How much content ends up getting cut from your own wads and mods?

[Lizardcommando]

I'm sure there comes a point in every modder and mapper's life when you are working on a project and have a bunch of stuff already created for it, but then you notice that some things just don't work. It could be a new enemy replacement that's just too frustrating or boring to fight or new weapon that is no fun to use. Or maybe it's some part of a level you make that ends up making no sense being a part of the entire level so you cut it out entirely.

 

Anyone else have this sort of situation happen to them before?

 

The last map I made, which was for Ramp 2024, I initially had the map start off with the player board a submarine but I couldn't get portals working so I scrapped the entire thing. I tried keeping the submarine theme, but I made it so that boarding the submarine is the main objective and was where the map was supposed to end, but I still couldn't figure out how to build the rest of the map around this theme, so it got scrapped. I made a brand new map once more, but the only thing I kept from the original idea was to have players board some kind of vessel as the map's exit. Somehow I was able to work around that theme and eventually finished making that map.

 

The edited Eri's Guns mod I made, I originally added in a rocket launcher that had a secondary function which lets you remote control the rocket, similar to the RPG from Half Life 2, but I ended up cutting that function out and made it act more like a traditional rocket launcher.

Edited June 18 by Lizardcommando

[JadingTsunami]

During the "prework" phase, a lot; palettes I thought would work just plain don't, textures that look good in the editor look awful in game, traps and setups are more annoying than I thought, etc.

 

During the "grind" phase, probably around 20% gets cut due to refinements but I mostly have an idea of where I want things to go.

 

In the "polishing" phase, very little gets cut, mainly because I do this as a hobby and I don't enjoy re-doing huge portions that are already serviceable.

[Decay]

If it's a high effort wad, it is not uncommon for me to significantly rework layouts until they are given a stamp of approval. Less common but still happens is a map gets cut. Usually nearer to the end of a map's completion not much changes because by that point the fluff and negative parts are removed. I have more than a megawad's worth of scrapped layouts. One day I'll make a D-Sides compilation.

 

Mid-effort wads may not get the same level of trashing, but typically anything deemed as potentially problematic is axed.

 

Low-effort wads, only the truly shittiest of the shit get cut.

[mouldy]

When i was working on overboard I started making an inflatable banana to replace the chainsaw, but had to give up because I didn't really know what I was doing.

[Kinsie]

Copy pasting from the trivia easter egg, here's some stuff cut from Reelism 2, as documented by Shadsy:

 

Scrapped Maps

• Terror in Tastytown: A city under attack made entirely out of fast food products, inspired by Candy Planet from Reelism 1. Scrapped for being too similar to Pie in the Sky.
• IronWerx: A giant fire and steam factory. Originally scrapped in Reelism 1, this concept was brought back from the dead for Reelism 2. Re-scrapped in the blocking phase so we could prioritize other maps instead
• The Meat Vortex: A large, spinning funnel made out of meat. Players and monsters were whipped around like rocks in a blender. Hilarious and wholly unplayable.

 

Scrapped Reels

• Fancy Hats: All monsters wear fancy hats. It was more of a programming exercise to get familiar with ZScript. Scrapped because there's no way to tell where a monster's head is relative to its body. (Looking at you, dogs.)
• Freak Out: Enemies shake around violently and fling themselves in random directions. It was funny but too chaotic to be playable.
• My Son My Son What Have Ye Done: Fighting against a bunch of knee-high miniature Doomguys. Wait, why didn't we do this? This is a great idea!
• Pestilence: The player carries a highly infectious disease that harms nearby monsters. This idea became much less funny in 2020 for some reason.
• Reelcraft: Weapons for constructing traps and obstacles. Scrapped late in production during the "bayonet-the-dying" phase of development.
• All Animals vs. All Humans: Like the Dogged reel, but with dozens of different animals. Scrapped because we didn't want to make 20 different animal sprites and behaviors.

 

Scrapped Bosses

• Dr. Chairman: A supervillain with an obsession with comfy office chairs. Dr. Chairman was also floated for Reelism 1, but in both cases, he never made it past the brainstorming phase.
• The Entire Cincinnati Bengals: Reelism 2 supports bosses that use multiple enemies, which gave us the idea to try a boss with 46 enemies at the same time. We didn't go through with it.

 

Scrapped Weapons

• Throw Your Own Head: Described in our notes as "an insta-kill projectile of the Doomguy's head with your camera attached," and you have to run over and pick it back up. Scrapped for obvious reasons.
• Frisbee: In addition to the basketball, we also thought about adding a frisbee weapon and a frisbee golf minigame. It would've been too similar, but man, now I want to play Doom frisbee golf!
• Psychic Mindwave: aka "Scanners Weapon." The player could blow up non-boss monsters using psychic powers. Originally part of The Elementalist reel, but replaced with Cold Snap because "psychic" isn't an element (except in Pokemon).
• Bucket of Scorpions: Toss the bucket on the ground, and dozens of scorpions would go skittering around, pinching everything in sight. Still a fun idea, but it was a low priority to add.

 

Other Stuff

• Originally, the Babby Cacodemons would scream and run away when they got hurt. Scrapped for being too heartbreaking. Seriously, we couldn't bring ourselves to do it.
• As an experiment, the Mini Imps that fall off the Mega Imp were able to jump back on and restore the Mega Imp's health. But the Mega Imp battle is already hectic, and it was just too much extra.
• The man eating rocks in Town was originally supposed to sell rocks you could throw at enemies. We thought it would be funnier if he was just there for no reason.

[Scuba Steve]

Before limit removing source ports and node builders, a ton of content was cut from most projects. Doom City's text file describes crosswalks and stop lights but they were removed because it caused visplane overflows. When I was making in the late 90s, I had to scale down a bunch of detail in my map because DMapEdit had a hard limit of something like 700 sectors; I emailed the creator to ask that it be raised and he replied, "no, that's more than enough for any map."

[esselfortium]

A few things that come to mind:

 

SpaceDM9 was originally planned to have significantly more than three maps, and a hub map where you could pick levels. There was going to be a gothic map (which used a bunch of textures that later appeared in BTSX E2), a blue-and-white Greek island map, a forest map, and more. It was very ambitious.

 

A few years prior to that, SpaceDM5 was at one point slated to have a "submarines" gimmick map that would use ACS tricks and camera textures to simulate the sound and visuals of a team-based submarine battle. Most of the actual details of exactly how it was going to play never really materialized.

 

Back around 2008, KDiKDiZD was originally slated to include ambient sounds and bullet casings, but when I revisited the project in 2020 and redid its dehacked patch from the ground up in DEH9000, I decided that my vanilla implementations of both those features were far too obviously janky to be worth keeping instead of using that precious dehacked-patch real estate for things that would actually be cool instead of awkward and half-functional. In 2020 I also very nearly got rid of the camtextures, because my original implementation of them was way too obviously a hack (and was also arguably too low-resolution to be useful), but then the half-circle projection approach came to mind, vaguely inspired by the weird projected computer displays in the movie Brazil, and everything fell into place from that.

 

In BTSX, I heavily revised the layouts of some of my own maps before releasing them (or in the case of Navigating Flood Regions, I also did it a second time after release). Prior to E1's first public release, I'll Replace You With Machines and Navigating Flood Regions both underwent significant reworking in the form of "delete roughly 2/3rds of the map and start over", because their original layouts consisted of a lot of aimless corridor spaghetti that I struggled to do anything interesting with. In the case of Machines, skillsaw had been kind enough to finish up its original version into a playable form for me, and his comments about the thingplacing decisions he made for it were a big part of what finally convinced me to just scrap a lot of it. (Though I felt a bit bad about doing so right after getting his help with it, though some of his contributions are still there in the final.) Machines was actually the first BTSX map ever started, initially as a texture test map (the outdoor gazebo-in-lava scene was the first structure built for it), and due to my careless development it ended up being one of the last ones finished for E1.

 

A handful of 2010-vintage screenshots from an early version of I'll Replace You With Machines, featuring some crusty ancient versions of some E1 textures:

Spoiler

 

 

[myolden]

My hard drive is littered with scraps and abandoned ideas. Some maps just don't work and collect dust, never to be finished. Others are fully complete but the project itself just doesn't come together so the map gets orphaned and sometimes reused in other projects.

 

Two of my Pina Colada maps - 5 and 17 - were both originally part of a small solo project that I abandoned, but they found a nice home after a little bit of reworking. I ditched this idea because the core concept was really undercooked, and the maps sat on my drive for quite a while before finding a home.

 

A handful of Simulacrum maps were scavenged in a similar way. Map 3 was originally developed for Altars of Madness, but got left on the cutting room floor about halfway into it's development. It had good bones but I wasn't sure what to do with it. During Simulacrum's development I fished it out and completed it. Maps 8, 19, 21, and 23 were all going to be in Altars of Madness 2. I had actually finished map 8 and the others were in various stages of completion when I first approached Muumi and asked if he wanted to collaborate on something. The idea to scrap AoM2 in favor of Simulacrum happened at some point pretty early in development. Maps 18 and 32 were also meant to be part of a 5 map set I wanted to put together. I won't spoil that one because it's an idea I'd like to revisit at some point. Map 11 (by muumi) was going to be in a solo project that he abandoned, but I don't know the details of that one.

 

The secret map in Waffle House was originally part of a Swift Death inspired set that I abandoned. Only 2 maps were ever completed for this idea, and the other one has already been recycled into another collaborative map set that's being worked on right now. I can't say too much about this one but hopefully it'll be out this year.

There are no cutting room scraps for Nostalgia, Nostalgia 2, or Obzen. I didn't scrap any maps, and any areas or parts that weren't working were pruned before even being finished. Honestly I barely remember making Obzen. It was made in like 4 months.

 

Aside from that there are bits and pieces laying around that never went anywhere for various reasons. The rest I'll keep to myself, as I have a lingering sense that I'll revisit them someday and I wouldn't want to spoil any surprises.

[MundyC]

Here's some of the more noteworthy stuff I cut from Austrian Avian Association. This mostly consists of things I already typed up in the AAABONUS file in the idgames release, though I did dredge up one additional thing I had forgotten about.

• My first idea for AAA was basically Viscera Cleanup Detail: The Doom Version, and would've been a gameplay mod where Katharina had to clean up the various campaigns that Doomguy left messy and/or unfinished. Obviously, this expanded into a full total conversion.
• Early in development, I messed around with having a Pizza Tower-esque "second lap" feature where the Kaiserin chased you around the level and you had to reach the end before she killed you. This lasted for about half a day before I scrapped it.
• There was going to be a map between MAP05 and MAP06 named "Blinding White", in which Katharina had to navigate a winding path on Grossglockner during a blizzard. I wanted to have the skybox change from sundown to night the further in the level one got, like MAP11 from Lost Civilization. I scrapped the map as it both didn't flow well with MAP05/06 and because I ran out of long Zelda's Adventure songs to use (though that wasn't a problem by the time Post-Mortem was being developed, lol). What was completed of Blinding White were tacked onto the end of MAP05 and the beginning of MAP06.
• There was originally going to be a small arena within the CD-i Zelda MAP06 secret. Taking place in a dinner hall with a large portrait of Lupay, you would've fought off a small army of Knochenhunds. I scrapped it for two reasons; I didn't want to lock a bunch of enemies behind a secret, and I was done with mapping that behemoth of the map. (If only I knew about the scale of MAP13 back then!)
• During the development of Post-Mortem, I wanted to buff the Knochenhund Minor by giving it a lunge attack similar to the Beastling in Harmony Compatible. After replaying the campaign with it on, I realized it just didn't work and scrapped it.
  • This is the only scrapped thing that made it to a released build! The frames are still functional in the Post-Mortem DeHacked patches - set the Knochenhund Minor's Attack state to 922, and you'll re-enable it.

• The Lindworm was planned to have two dedicated actors at first - the one seen in-game where she's breaching the water's surface, and another where she is fully submerged and swimming (the picture above is one of the sprites meant for this thing). This second would've been used in MAP15's water tunnel segments and maybe a chunk of MAP31 as well. After running through the states and actors I had left for Post-Mortem, I realized I didn't have enough of either to implement this second form, so it was scrapped. Makes me wish I had done the project in MBF instead of Boom!

On a similar note, most of the enemy sprites made by me were sourced from Vile Mountaineers, that one shelved GZDoom TC I posted about a while ago. These include all Knochenhund-related enemies, the Doppelsoldners, and the Lindworm. Only Katharina's sprites (and the Shadow'd Schanbel recolors) were properly bespoke for the project.

 

[kevansevans]

While I was working on my gardevoir mod, I thought it would be appropriate to offer the mechanic of being able to catch demons like you would Pokemon, and use them as your own. Mechanic ended up slowing the gameplay down too hard, so I scrapped the whole thing.

 

https://vxtwitter.com/kbeevans/status/1427811380011442181