baja blast rd.

thanks for the playthrough and thorough notes! the compliment for Slime Girls means a lot (especially having noticed which other wads you've loved). :)

<3 Angles is a very good way to put it! As visually appealing as the designs are, the layouts are clearly thoughtful in how they allow enemies to behave. There are setups where like an enemy closet will be released in another room as part of a trap, and the monsters will fluidly path over into the room you are, rather than pooling up somewhere or being caught in geometry. Hints at designs being remade for that reason too. It's one of those reminders that very well thought-out gameplay is not just about setpieces and difficulty (and I say that as someone who has no problems playing wads like Abandon and the Stardates), and that easier-leaning gameplay can still be very well thought-out instead of being purely about satisfaction or player empowerment. I'm going to try to do more of these reviews. It's one of my favorite formats. The first three (Mutabor, Sunlust, and JPCP) were wads I had really wanted to write something about for a while, but my plan is to pick slightly more obscure wads from this point on.

Way 2 Many Dead Guys (Beta 1) by Urthar 5 Boom-format maps for Doom 2 Urthar is best known for his efforts in the style of Quake, but the unfinished W2MDG remains my favorite work of his. It was formative in my love of Shapes in Doom. Every map is built around its own shape motif, like looping semi-circles and triangles with beveled corners. The nonorthogonal architecture is designed to accommodate Doom's standard texture lengths, and this sometimes required multiple attempts* at areas to get right. Outside of that, the overall craftmanship is strong. Urthar gets how the stock textures work together, finding far-flung combinations and unusual recontextualizations that jell. The best are creative composites, like BROWN96 and BROWNGRN being combined to form a grimy dirt-caked wall. The texturing and detail, combined with the shaping, gives the set a sleek, futuristic sci-fi character. It evokes a modernized early Doom 2 starbase not so much through greatly increased detail as through amped-up stylization. Maps two to four, despite not being large, have an expansive character and wondrous mystery to them -- with secrets and dark side areas that lurk behind windows and gratings. The level design is consistently smart in how objectives are broadcasted, and in the subtle ways you can transform the environment. The creepy atmosphere hits the strongest in the dark sewers and empty back alleys -- or when odd shapes recur close-by at different scales like fractals, which creates the vibe that maybe the world was twisted into these forms. Fans of easier wads will appreciate how Urthar prefers using lots of Doom 1 popcorn enemies, and how Doom 2 enemies like revenants are treated with reverence, as if a group of three can be a mini-boss encounter. The abrupt hell finale is the clearest sign of unfinishedness, but even in this form W2MDG is very worth a play. *source of dev pics (what do you mean that "W2MDG" is cheating to lower word count I'd never do such a thing)

Good mapping is all about what you want to see in a map. Coming to a better understanding of that and just asking yourself "What do I want?" a bunch, whether about the map as a whole or individual areas in that map, can be pretty powerful. Play wads and pay attention to what you like. Other games can be good sources of inspiration too. Be careful about tips like "inescapable pits are bad" or "platforming is bad" if you've ever come across those, because avoiding specific people's pet peeves is not a good way of improving at mapping, and a lot of good ideas intersect with people's pet peeves. People who rant are not worth appealing to either; there's better demographics to appeal to than angry dudes on the internet, like cute girls. I don't know what stages of design these screenshots are taken or what exactly you're going for, but it seems like you have lighting in at least one of them, so maybe try playing up the lighting contrast more. Don't be shy about mixing darker (128 and below) and brighter (176+) in a room, with or without ramping up between dark and bright. You're in a wall in screenshot #4 -- I thought the sky was glitching out first. Those Doomguy hedges (?) are incredible. Guessing these areas are unfinished, but I like how some motifs seem to recur in different areas, like those 'pools' and storage areas. Having some design motifs that show up in various places, maybe with some variations between them, is pretty good for cohesion and sense of place.

Doom: The Middle Ages

Responding to the title question, not the poll question. This goes for longer mapsets in general, but I try to avoid burning out on them by being willing to take breaks and not force myself to play them day after day until I'm done with them. It isn't uncommon for me to take a weeks-long or even months-long break in the middle of playing a wad. I find that doesn't hurt my sense of progression or immersion at all. If anything it strengthens it because the mapset "lives" with me for a longer time. This doesn't happen because I get tired of wads. It's more just a fundamental rejection of playing constantly day after day as the "proper rhythm of playing". It's kind of like in making art, sometimes you take days or even weeks off from what you're working on because that's just...what you do, that's how it's meant to be worked on, the rhythm isn't "do this every day." Rushing through a set out of obligation has pretty much always been a bad experience for me. I try to avoid using playlists for myself because I find they encourage that "checking something off a list" mentality that I want to avoid. A couple recent notable examples: - Eviternity 2 (very good megawad obviously, still haven't played map30 or all the secret maps) - 10x10 Project (one of my favorite wads ever, I took a 3-month break after map07) - name redacted (the author and I have been friends for a few years, and I find her so wonderful that it kinda makes playing her wads in a timely fashion feel besides the point -- would rather talk to her :P)

Well technically because he's talking backwards, he could lead off (finish) with his whole life story up to that point. Unless he's saving it for a biography or something...

A lot of them. Barons can be good enemies. Was playing Mayhem 2016 map02 recently and this is one of my favorite uses of a baron. At the blue key, there's a baron ominously standing guard over it, which first off is a cool-looking setup. You drop down, and the main threat reveals itself to be not the barons, but two archviles meatwalled by a few spectres. (The spectres being partially invisible lets you see the archies more easily, so this is also a good example of one reason you might use spectres instead of regular pinkies beyond simply making them harder to see.) What the baron does is bully you around while you're trying to desperately take out the viles. While you're lobbing rockets at them, the baron is always either on your side somewhere out of view, forcing you to account for it and move around while trying to doing something that is very urgent -- or it's in your way and you have to try to aim your rockets around it. Some baron setups might run into the criticism "but two HKs would be more effective." But this fight makes a great illustration of another concept -- which is that Doom setups are not necessarily trying to maximize the "effectiveness" of threats in an abstract "make threat level go up" way. They are trying to create a dynamic that has character to it and is fun. The exact dynamic of one baron in this fight is that the baron pushes you around but you can keep slipping around it to focus on the archies. If there were two HKs instead, they would be far more overbearing about getting in your way, and you would start to be more inclined to simply kill one or both first. (With the rocket launcher, you can take out two HKs with four rockets compared to the barons' five -- so you would have an even bigger incentive.) That would turn the fight into something with a lot less individual character to it. It would still be a fun encounter, but it would be a much more common "try to kill everything quickly" race. Another neat thing about this setup is that the baron can be potshotted from below...once. Then it'll wander down to the ledge below you and become a real nuisance. And that is telegraphed from the area's architecture. This is cool because it's rare that a lock-in setup can get away with freely letting you attack an important enemy without entering first. Also I did try out this setup while trying to take out the baron first and that becomes much more dangerous, because the spectres and viles get to spill out of their chokepoint. It also eats up a lot more rockets. Not to mention usually requiring a vile dodge without looking at where there vile is.

What the point on grades not being important had me thinking: Something I've seen a bunch is critical convo that comes down to simply "this wad is better than that other wad." That includes tier lists that are shared without elaboration, and discussion about which wads are overrated or underrated, again without any elaboration. So, when you're talking in a server about wads, that feels like the only option right? Actual "criticism" (which requires more length) is too deep for a chat, right? I don't think so. Let's say you simply open up a wad, in-game or even in the editor, and go to one area of one map, and casually talk about something in that area -- whether it's a design of some kind, an encounter, the overall mood, or whatever. Anything that area makes you feel or think. If you do that, you're already so many steps ahead of pure "criticism as evaluation" in having something interesting to say. You don't have to make a larger point of some kind or tie it into a neatly structured essay. You can just...chat. (I also once jokingly suggested in a server that every tier list someone posted has to come up with a 1000-word essay. Then a few people actually did that -- which is why I try not to make requests of people lightly :P. They did it not with a neatly structured review or essay but with casual freeform support of their placements.) The other day we were talking about drawing rocks and how there are so many different ways to do it. It started out as a discussion of Dannebubinga's rock style, these single-row borders of uniformly sized rocks that have become one of the most popular rock-drawing styles in challenge wads (Ribbiks would also try that in some of Crumpets's maps, and people who have joined the community recently sometimes don't even realize it's Danne specifically that really popularized that style in these wads). Then I talked about AD_79's style and their penchant for these well crafted arches, where rocks on both sides build up to a highest point over a path of some kind... ... and also highlighting pseudo-3D by going out of their way to place a thing prop of some kind on top of the structure, which makes it look like the part above the arch has space up there even when it doesn't. Terminal Stages of Nostalgia shows that, but even as far back as Violence it was a thing. Then we discussed Darkwave0000's style and we got into so much, like how he kinda improvs with all the shapes, doesn't worry about whether they're pretty or ugly, even sometimes draws in ways that most people would consider sloppy. So many examples, but there's this bit in Speed of Doom map02 where a rock is a literal rectangle. You don't really notice in-game. This part of map06, because of how the ceiling architecture juts down, has these convex jagged shapes that would be taboo from many other authors, but it looks weird and surreal. We talked about map10 and how this vista has so much character to it. Rather than drawing this careful and tidy set of rocks like many other authors, Darkwave's loose, more improvised shapes evoke the wear and tear of a world falling apart. That fits what he's going for thematically with the familiar Mucus Flow acid-wear style look. And this isn't even played experience. Since I was chatting, I was casually opening up wads to -nomonsters through them and talk about design. Played experience is all of that, and then some. (I would happily talk about that too, but usually when I'm playing I don't stop to write notes.) Doom wads are a wondrous world of interesting things to say, do, and feel. I joked about writing a long essay about Wow.wad once, and then I outlined it for fun, and saw how shockingly reasonable that was -- even if chapters would have to be topics like "the history of lazy jokewads" and "an analysis of Doom's gore props" and "a description of Decay and El Juancho's UV-Max fight along with a literary analysis of the demo text file beef" and "the use of HOM as an intentional aesthetic choice" (50 Shades of Gray map06, along with Maribo's work, would make this one a genuinely interesting chapter to write -- but if I did it, I would want to write that chapter as a standalone piece to not tie their work to Wow.wad). Something I've felt is that as good as critical formats like reviews or other write-ups are, you open up a lot by simply allowing yourself to talk about wads somewhere, to say whatever is on your mind about one thing at the time. There's a lot of space for even more informal writing. Thinking about all the times I tried to participate in a DWMC and felt I didn't have the energy, but it was because I was trying to do "an overview" instead of just blabbing without structure. Blabbing without structure, like I'm doing now... I think the larger point is we shouldn't accidentally wall ourselves away from good things because we force ourselves to do it in a way that requires a lot of effort -- because we shy away from forms that allow us to do it very casually. This applies to a lot of things. It's one of those reasons that speedmapping or less-serious projects can be a good thing to turn to after working on something very ambitious.

good thread, rate my pyramid

the pain elemental is now officially named Zeromaster

map10 UV-Max in 4:34 aa10-434.zip

You should be able to find MBF21 in UDB's list of Game Configurations if it's not already showing up. Then set it up and use it like the other configurations. For someone who has done mapping in other formats like Boom, the MBF21 spec is worth looking at. With MBF21, you don't "have to" to use many features beyond what's in Boom in order to justify it being used. When I started using it, being able to set linedef flags to block land monsters and players specifically was already easily enough to justify it, before I started using other features. Even if you use no extra features, MBF21 fixes some bugs. and most modern source ports that support Boom also support MBF21. If you're new to mapping as a whole, it might make more sense to keep that link in mind as one resource of many, and play around with editing yourself, since you'll be learning mapping while working in MBF21, rather than learning MBF21 specifically. (Meaning you will be learning the underlying fundamentals that also apply to vanilla/Boom.) You also don't need to use DeHackEd yet if you don't want to modify enemies and weapons and such. (Clearing up a couple of facts from upthread: DECOHACK is something separate in that it is a very convenient way of generating DeHackEd files. It is not tied to MBF21 specifically; DECOHACK supports formats down to vanilla. And DSDA-Doom is a commonly targeted source port for wads, but most of that is through MBF21, not through the "DSDADoom UDMF" format.)

the fist is one of my favorite "hold the fire button and hope" weapons :>

some people give themselves rules for exactly where or how often they can save. like at major objectives (keys, weapons), or a certain amount of times per level. habits that are just "stop doing something" can be hard to break. "do something different instead" usually works more easily. so try seeing if rules like that work for you. be flexible with whatever you go with, because any rules will have levels that are a very poor fit for them.