and my advice would be to gradually add to your toolkit of shaping techniques. There are so many options here I don't want to suggest too many you're not even going to like, so use your favorite maps as a reference. 

 

You can get a lot of mileage out of just modifying the existing shapes you have now. Like the L-shaped hallway on the lower right could be something like this (here I incorporate some 2:1 ratio angles): 

 

 

Also building large insets/alcoves (sort of like the structure on the bottom of my shot) there ends up altering shapes. 

 

Second is to play around with different processes for building. I'm guessing you make rooms by making complete, closed shapes.

 

But you can also build areas by piecing together unclosed shapes. Here's a simple room that starts with some disconnected segments I then close up. 

 

 

Yes that looks like armor.

 

Here's another (I work with a curve and a couple 2:1 angle lines but this is mostly an orthogonal and 45-deg base, which shows that room complexity doesn't exactly need wild angles). 

 

 

I'm just doing this very quickly since it's a forum post so the shapes are maybe a bit whatever, but it's the whole idea of it I'm trying to convey.

 

This also goes for the layout as a whole. You don't have to keep building on one connected mass. A lot of designers will instead create separate regions as isolated fragments that they then connect in some way, which is good if you want more unusual shapes because depending on how you situate the fragments, you might be forced to use unconventionally shaped areas to join them.

 

 

If I had infinite time I could say like 50+ more things about this. Hopefully other people get around to a lot of those though. :P 

[Omniarch]

As others have said, orthogonal geometry != bad geometry, but since you seem to be interested in experimenting with unusual shapes, I will expand on part of DRON's argument by suggesting a method of studying other people's work: the DoomWiki.

 

While instructive, opening up wads your editor of choice can actually be quite time-consuming, and while one could just browse map lumps in SLADE with the geometry preview feature, it would be more convenient to simply look up your favourite maps or mappers on the wiki*, and gaze upon the cleaned-up map layouts that the wikiers kindly provide for you. The advantage of this approach is that you can look through a large number of maps quickly, find shapes that interest you, and then open the map up in an editor.

 

By way of example, I have spent a lot of time studying the works of Tarnsman and Xaser, both of whom are masters at creating interesting and visually-pleasing layouts, first on the wiki and then in the editor. Both provide superb examples of practical non-orthogonal geometry that is instructive even in its purest form, but also in mechanical and presentational terms.

 

Alternatively, you could also find examples of orthogonal layouts that are really well-done. For me, the works of cannonball, especially Return to Hadron, are fantastic examples of attractive and functional orthogonal geometry.

 

At the end of the day, though, the 2D view of a map's layout doesn't really tell you much. I mean, it totally obscures the vertical axis, for one, which is very misleading, but also hides subtler aspects of level design, like progression telegraphy or the composition of vistas etc etc. Basically, I wouldn't recommend getting hung up on the shapes themselves unless you derive pleasure specifically from attractive layouts. Frankly, anyone who makes prescriptions vis-a-vis orthogonality can be safely ignored, since any style of geometry can be done well or poorly, and there's nothing more intrinsically worthwhile about pretty, non-orthogonal geometry. I say this as someone who does constantly get hung up on this, mind you.

 

^{* of course, not every map or mapper has a wiki page, but you'd probably be surprised by the bredth of coverage on there.}

[Egg Boy]

For my personal style I don't usually think of areas as "rooms," when I draw them, I start with a giant square, and start drawing structures into that, letting the design and layout flower out from an initial structure or idea, deleting spaces that are not used until it is no longer a square. I suppose it emulates a more additive environment, it could be helpful to try something like that.

[PeterMoro]

Try curvier corridors and hallways instead of 90degree angles.