Fonze

Colored lighting is cool and it is always awesome to see in wads, but I'm more a fan of brightened colored textures "lights" emulating the effect, as it tends to have more of a punchy contrast to it and allows for color pairing areas without becoming a mess of colors. The dulls between the brights accentuate the overall picture and it's something that I think would be more difficult to pull off with colored lighting. Which of course isn't to say it's bad or it's use would inhibit aesthetics, but people tend to like to have a reason to put in the extra effort for an effect they can do basically as well with easier methods. I suppose it also doesn't help that finding good settings for colored lights to not look janky or downright ugly is fiddly at best. I think the best use case for colored lighting is with small doodads emanating little light shafts across a darker/neutral scene, but again it's a small benefit to the aesthetics for a lot more effort, when it could be as easily argued that just having the "lights" themselves be a bright color and the "rays" it casts being brighter versions of the neutral textures looks as good anyway. That all said, I love to see color aesthetics and stuffs in any form! 😍

Based on the uselessness of the article to this context, the general ridiculousness of it, and particularly these two examples quoted above, I'm guessing this is a joke, in which case it's quite reductive of the entire design process and this discussion. Maybe it makes sense for a big studio designing a modern cover shooter, but for a bunch of hobbyists making a very different type of game this is kind of a horrible take. I've seen some good discussion on doors on this very forum, outside of this thread. Doors can be a huge detriment to a map's flow when done poorly to the point that I've heard some reasonably argue against their inclusion in maps (albeit mostly mp maps in this case). Doors can also lead to rote chokepoints, leading to a cover-based encounter that many players will find to be more bland than just running in. Doors can also be used as breadcrumbs or mini-objectives to serve in those fleeting moments between combat encounters, and often can cleanly cut off areas from one another, helping with player navigation and parsing of the map. They have so many uses and misuses that I think reducing the topic down to an attempt-at-a-joke-article who's main point is that the player wont notice a door anyway is like blindly charging away from a decent conversation with your fingers in your ears shouting random syllables in a vain effort to not hear any more of this clear idiocy. If done right, maybe players shouldn't notice each and every door; we do remember more things that we didn't like than things that were 'okay I guess,' but that doesn't make the decision of how to implement them any less important to the design process. Unless if you were posting that because it's not meant to be taken seriously and involves door discussion, in which case then lol.

I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do them. The most important thing is to recognize that they are a trope you can establish as a mapper, just like many other things, and that in some cases you may want them to remain consistent while in others you may want to change them up. There is an expectation of what a door should be/look like, common tropes we all use such as particular textures/flats, or widths/depths, or not having them rise into a blank sky, etc. which will be different for each person, but much as trying to discuss the metaphysical definition of a door irl, there will be too many specifics to nail it down to anything other than the general term "threshold." That's not to say the idea for the discussion is pointless tho, it is cool to read how others approach their door logic design!

It's not the quarks that make a thing, but the way they're arranged. Everything in this universe is relative and can be examined far too zoomed out or far too zoomed in to get a clear picture and context of what you're looking at. Particularly when we do not have the technology or current ability to go further. I don't see a paradox here, only limits of our technology and understanding. And maybe a bit of a bad assumption that zooming into a picture gives a clearer context than framing it contextually. Idk enough about quantum whatchamacallits and whosawhatsits to comment on that part of your topic, but I'm not sure I'd buy that it's a paradox to be taken seriously without some scientists in the field (appeal to authority, to be fair) making the claim. Still tho, interesting topic!

I hope everything is well for you AD or is able to get better soon ❤️

By the same token, we should also tell all newcomers to only use limit removing formats so all the extra fluff won't make things difficult for them too. Or maybe we recommend pure vanilla with all its painful limitations because if people cant make huge, open, overdetailed areas then thatll surely make the process easier on them. Your post was a hot take because it has some bad advice attached to good advice, cheapenig the value of the good advice and presenting it as something else. A large part of learning is making the process fun so people want to continue to come back and learn more. People don't learn to make doom maps so they can make just another doom map in a sea of them, they learn the hobby so they can make their doom map. Are there priorities on good stuff to learn first? Absolutely. Should one learn to walk before they run? Sure. But adding new textures isn't running, and some texture set creators don't even want mappers adding their textures individually to their wads anyway so those would be made as a standard map with an added resource pack. That's not running at all. Additionally, given it takes more effort to make stock textures look interesting when they are literally the most overused textures we have, to the point that we can tell flat walls that use them on a cursory glance, it could be as easily argued that using some textures with better baked-in lighting makes the process of actually making a decent-looking room easier. Horizontally banded textures, as an example, look great by themselves and there just aren't as many to work with in stock textures.

Yeah thats a silly notion lol... While you can do a lot with the base textures, indeed, I'm a huge fan of frankensteining them together to make new-ish ones, or to fit them to different sized walls than 64/128, it's undeniable that you can retexture the same room with custom assets and have it look ten times better than with stock textures. You're experienced enough to know that, why would you actively try to make things harder for newcomers? Stupid Bunny got it right, all other replies to this thread are going to be of as little usefulness as the one I've quoted.

As op states, stuff to relax with is subjective, and as such I have a wide range of games I play super casually. Currently Palworld is still consuming most of my gaming time. I tend to spend a lot of it chilling/building around the base, casually leveling up in the process, and breeding my pals. Sometimes I go out to walk my chillet and explororize/wreak havoc, or go mining for the billion ore I need lol. I also love to do Hollow Knight and A Link to the Past randos; randos are peak relaxation. I love metroidvanias/randos and side-scrolly fighting games, so those really fit the bill for something new-ish while still being familiar enough to not have to think much about playing well, just where to go next 😄 Helps also that both (and many other randos) are highly customizable to tailor the experience to your preference. Few other honorable mentions for being fun, chill times every once in a while: Snake Pass, for being the definition of a chill game, just is a bit short at 15 levels. Vampire Survivors, it gives you 30 minutes per round for the most part and you can bet that a good amount of that is spent relaxing watching the numbers go up lol Zelda 2/Oracle series, or any other zelda for that matter. Battle of Olympus, I love the music, the setting, the combat, and constant threat of each area as you explore the world's mazes of screens. I've played through it a ton of times over my life and at this point it's just super comfy. Crystalis for similar reasons. I guess any nostalgic game one is hugely familiar with could fit the bill here really.

This reminds me of one. Much as with your example, he picks locks with his bare hands and may well live in your walls, or at least you tend to hear clicking noises and his ultra-calm voice late at night on the other side of your bedroom door saying, "click out of one, nothing on two, click on three and we've dropped into a false set. Little counter rotation and we have this open."

There's a lot of good thoughts in here already, so I'll try to keep my reply short-ish. For starters, I'd like to bring up that it's good to think about the capabilities of players playing at lower difficulties. That is to say, maybe UV can require people to have a good 6th sense wrt sound effects and dodging turreted enemies behind them while facing off against a tough encounter in the other direction, but maybe for HMP/etc that turreted enemy group could be changed to something easier to kill, or less punishing to fail to dodge, as an example. Of course it's a bit time consuming to attempt to tackle the underlying issues that lead to different difficulty needs and it'll never be perfect, so to that end it can also sometimes work out to make the difficulty levels match you as the designer on keyboard-only or on mobile controls. I suppose that's the wonderful thing about art: we can do it however we like and every way is as valid as the others. Just have fun with it 😃 That said, I tend to design my maps with: UV is for me and the 0.5 people that replay my maps. Don't play the hardest a map has to offer then complain it's too hard. I've never not implemented interesting difficulty settings... use them! Lol HMP is much the same, but with more supplies and perhaps some fewer key monsters. Sometimes reworked encounters altogether. I think making maps play out differently on each difficulty is a fun way to combat the fomo that leads to the UV-or-bust mindset and a good mapping exercise to see how different mobs and encounters play out in the space one has designed, while not feeling like you're totally divorcing yourself from the encounter you've planned to that point. HNTR/ITYTD is either morer supplies and morest toned down resistance (less need for advanced tactics too) or it's a meme where I fill the map with rockets and pain elementals 😄🚀💥🫠 Alternatively, make HNTR/ITYTD the secret hard difficulty so people can satisfy that UV-or-bust mindset under the protection of half dmg and double ammo.

I see this was designed more for ffa, but I would love to play some duels in this at some point! Congrats on the release, crazy how much you got done in a couple months! ❤️