Scypek2

I also like to take continuous play into account. On HMP, my maps should be fun and challenging from pistol start. On UV, my maps should be fun and challenging in a continuous playthrough and survivable on UV. And I don't mean survivable on a blind run.

I always found it annoying how Rise of the Triad's skill 1 and 2 names are nearly identical in tone, and so are skill 3 and 4 names. In every variant.

It sounds like they'd be used for Still Water and Flowing Water. FWATER does seem to flow diagonally, and is also slanted, compared to the pre-release nukage which is round and very static.

You may already know about the MISSILEMORE and MISSILEEVENMORE ZDoom actor flags, but you probably haven't heard of the MISSILEJUSTALITTLEBITORMAYBENOTATALLIMNOTSURE flag if you haven't been active on the modding scene in late 2009. The flag was made for compatibility with Soul Rampage Story, a long-awaited TC megawad using a custom executable. The megawad was going to be sold commercially, had (allegedly) over 50 levels, lots of custom assets and an elaborate storyline, and the flag was going to be used for the final boss battle against the protagonist's former best friend. The megawad was eventually cancelled in order to get a tax writeoff, and the whole incident was so infamous, the ZDoom devs ended up removing all references to the flag from the documentation.

I appreciate the effort, and it looks very nice for sure... but it would probably make a lot more sense if it scrolled horizontally, with a linedef action :P

That's pretty detailed! There's a lot of doom and doom-adjacent dreams I've had but never wrote down. A lot of the time I felt like they had a specific place in a supposedly very well-known megawad that doesn't exist in reality, sometimes my own, sometimes someone else's. A fair amount of MAP01s, episode-starting maps and episode ending maps, and also grandiose ending maps that are like, the the endingest of endings. A map that doesn't just conclude a megawad, but perhaps concludes every megawad ever. The REAL ending that follows up after their final maps. With extra intense and extra evil hell, not necessarily with an exceptionally high monster count, but in some kind of more abstract way. Maybe with the AlsoDieInRealLife MAPINFO flag enabled, I dunno. So that only the bravest players would attempt it.

I'd like to mention that giving roughly the same amount of each ammo pickup may seem like the most natural option, but in practice a box of shells lasts way longer and kills more stuff than a box of bullets, so it's pretty common for maps to end up with way too many shells (also because shotgunners are a very fun enemy to use...) and a deficit of bullets and rockets unless you make an effort to avoid it.

But then it would be single-colored, wouldn't it? There's more to making Doom-paletted textures than just throwing a truecolor photo into Slade's converter, and making light blue textures in Doom is especially tricky, but I'd take an imperfect colorful thing over yet another monochromatic orange or brown sky. @SatanaInArte's sky came out surprisingly well, all things considered! Probably thanks to the gray clouds taking up most of the space, and making the blue bits look okay even when they're flat.

The Lost Soul is pretty great in concept - you dodge it, then it can attack again from another direction! A hundred times more interesting than another boring fireball thrower. But in the end, it all comes down to balance... and while most Doom enemies are very good in that regard, Lost Souls always feel too damn bulky, given how well they can dodge and how tempting it is to place swarms of them. In Deadliest Dem(o(li)ti)on, I decided to nerf them down to 1 hp and also double their delay before charging, so that they aren't going to slam into you immediately after hitting a nearby wall, and fighting them with melee weapons actually becomes a good idea. They're still pretty deadly with their fast movement and high damage, but disposing of them is no longer a problem as long as you're paying attention. That seems to have fixed pretty much 100% of their issues, and now fighting them (and Pain Elementals, another nicely unique enemy) is a joy.

@head_cannon Your explanation was very clear, thanks! I do like making progression non-obvious now and then, but this seems like a very straightforward mistake - no real reason not to have that lift-disabling linedef slightly earlier, before you can trigger the ambushes and make the lift-fixing switch reachable! It will be fixed next release. I'm glad you enjoyed the levels so far! It's definitely been interesting to make.

Totally. That's how Batman Doom made its slot machines, and that's how I made the Hermor Bonus! (One day, I hope to actually complete the project it's made for...) One thing I haven't learned until much later is that it's only the sprite prefix that matters, not the animation frames, so potentially you can have a few visual variants of the same collectible item, or turn a non-animated item into an animated one... the latter really messed with my head when I saw the stimpack orbs in Rowdy Rudy 2!

Also, for ideas interesting enough to mention but not substantial enough to merit their own thread, we have a stupid mod idea and a good mod idea thread, whichever feels more appropriate! I do like the idea of going through original levels backwards - more interesting than a typical remake, that's for sure! I had a similar idea with The Other Moon, in which Phobos is the moon that gets swallowed to hell, so you land on Deimos first and traverse relatively un-corrupted areas until you reach Deimos Anomaly, which takes you to hell-consumed Phobos. I've been slowly working on it inbetween countless other projects and I'll definitely release it eventually.

It's probably worth a mention that I'm actively working on this mod, slowly but surely! I made a creepy E1M8 rework for the E2M1 slot, an action-packed non-linear E2M5 remake for E1M4, made some good progress with E2M4-inspired E1M5, and heavily reworked the E2M9-inspired E1M9, which turns the tedious pinky-punching into a genuine challenge.

Lol, nice. Someone should use that for progression in a hell-themed or otherwise surreal mapset. Maybe make the entry door key-locked for good measure, or openable with a consistent switch. Then put a copy of the next level's first room on the other side of the room to make it visually seamless.