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! ❤️

If you want zdoom, don't waste your time with dosbox. From cursory research it looks like chromebook is android and has the Google play store. Given that, buy Delta Touch. It has zdoom, lzdoom, gzdoom, zandronum (which supports cross-platform play!), prboom, crispy, choco, and retro... most of the major doom source ports. There is also a free gzdoom app iirc, but it uses an old version of gzdoom and delta touch is its successor. I guess you could also get the official bethesda port too if you want to support a multibillion dollar company over a solo indie dev and receive less functionality (and no zdoom) than delta offers. Oh also, I just reread the thread title. If you want to make doom mods, you need an editor, not zdoom. There are currently no editors that work on android.

There's a reason doomworld got rid of the newproject tag, and your posts here, despite not using it but very much echoing its sentiments, perfectly exemplify why: it's toxic. You don't have to in an overt effort to stir up a shit storm. I think the direction this thread has taken on all sides is a shame, but maybe it's a learning experience all around.

I like the "can it run doom" meme, but there is definitely a difference between that quite interesting question and the unfortunately more accurate "can it display doom," low-effort, disingenuous, clickbait garbage that people try to pass off as the former.

Very cool maps! Was thinking a couple of these may be cool to dm on til I recognized the final one lol. It was cool to see the sp progression added to the remixed orbiter(?) here. Maybe it has to do with playing on mobile here, but I could have done with a bit more ammo. Finished all with at least some to spare in each map but also heavily used infighting to get through. I really liked the enemy and arsenal changes; they complimented the flow of the maps and the punchy encounters nicely, as well as cleanup afterwards. I liked the teeth that many of the trap/encounters had, although being on mobile I def nope'd out of a couple, which may have made them hit a bit softer and more chaotically for me. Much as I do like what I suppose others may consider "dick-ish" design, I did feel the tp'ing rev in map06 was a bit on the harsh side lol, especially considering the rng between him deciding to fire vs move and tp, which also may be followed by another immediate attack within punching distance as he tp's just behind the player. That's not to say I found it over the top though. Given the context it appears in within a small map and at a time the player is fairly well equipped/armored, a smack or two from a rev isn't too big a deal... but I did bat an eye to it as I laughed at my sudden unforeseeable death there. The only bug I noticed was with the final mancubus (paired with an av) in map06. It seems the mancubus gets stuck if he teleports instead of the av. I played in gzdoom; perhaps that's not an issue in other ports. Good maps, fun times 😄❤️

Fun topic, I'll 🤓 First you mention: Either all wads or no pwads are canon. If our dark lord and savior Romero is to be believed, all wads are canon. Thus all answers can be correct. That said, I tend to base my headcanon on the iwads and treat pwads as fair interpretation, also canonical events. Are generals warlords? If you're asking merely if they (smm and siegecow) are in leadership positions, then yes, I believe doom 1 explicitly states that. But I guess hell is as much ancient China as it is modern US (or insert your preferred country here, they all fit). Even companies have leadership that controls land. Hell is a society of some sort and has a hierarchical structure, but idk that comparisons to real world nations/groups is without its issues. I would say yes, the one we kill in doom 2 is in a different location to the one in plu and the one in tnt, and icons cant move. Another good question would be if it is more of an object than a creature if we consider parallels to narrow ai 🤔🤓 although I suppose the differentiating criteria of "it doesn't move" is fairly flimsy and that would also open the question to the rest of the roster, and perhaps doomguy himself. Maybe the icon is just a vessel for the overarching leader of hell to act through from afar, like how sauron leads his armies in lotr. This is a big question on its own and your paragraph asks a thousand more. It's a hard group to answer... I suppose in the first place, it's arguable if a hell leader even exists. Maybe some lucifer-esk entity exists somewhere and acts as sauron, from afar, but the concept/setting of hell itself is also presented as much of a character as doomguy. The messages at the end of the episodes don't read "the moodemon/smm/lucifer/icon/healer/etc" didn't play fair, it says "hell didn't play fair." Hell in this sense is perhaps more a force of nature than an entity, or maybe some cosmic cthulu mythos being shaping its dimension to its whim, but probably just a force of nature. Perhaps the very nature of the dimension itself, naturally bleeding over where it finds gaps to fit through. Who knows lol. I do think doomguy died at the end of e1m8, which would point towards the new dimension being actually hell, though I don't consider it to be a christian hell. More like a general hell. Doom describes the demons as interdimensional, but that doesn't mean they come from the only other dimension around. There could be other dimensions, it just so happened that teleporting technology uncovered this one, which also coincidentally seems to be where souls of bad humans go, at least if we take the in-game lore at face value. It could be argued that humans in-lore just mistakenly interpreted the new dimension as hell, being the closest comparison they knew, or maybe the entity/nature behind hell just shapes itself to its victims' fears. Presumably to amass more soldiers and a larger area of influence. The age old "number go up" motivation 😋 Or maybe they just want into our dimension so bad that they've been waiting for such an opportunity. Alternatively, maybe it's just the nature of the dimension to corrupt and expand. Maybe the fighting is not because of hell doing its natural thing, but because of our desire to fight change, in this case to not become hellspawn. Maybe being a hellspawn wouldn't be so bad 😋

Counter argument: imagine pain elemental with its little huggy imp abomination arms that likes hugs and making new friends and floating to space and literally doesn't have the capacity to hurt an innocent person 😍🥰

D2m1 would also be map01. Just felt the differentiation between doom 2 map01, tnt map01, and plu map01 would be helpful. I guess given I labeled tnt map01 as tnt01, I should have followed my own convention and labeled doom 2's as d201, or swapped tnt01 to tntm1 and plu01 to plum1, but that also seems confusing 🤔

Plu01 and tnt01 are both top tier for me, for many reasons others have mentioned. Chaingunner-archvile combo turrets are amazing, hugely innovative tricks that have a lot of underutilized potential, and tnt01's early berserk just makes for a fun, silly level to play. E3m1 takes the next spot for me. I felt super clever as a kid infighting the cacos and imps, then rushing to the shotgun for some better weaponry to come back with while they fought it out. The rest of the map is fairly 1-dimensional but not offensively so, and it also gives e3m9 room to build off of and subvert expecations, which made for a really cool reveal when it was new. Also, rocket launcher map 1 let's go lol. E2m1 comes in my 4th spot, starting off the episode with a plasma gun that is actually useful in the level you found it in is a very strong opener for a set and a good time in general. E4m1 is a good map, and gives rockets! But I'm just not a fan of the way ammo was placed in it. I guess d2m1 can take 6th spot for me given all the dwango maps that have cloned it, but better, though I absolutely hate dm'ing on the original. Finally, e1m1 is a cool level in its own right and teaches some important aspects of the game, but it's a little too close to a tutorial for my liking. It also forms the foundation for more advanced maps to build off of, so it makes sense that other m1's would have a bit more innovation in them.

Been going through baba is you again since my new phone reset all my progress. Haven't finished new adventures yet but figured I'd go through the base game and museum first since I've played through those before and don't remember all the levels. I just finished the base game again, sad at my title screen now with the knowledge of what I've done, but what a joy to replay! Very few games can make me cackle like a madman in pure amusement, but baba the little cute eldrich horror is def one of them.

I'm sure early 2000's toxic masculinity/homophobia also has nothing to do with the way things are presented in that meme too. Pure coincidence.