Tarnsman

Updated to fix a few node building issues as well as a problem I didn't even know existed in DSDA Doom where it has trouble properly rendering lines longer than 512 units long. Same link.

I feel seen. Big Mood. This is a personal attack. Etc.

The overwhelming majority of "prodigies" for anything be it recreational or professional have devoted endless hours upon hours to that craft. While I'm sure there are certain things that make getting into doom mapping easier or more difficult, like every other skill it's overwhelmingly driven by practice and understanding the medium and what you're trying to do. (I would say it's probably harder to map if you have that thing where you can't picture concepts in your mind - but given the number of prominent mappers who share "I draw three lines and it doesn't look exactly what it looks like in my head so I delete everything and start over, big mood" that's probably not even true.) Lol no.

Updated to add 6 more maps. Also remembered that people play with the setting that lets them knock monsters off ledges and that monster blocking lines are a thing. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/z33sf585j08o8b4sgukn8/DOOMKIDv2.wad?rlkey=wm77gm1hz6pg9ydp3uaxd1bcm&dl=0

Completely forgot this.

Way behind: The map 24 connection is obvious but Map 25 is also a remake of another "level" from a different game. This was a thing that shows up in places in the 90s, the most remembered is probably the Requiem secret map that recreates a Quake map, but the just general idea of recreating something outside of Doom (famously, especially recently, your house) is something a lot of people tried to do a bunch back in the day. Some quickfire other stuff.: 22 is a collage of different Breezeep scraps from the same set of Plutonia scraps that were previously used. 26 is the only actually collaborative map in the entire project where I made a big middle pillar area then AD made some outlying stuff to go around it (the archviles were originally just going to get crushed in the middle - AD came up with the idea to teleport them out to die in front of the player). 27 spawned from someone saying something along the lines of wondering why the end of Administration Center was a thing and it felt like someone just attached a second map to the first half. 28 is from DTWID E3 scraps. 29 is not from TWID scraps but actually a scrapped BTSX E3 map layout. For 30 everyone is fully familiar with the IOS letdown that is mandatory for so many Megawads, the goal was to capture that feeling of just a random non-finale that so many of those have, while also not just making another IOS, so you get probably the most joke-map in the entire WAD. It was only after I made the map that I realized it completely destroyed vanilla limits so we just left the crash in. The VPO message is supposed to read "Icon Too Sinful" but I don't think any of the programs that actually crash on VPO properly grab that string from the DEH.

People talk about damaging liquids because they lack the courage to have damaging grass.

Very behind. Map 32: As I've posted elsewhere a lot of the map is based around various lyrics from the titular song. If 31 is a love letter to the weird nonsensical puzzles that many people loved in 90s mapping, this is a love letter to the sort of maps where you'd pop open the text file and see the author explain the weird idea behind the map and how that influenced almost all mapping decisions. Where a modern map wouldn't give you a chainsaw to fight a baron on a sector table just to have you teleport away from it, the 90s style says "The lyrics say, 'They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast' so that's what we're doing!". Map 17: While this and another map coming up are the most extreme examples of it, D2ISO while trying to present itself as a bizzarro D2TWID does purposely lean far more into TNT and Plutonia than D2. As a few have pointed out this is a very blatant homage to TNT Map 17. TNT Map 17 randomly shows up in Maximum Doom in one of the various level compilations that populate its files (one of the many baffling things that show up in Maximum Doom). Full commitment to the joke would have been just sticking TNT Map 17 here like a proper bootleg would. Half of this map is actually taken from a scrapped Mustaine map I made for TNTtwid, the four dead players in the eastern side of the map represent where the old player starts were for that map. Map 18: No original layout screenshot this time because I can't find it. This map was a stand-alone Breezeep map for a limit removing thing he did that he never finished and I took it and pieced together the various floating sections and made the various changes necessary to make it vanilla friendly in a similar vein to what I did with Alfonzo's work to make Map 08. Before Breezeep gave me the base for this map I was original going to make just a much larger version of the final titular Court of Yards but vanilla limits really do not like a bunch of floor detailing such as hash marks and giant endzones that say "Innocent" and "Guilty". Even the smaller scale tabletop football field had to be made out of separate custom flats otherwise it would generate close to double the vanilla limits in segs and visplanes.

Map 15: This map comes from two unfinished D2TWID maps. The people who say it reminds them of shipyard are right on the money because the first map it comes from is sl-shipyard-original.wad and then second map is another sandy attempt, sl-sandy2.wad. This is probably the first map that leans into something that a lot of people don't think about with Doom 2 because they know the levels so well, which is Sandy was totally fine with mean pistol starts (Like Barrels of Fun) and making maps that play very differently if you do or don't go to certain places in certain orders. I am surprised by the amount of people that insist this map forces to to traverse a lot of damaging floor given there is exactly one small patch you ever need to cross to beat the level. I do regret not putting a switch on the ledge with the backpack to lower the lift to go backdown because I think a lot of people go up and then struggle with where to go from there. Secret exit is very much a Jim Flynn inspired affair and since it unlocks a map that's exclusively secret progression it felt appropriate to lock it behind a 90s era puzzle - although Jim Flynn had the courage to lock map progression behind that sort of stuff and not just secrets. There is a non-secret SSG right by the start, you can see it from the starting room. The late SSG is actually just there just in case someone missed it so I'm happy that it got used for its intended purpose. Map 31: This comes from 01.wad that was part of a collection of unfinished Plutonia maps that Breezeep gave me. Also a very Jim Flynn inspired affair.

Just going to start omitting any maps I don't have any fun fact stuff for. Map 12: This is the first scrap map where I have the original base still lying around to compare against. This map started off as one of Essel's D2TWID scraps entitled "sl-romero2.wad" (original base linked here). This scrap can also be found in the western section of D2TWID-LE map 29 where Xaser did his Xaser-y things with it. Unlike Alfonzo's scraps where I mostly just stitched together completed products and called it a day, this one probably has the most work done to transform it into the state that it is currently in, mostly because it was probably the least finished of all the scraps used.

Map 09: Definitely the most 90s map in the first batch. I wanted it give the same feeling I got playing through the more enjoyable parts of Maximum Doom while also not being too aggressively 90s. One of the most interesting things about a lot of 90s PWAD content is how differently they viewed the game than we do today. Reading through the text files of a lot of mid-90s PWADs is wonderful because you can really understand the ideas they were going for even when their maps are clearly nowhere near what they intended them to be. A lot of people treated Doom as more of this adventure puzzle game rather than a kinetic action experience. Inescapable death traps were fine because it was a dungeon crawl and why would the path in a dungeon be obvious? Of course they'd hide the way to get to the end of the dungeon in a door track switch, it's a dungeon after all, it's supposed to be secret. While never as obtuse as the PWAD stuff from that era, Sandy also took this sort of dungeon master approach to a lot of his maps that gets overlooked because people know them back and forth and there's plenty of available documentation on them. (Think of how weird it is that every key in The Citadel is a secret.) Map 10: AD can chime in if he has any fun facts.

Map 07: Hexagons are bestagons. The section behind the blue key door where you get the red key was fun to remove the various softlocks that could arise from hitting a switch through the floor or before a section had finished lowering. That section is also one of the best things about making maps with minimalist design that TWIDcore allows where sometimes you can just make a bunch of lowering floors without dealing with the hassle of more complex map geometry working with all the moving parts. Map 08: Unlike the other scrap co-author maps I didn't do much to finish this one. This map is just three unreleased Alfonzo maps from his smorgasbord project of small maps that I stitched together and then edited where necessary to fit with the Spain theme.

Map 05: Not too many fun facts for this one. This map was designed to be Sandy E2 city sandbox but filtered through McGee E1. I wish I still had the very first version of this map which was made around the same time Fonz made Map 04. It was hilariously small and cramped and I'm glad I scrapped it. On the music side: I had half-jokingly asked Jimmy if he could just take D_DOOM and make the D2ISO version of it. I really enjoyed what Jimmy came up with in El Destino Amargo, particularly how the start tricks you into thinking it's the original track before it transforms. Map 06: This map is actually dangerously close to vanilla visplane limits in a lot of places. The directional outdoor lighting is something that vanilla doom does not handle very well. Even though the ceiling is replaced with sky the directional lighting still generates a ton of visplanes on the sky ceiling which makes even basic compositions have far more than you'd expect. There are a few architectural elements such as this wall that exist to block visplanes, something that I'd typically have to do for a far more complex project like BTSX or TNT2, not something I'd thought I'd need to do in a TWID-lite. The midi for this map is named "Pseudowoodo" which, beyond being just a terrific title, is a reference to Will Wood. When originally brainstorming the soundtrack, Jimmy had posted Chemical Overreaction by Will Wood as song suggestion when we were trying to come up with a general sound to aim for. I eventually asked Jimmy if he could make a "Willy Woody" sounding song and he gave us this.

Map 03: The first of many Frankenstein maps that were cobbled together with parts of unfinished other maps. I think (I can't recall any other ones off the top of my head) this is the only one where the unfinished base was actually made for this project specifically. Alfonzo made the first few rooms of this map before abandoning it. I ended up taking some stuff from a D2TWID scrap I made and stitching it on to that and then filling in the bits that needed connecting. At one point I realized there were way too many consecutive "wall opens, hitscanners attack" ambushes and was going to cut some out but then decided to go the opposite direction and lean into it and more because that's the joy of making a D2ISO map. While playing D2INO Alfonzo had lamented how the mappers didn't lean into alternative interpretation of the map names, bringing up the train tracks usage of gantlet, which is where the map name comes from. Of course many will point out that there is nothing in this map that has to do with train tracks and I will say that if you squint really, really, really hard, the first couple of rooms are kind of like a station entrance going down to a train platform. Map 04: Alfonzo's lone solo effort was the 2nd map ever made for the project. The map is intended to be near the epicenter of an earthquake, the logic chain being: The Focus -> the focal point -> the epicenter. This is why the map has such a skewed and dilapidated construction.

I guess I'll contribute random fun facts and behind the scenes stuff for the project/maps from time to time as the club plays through: History: Way back in the day (it's amazing to believe that it's almost been a decade since 2014) when D2INO came out the dumb pun of Doom 2 in Spain Only popped into my head and I talked with Alfonzo about making it. This was right around the time when TWID mapping was still all the rage and we were really enjoying making maps in that style. When FDTWID was still going to be a thing (it might still be eventually) one of the ideas for the TNT side was for people to just make maps in their own style but 90s-ified to fit with all the random one off maps that exist in TNT which would be harder to emulate than the other stuff where you have multiple levels by an author to study and base on. So the idea was going to be that Alfonzo made half the maps and I made the other half both in our own styles but as filtered through 1996. Around six maps were made for the project at this time (1 by Alfonzo and 5 by me) at which point the project went on hold for about 5 years. Even though he only ended up contributing one full level prior to his exodus from doom, Alfonzo's influence is still heavily felt on the WAD. The bootleg knock off concept came from Fonz as well as a lot of the core aspects such as the poorly translated level titles, deciding that a song famously associated with and named after a *Portuguese* speaking nation should be the title track, and the overall idea of having the music sound the way it does. Around the start of 2019 after being asked about the project by people who were aware of it I asked Jimmy and AD if they wanted to work on it. I had originally hoped the final product would be more evenly split between the three of us map wise but when that ended up not being the case, and not wanting the megawad to be entirely me except for 4 maps, I looked to a ton of random scraps that I had been given by Essel, Breezeep, and Alfonzo for entirely different projects. After asking them if I could use them, I filled out the remaining maps using these scraps as a base (great quote from Essel upon release: "this release is fun for me because i have maps in it but i've never played any of them"). This ended up further feeding into the bootleg idea so it worked out. Map 01: When DTWID and D2TWID were being made one of the most discussed and attempted maps was the first. A big aspect that was talked about was how these maps had opening shots that showed various aspects of the engine's capabilities (varied floor heights, flats, lighting levels) and also how the levels taught you basic information. This map was designed with that in mind. For D2TWID map 01 Alfonzo had discussed the idea of having the player jump to a key to match Doom 2's more vertical and platformy aspect that it has over Doom 1. This is where the jump to the blue key came in. The required strafe jump was originally not going to be there but I didn't like how narrow it made the ground corridor so I widened it and headcannoned it to El Pedersen had made it to be a normal jump, but made it too wide, and since the one play tester they could afford to have on staff was able to strafe jump it, they never told him to fix it. Map 02: No real fun facts for this one.