What "no rules" community projects have you played and what do you think of them?

[Li'l devil]

"No rules" community projects are projects like Doomworld Mega/Maximum Projects, Community Chests, RAMPs, the Joy of Mapping, DUMPs, etc. These are projects with barely any rules or restrictions in place (usual restrictions being Vanilla/Boom only maps, loose time restrictions, no troll maps, etc). Most importantly, they have no quality restrictions, no theme restrictions, no map limit, no monster/linedef/sector restrictons, etc, and anyone from a newbie to a veteran can submit a map.

 

What's interesting to me is that people barely ever talk about most of them. I do hear about RAMP sometimes, and Community Chests are mentioned simply by virtue of them being old enough to become classics and having a couple of very notable maps. Somehow everyone is more interested in discussing Maximum Doom than these projects. It seems that people generally aren't interested in playing them, probably because they're afraid these projects are full of garbage. And while that's probably true, I'm sure each of them has at least a few cool and memorable maps, and that might be a good reason to play them.

 

I haven't played through any of them myself, but I plan to (that is, IF I ever finish my current backlog of wads >.<). I'm very interested in everyone's thoughts about any of these projects and individual maps in them.

 

PS: speedmap compilations don't count! These are a separate wad category!!

[Celestin]

Does JPCP count? I don't think it had any restriction per se, but because it was organised on one Japanese website, the contributors all came from a single country. It's also one of my favourite community megawads, thanks to its variety, creativity and lack of levels where several mappers try to outdo one another in terms of scale or difficulty.

[MrMean]

Enjmin Doom is an interesting one. It was a 2023 gen ed class at a game industry university rather than being hosted in any sort of traditional Doom community and required that all maps be made for GZDoom (remember to turn off Texture Filtering if you try it yourself). The resulting maps tend to have shovelware levels of polish and early ZDoom levels of source port experimentation. My personal favorites include:

• Breakout by Gurlu (Nathanaël) is a mostly monsterless exploration map that pitch-shifts monster sounds to make some goofy Banjo-Kazooie style dialog noises and messes with pitch black areas that require using the automap to navigate as well as areas that require navigating terrain that doesn’t show on the automap at all. 
• Le Pélerinage by Baptiste is another monsterless exploration map that manages to combine a bunch of GZDoom-isms (dynamic and colored lighting, slopes, reflections, etc) into a coherent artstyle and really picks up on how Doom’s graphical style and level design limitations really lend themselves to sheer architectural scale.
• Saw666 by Gorik - Chainsaw that upgrades your movement speed with each kill. Also, the combat design here is pretty fun, especially for someone who may never have played Doom before
• Deconstruction by AmeSun - Surrealist secret hunting
• Kopalnia Soli by Cajou - Another monsterless exploration map, this time with striking lighting.
• The Doom Dimension by Bigaston - Portal inspired map where you can toggle whether blue or green terrain is raised by firing your “weapon”. The terrain “raising and lowering” is actually handled by teleporting you between two otherwise identical versions of the same map.
• Khazad-Doom by Victor - Similar notes to Le Pélerinage, but it’s a LOTR reference.
• Doom Souls 3 by Vincent - All around solid map if you don’t mind low difficulty and heavy use of dynamic lighting and colored fog. Implements some cute Dark Souls references ( bonfires and soapstone messages) 
• The Tower by Creamos - The kind of cutscene heavy GZDoom map that would be exhausting as a full megaWAD but is pretty fun as a one-off. Highlights include the skybox, drowned imps that reuse frames from the imp’s gib animation to represent forming from and collapsing back into the water, and the custom gem and key sprites.

(Also on a side note I just realized while looking back at this that apparently GZDoom can load wads with umlauts and diacritics in their filename)