Community Project concepts that you would like to see?

[ViolentBeetle]

Had an idea for some time that might be of interest to someone, I probably won't make it in a while. Working title "Kill the Necromancer". Every map has a boss that looks the same but gradually becomes more powerful by gaining different attacks and increasing its stats.

Ideally, every mapper would pitch an upgrade that would last for the rest of the game, but that is an organizational nightmare.

[MObreck]

Any project that uses my MEDB  MBF21 creature roster would be a wonderful site :)

 

But enough shameless self promotion. We now return to our regularly scheduled discussion.

[DoctorNuriel]

A single-map CP where mappers are each assigned an empty lot of between 512x512 and 1024x1024 units in a city block pre-built by the project lead. Kind of like an Exquisite Corpse X Citadel of Unidoom type setup. The created structures could be single high-rises, groups of smaller houses, a park, etc.

Edited May 1 by DoctorNuriel

[Wahrnehmungskrieg]

It's been done many times in the indie scene (Experiment 12 comes to mind first here) and it needs to be done in Doom if it hasn't already been (and if it has it shd be done again): a chain-game type of gig where some some number of mappers get together, each (consecutively) make in a brief time a tiny WAD of 1-3 or so levels in whatever format they please, no restrictions except for one: some narrative and thematic coherence wrt what WADs have been made in the chain of WADs before the mapper's slot; the design is left entirely open to the mapper. Wd be an absolute pain in the sack to organise (given every mapper wd need to be available on a different date) so I wd never lead such a thing, but I'd like to see someone else initiate

Edited May 14 by Wahrnehmungskrieg

[Walter confetti]

Interesting concept indeed! Yeah, It must be pretty hard to organise all but it's doable....

[purist]

A bunch of people sign up in a thread, are randomly divided into small teams and each tasked with making a megawad in secret. No themes or restrictions, except that any original content in the wad must be made by one of the team.

 

At a pre-determined time the teams all post their megawads back to the original thread and either judge the best effort or just rejoice in all the lovely new maps.

[june gloom]

How about something to showcase a different theme besides the usual demons? Something with aliens, or cosmic horrors, or mutants. Get away from the stock textures and the popular packs like OTEX and move towards a more aggressively late 90s industrial-cyberpunk vibe? Bonus points if it's heavily DoomCute.

 

^{Yes I realize FreeDoom kinda does this but I was thinking of something more cohesive.}

Edited May 15 by june gloom

[Devalaous]

On 5/15/2024 at 7:40 PM, june gloom said:

How about something to showcase a different theme besides the usual demons? Something with aliens, or cosmic horrors, or mutants. Get away from the stock textures and the popular packs like OTEX and move towards a more aggressively late 90s industrial-cyberpunk vibe? Bonus points if it's heavily DoomCute.

 

^{Yes I realize FreeDoom kinda does this but I was thinking of something more cohesive.}

 

DBPs and the related DBKs do this very often, one of the reasons I love to play them. You never know *what* you'll get each month/every two months

[elf-alchemist]

The Master Levels the Way The Master Did

It's an idea I keep daydreaming about after my Masterpack project first released. Five mapper are each assigned an episode of six-to-twelve maps each, and they are tasked with bringing in the style of each of the authors involved in the Master Levels:

Inferno, in the style of Dr. Sleep

Titan, tries being Jym Flynn

Cabal, taking after Sverre Kvernmo

Klietech, dealing as Chris Klie

Lost Level, grabbing from Tom Mustaine, Theresa Chasar and Tim Willits

I think it'd be pretty neat.

[Suitepee]

Honestly, I've always wanted to see a Doom ComProj that revolves around making precisely 7 maps based off Ring/The Ring in some manner. Like, each map represents a different 'day' and some form of horror revolving around the premise of the film, as it builds up to the finale.

[97th Century Fox]

Got an idea for something while on the bus the other day. Was randomly thinking about brutalism and remembered that I've been seeing wads themed around it pop up somewhat frequently as of late. Eventually I got an idea for a twist on the theme. IRL, a common companion of bare concrete is graffiti - how about someone makes does the same to Doom's brutalism? Here's the idea: take a set of concrete textures, like the ones in OTEX since those are really popular, and have the community draw whatever they want onto them. Way this could work is setting a rule that in order to participate in making maps for the cp, someone would have to submit at least one piece of graffiti that could then be plastered over the various concrete textures. Just as with graffiti irl, there would be no barrier of entry so everything from simple tags to elaborate graffiti art would be welcome. After all the graffiti is edited onto the textures, mapping could begin and it would be a standard cp from there, themed around urban decay or whatever

[june gloom]

Was playing Doom 64 last night and I've also had Marathon on my mind recently with the Steam release of Aleph One, and I thought -- why not a "Marathon 64?" This may or may not be better suited as an Aleph One scenario but I'm not active at the Pfhorums, so I'll just put it here. Something bigger, darker and scarier than the original trilogy (not that Marathon doesn't have some horror-themed scenarios, RED being probably the most famous one) with colored lighting (which I'm not sure A1 can do, actually?) and a dark ambient soundtrack distinctly different from Aubrey Hodge's (as Marathon 1's music was very different from Doom, so too should a hypothetical M64 soundtrack be! Perhaps taking more after Alien Trilogy for PSX?)

 

I don't know, I'm just musing. I think I'll ask on the Marathon community discord about colored lighting. I asked and the answer was "not currently, nobody wants to mess with the software renderer and the OpenGL ES branch is years away from becoming the main branch." So maybe GZDoom is a better choice for this dumb idea after all.

Edited May 21 by june gloom

[slowfade]

A WAD with 1001 maps. Three or four high quality maps in random slots like 258, 513, 893, 939, the rest churned out by a couple of mappers, with the most prolific making 600 maps in three weeks.

[june gloom]

...why?

[slowfade]

Indeed. Let's hope nobody will find a reason for making it.

[Jayextee]

I dunno if I've said this before, but DOOM II in Icon Of Sin Only. Yes, all MAP30-alikes! Because people tend to really hate these for some reason, so why not explore the idea and see if there's any merit at all in it; by making it 32 times!

 

Spoiler

I'd totally play it tho.

 

[yakfak]

zine format anything-goes community project where as well as a map you also submit a diary or a bit of fiction or an essay or ansi art or a review of something you like or what-have-you. for a fork of boom/dsda with a console that lets you browse an embedded text file at yr own leisure

 

and no dumbass 32 map limit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

edit: actually the more about-itself a project is and the less about existing Doom stuff/based in tribute it is, the more likely i am to play it and think about it!

Edited May 23 by yakfak

[Matt Eldrydge]

Brutalist Doom, but played straight. 32 maps of beautiful concrete, steel, glass and lots of geometric shapes, with or without Control-esque weirdness and void stuff in them. Just make a cool map with concrete in the starring role.

 

I understand Doom's engine doesn't let you go wild with room over room and such but this has been on my mind ever since I saw the Quake Brutalist Jam. I might start it myself after I explore what I can get out of a narrow, mostly monochromatic palette.

Edited May 23 by Matt Eldrydge

[Obsidian]

11 minutes ago, Matt Eldrydge said:

room over room

 

You can get inventive with things like instant ceilings and floors or artful midtexture usage, so it's definitely still something that a dedicated team could tackle. And that's even before we consider portals and GZDoom's 3D floors! I'd be keen to see something like this happen.

[Jayextee]

11 minutes ago, Matt Eldrydge said:

I understand Doom's engine doesn't let you go wild with room over room

I'd wanna see Brutalism tackled without RoR personally. Probably involving a fair amount of midtexture trickery, but that shit's awesome to see when done well IMO.

[june gloom]

21 hours ago, Matt Eldrydge said:

Brutalist Doom, but played straight. 32 maps of beautiful concrete, steel, glass and lots of geometric shapes, with or without Control-esque weirdness and void stuff in them. Just make a cool map with concrete in the starring role.

 

I understand Doom's engine doesn't let you go wild with room over room and such but this has been on my mind ever since I saw the Quake Brutalist Jam. I might start it myself after I explore what I can get out of a narrow, mostly monochromatic palette.

 

To counter Obsidian and Jayextee -- though they make good arguments for a vanilla approach to this concept -- I try to advocate for more interesting GZDoom projects that don't go hard on GZDoom effects but instead are more like Vanilla+ with the use of slopes, RoR and (of course) intelligent use of colored lighting, and it seems to me this is an ideal idea for such a project.

Edited May 24 by june gloom
decapitalized Jayextee's name, sorry wasn't thinking

[Jayextee]

For once I wasn't advocating vanilla; drawsegs limit severely limits the kind of midtexture wizardry one can do. Limit-removing will do.

And, although off-topic, please don't CaPitaLize my name like that. Thanks.

[Andromeda]

1 hour ago, Jayextee said:

I dunno if I've said this before, but DOOM II in Icon Of Sin Only. Yes, all MAP30-alikes! Because people tend to really hate these for some reason, so why not explore the idea and see if there's any merit at all in it; by making it 32 times!

There was this, but sadly it died down:

 

[Shepardus]

1 hour ago, Matt Eldrydge said:

Brutalist Doom, but played straight. 32 maps of beautiful concrete, steel, glass and lots of geometric shapes, with or without Control-esque weirdness and void stuff in them. Just make a cool map with concrete in the starring role.

 

I understand Doom's engine doesn't let you go wild with room over room and such but this has been on my mind ever since I saw the Quake Brutalist Jam. I might start it myself after I explore what I can get out of a narrow, mostly monochromatic palette.

The Quake Brutalist Jams produced a lot of cool maps, I'd love to see what we can do with Doom in that theme.

 

2 hours ago, Jayextee said:

I dunno if I've said this before, but DOOM II in Icon Of Sin Only. Yes, all MAP30-alikes! Because people tend to really hate these for some reason, so why not explore the idea and see if there's any merit at all in it; by making it 32 times!

If Dark Scythe can get away with 40+ Dead Simple clones, anything is possible!

Edited May 23 by Shepardus

[Matt Eldrydge]

43 minutes ago, june gloom said:

 

To counter Obsidian and JayExTee -- though they make good arguments for a vanilla approach to this concept -- I try to advocate for more interesting GZDoom projects that don't go hard on GZDoom effects but instead are more like Vanilla+ with the use of slopes, RoR and (of course) intelligent use of colored lighting, and it seems to me this is an ideal idea for such a project.

 

Yep, I know. I just don't like working with GZDoom UDMF after more or less getting the hang of Boom/MBF21. It might be more convenient for non-standard features like 3D sectors, slopes, colored lighting, etc, but I like the challenge of making something similar without having those tools immediately available.

 

At the same time, it's not like we're forbidden from having two projects with the same premise. In fact, if anything it'd just add to the pool of maps in that particular theme.

 

2 hours ago, Obsidian said:

 

You can get inventive with things like instant ceilings and floors or artful midtexture usage, so it's definitely still something that a dedicated team could tackle. And that's even before we consider portals and GZDoom's 3D floors! I'd be keen to see something like this happen.

 

Oh, absolutely! I really don't think Doom ever needed RoR and some mapping wizards (Mechadon and Jaska come to mind) can make you forget of Doom's more "primitive" toolset with how they set things up. I'll definitely look into the possibilities later this year, I already have an unnanounced project on the backburner that has a pretty similar theme going on - just with a bit of an emphasis on narrative.

 

2 hours ago, Jayextee said:

I'd wanna see Brutalism tackled without RoR personally. Probably involving a fair amount of midtexture trickery, but that shit's awesome to see when done well IMO.

To be fair, I think the midtex stuff is probably not even super necessary for the vibe, as someone who has dabbled in brutalism fairly often. I'm not very clever when it comes to exploiting the engine's quirks, much less the stuff you can do with Boom and such, so I just try to play by a vanilla-esque approach when I do it.

 

1 hour ago, Shepardus said:

The Quake Brutalist Jams produced a lot of cool maps, I'd love to see what we can do with Doom in that theme.

 

Given the positive reception to this idea, I think it's more likely to materialize now. ;)

[Obsidian]

It'd be remiss of me to not mention the Eternity Engine in regard to this idea as well, as it kind of straddles the line between GZDoom and MBF21 capabilities. I can understand wanting to stick to simpler formats though and MBF21 in particular definitely deserves a bit more love.

[Matt Eldrydge]

1 hour ago, Obsidian said:

It'd be remiss of me to not mention the Eternity Engine in regard to this idea as well, as it kind of straddles the line between GZDoom and MBF21 capabilities. I can understand wanting to stick to simpler formats though and MBF21 in particular definitely deserves a bit more love.

Eternity has my interest, but I barely use that port myself...kinda feels weird making a project for something you're just not in the habit of using and have kinda no real reason to. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of the people who downloaded Eternity did so because of Heartland. :P

 

But yeah, to get it back on track: if I do this, it more than likely will target MBF21 if only because it's a superset of Boom with the added possibility of new stuff through Decohack/DEHextra. Lots of possibilities there.

[GreenAnime]

Rocket Doom - Doom maps centered around rocket gameplay would be the greatest thing ever

[Logamuffin]

I've always wanted to see an Alien Vendetta themed community project. Stuff like Scythe: Resharpened and Hell Revelations have come out, along with rehashes of every single commercial Doom game... so why not AV? A DTWID style Alien Vendetta thingy would be heaven for me.

[Trigsy]

On 4/2/2024 at 2:23 PM, Raith138 said:

I may be wrong but I have never seen a community project with limited vertices.

I've been thinking that it would be cool to take the vanilla maps and strip them down to vertices, and then build something for each level out of the corresponding frameworks. I'd propose the idea eventually, but I wouldn't mind if someone wanted to take it on before I do.

Edited May 24 by Trigsy
grammar lol