Nine Inch Heels

Hey all, it's been a little while! I hope everybody has been well since I was last active here *hugs* I figured I'd make a blog post rambling and sharing one of the things I've been up to lately.
 
I recently have been learning to make maps for a fun little platformer called Frog Hop (made by an indie dev that also made a very fun metroidvania I speedrun now), where you play as a 🐸 doing frog things such as hopping, jumping, and using your tongue as a weapon. It's very similar to Mario but if frog instead. You move slower on the ground than in the air, so you want to hop a lot, and there are triggers, switches, conveyor belts, movable blocks, little nodes you can lick to bounce/swing/slingshot off of, difficulty flags for objects (similar to doom), objects can be 'tied' with other objects to move/etc with them, etc. There are also no limits on map size, number of maps per world (level), complexity, object limit, and lots of other stuff. Needless to say, lots of freedom in map design and I like that.
 
I've always liked watching kaizo (and non-kaizo) mario hack videos but I've never made maps for a platformer before so it's been a fun learning experience so far! I just finished my third map minus some small finishing touches, so I'm starting to figure some things out and have some tricks I've picked up on, but I also know I'm only scratching the surface and have so much more to learn. Anyway, rambling aside, here are some screenies and... more light ramblings!

Myfirstfroghopmap.wad.world: Jungle Jumpies
 

 
An idea of how much is shown on the screen in game:
 

 
Other than chosing a color palate, I have no idea how to do aesthetics for 2d maps, or for doom maps either 🤓 so eventually I gave up and tried to make it look nice in the editor since that's what I was looking at the whole time. I'm not sure how well it translates over to the gameplay side of things but I'm hoping I keep it not so busy that it isn't clear what is a background block and what is a foreground block. I wanted something kaizo-light, small, and simple for my first map (all the nodes do different things depending on their color) and I think this did okay for that. It is fairly easy with a couple tricky spots, tons of checkpoints because yes please and even has a little speedrun skip accidentally built in at the start lol. For my next maps, I took the luxury of being able to place checkpoints everywhere and totally neglected it 🙃
 
 
My second map: Frantic Fugues
 

 
I wanted at first to make a more traditional kaizo-ish level with bouncing on enemies and stuffs in 3 parts, with this being the first one. For this, I started experimenting with making diverging paths so each would lead to a different door I could use to tie into a separate map for each difficulty, so I wouldn't have any problems with tiles being immovable between them. I also wanted to make easy difficulty an autoscroller if the player wanted it to be, and in the process quite liked the interaction with one of the enemies that flies off horizontally at a fast speed and having the player go that same speed just in front of them, like a chase scene, which made this map very long/big. I also made a 2nd, more casual way to play the map on each difficulty in case the player wants to explororize and doesn't want to jump on enemies' heads the whole time. That influenced heavily the rest of the design for medium and hard and thus this map is not at all the kaizo thing I had originally envisioned, but instead an easy-going, layered experienced that encourages players to make their own fun and I think that's pretty cool! Even if I didn't place any checkpoints in the map 😈
 
On a dev note, I made a large-scale, quite ugly grid tile layer to use during this map to make lining up/measuring jumps and distance easier, especially while in game, which helped a ton, and I did different things with the aesthetics, trying to envision some light source from the top right. Jury's still out on that one but given there was so much I think it ties itself together(?); it was cool to try. I also made a really silly short story for it involving aliens because why not 🤪
Here's a video to show what it looks like in game:
 
 
 
My third map: Red Velvet Cake Land 
 

 
This one is kinda the 2nd part to go with the previous map. I'm not sure if I'll stitch them together or not at this point given the difficulty spike between them but for now with this being standalone I made starting and ending maps to match the previous and next ones. I also made it so each difficulty level gets moved to its own separate map, so I have total freedom to tune them, cut parts out, add stuff in, etc, as I wish. I really liked the color palate I chose for this map, largely inspired by doom's red turning brown as it gets darker, and it made me think of red velvet cake. But you can't have cake without icing and it took a while to figure out how to get the icing right. Eventually I found out that in Tiled, you can give tile layers offsets, so I made a couple new tile layers and gave them offsets, which allowed me to make the phat icing look without it looking super blocky like the clouds in the previous map. I didn't go crazy with lighting in this map and I def could have done more with the icing to really smooth things out since I made the 2 offset layers at different times and I could prolly do better with more foresight going into it, but I think the effect and overall aesthetics turned out pretty decent! This map makes me hungry now and I like that 🤤
 
I got the kaizo feeling down more for this one which seems to transfer well to this game. Controls are tight and responsive so it meshes well and there is a lot of room for creativity in map design and object/player interactions. I put in a setup early on where you guide an enemy projectile through a set of doors by jumping alternating on 2 big crabs 3 times each while hitting a green switch above/between them each time you pass it in order to cycle open the doors below you which let that projectile pass through so you can bounce on it on the other side to reach the next area, which is very much something I saw in a mario hack somewhere, so little homage there.
 
Anyway, thought these would be fun to share here since I haven't posted in a while and this community has so many mappers in it; it would be cool to hear ppl's opinions! If there's interest, I'll post more level pics as I make them 🐸 

Alright gather round folks for mapping class. When you are having trouble getting started on a map, think of something you know your map will contain and then create it. 
 
 
 
I'll quote Ernest Hemingway who once said, of writing, "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
 
It is sometimes useful to try to apply quotes from one context to another, so let's give it a try here. 
 
"All you have to do is make one true zombieman spam teleport battery. Create the truest zombieman spam teleport battery that you know." 
 
Profound af. 
 
Thanks for reading.

For the first time in my mapping career, I've finally hit the hard linedef limit

I now know Gazebo's pain ;_;

My little kitten died just over 12 hours ago. I miss that little purr so much already. It’s crazy how fast 13 years has gone by.. RIP my small furry friend.
 
 

hmm my doom energy sapped again; net bounty: three new unfinished maps, about twenty new unfinished midis lol

anyway i wrote this song https://www.patreon.com/posts/legs-for-memory-67824985

Good news kids, I don't have the nasty bug after all. It's been almost a week since my old man tested positive and I still haven't shown any signs of having it myself, so I thought it was best to test myself anyways just to make sure I wasn't asymptomatic since that would still leave me liable to infect other people. So whatever Dad had was simply too pissweak to penetrate my fully-vaxxed system. Huzzah!
 

that does it. drawing myself a nice warm bath of COMP01

My old man's got COVID-19. The good news is he's been fully-vaccinated/boosted and at worse it has given him is a head-cold. The bad news is he took a sip out of my coffee before his RAP Test came back positive...
 
Welp, that's two years of successfully avoiding it down the drain. Fortunately, I'm also fully-vaxxed/boosted and if both my grandfather and now my father have gotten it after being fully vaxxed and didn't find themselves absolutely crippled by it or worse, then I'm fairly certain it'll be the same deal for me. I'm not terrified that it'll kill me like I was back in 2020.
 
Good thing I work from home, eh? :^P

When people be posting about "vanilla" DOOM lately...

I've been drawn into a game of Monsterverse against my will. My son is Godzilla, my nephew is Ghidorah, and my niece is Mothra. I've been informed that I am Biollante and that I will be defeated.
 
These kids have no idea what they've awakened.

Releasing Protosis: https://doomshack.org/uploads/protosis.zip
 
Not really worthy of a thread I guess, I didn't like the direction Liberosis was taking so basically decided to restart it with a fresh slate and just package up these 2 little maps as the prototype. Map02 pretty much untested, hopefully there are no major problems. Yes I know there are graphical glitches and maybe some other quirks. Limit removing, CL2, has a dehacked in the wad. VPOs for sure, probable medusas in Dosbox, but any other port should work fine.
 
Enjoy
 

@The Ultimate DooMer playing through Fragport for review and this is a notice that "Crystal Maze" is frikkin' awesome, thank you for this

https://zan-zan-zawa-veia.itch.io/dont-wanna-drive-anywhere-but-snows-in-the-way
brief silly detour
are you gamer enough to get 200 pts

Hello.
 
I'll be honest with all of you. The days at the last year, especially at the last 4 months has been pretty bad.
My mom was diagnosed with a non-terminal cancer found at the thyroid zone. But, the good news is that the damn tumor was removed successfully and, my mom is recovering slowly.
So yeah, she's fine and she feels much better after 4-5 months of being sad, almost depressed. Anyway, we are more relieved after the surgery.
 
Also, last year can go to hell. I felt bad on the inside, at the edge of depression.
It was bad news back to back to back...my grandpa's death in the middle of the year, my mom's cancer found in september...relatives also have cancer...
 
Anyway, I hope that this year gets better and forget the motherfucking disaster that the last year were.

long as the Swan stream flows, long as the sun-flower blows, you can read my review of OTTAWAU.WAD ver 0.9 by Jean-Serge Gagnon, Peter Naus, and Daniel J. Deighan.

A short status update to kick off 2022. The last few weeks of my life have been a waking Nightmare! thanks to an unfortunate bout of illness. I had to skip a month and a half of DWMC, but I'm planning on returning in February.
 
As of right now, I'm still working on Atonement: Episode 5. It's been going slow because I've started and scrapped quite a few maps at this point. They're not bad maps or anything, I just want to make the absolute most out of the 10 maps I have left. I'm also planning on releasing a few more standalone maps that will iterate on the Herschel Spaceport map that I released a while back. Herschel Spaceport is also getting an update soon and will go live on idgames. I'm just about done with the Interception II update as well, so I'm pushing it to idgames as a file update sometime this weekend.
 
In December, I finished doing a file update for Interception, fixing many issues such as the infamous soft-locks on MAP19 and 29, the missing Hell Knight in MAP09, the stuck Hell Knight in MAP02, and a few more small fixes all around. All the changes and bug fixes are noted in the text file. Anything that prevented 100% completion or crashed the game was fixed, which leaves some other non-vital quirks present (such as the damaging rocks in MAP13). This helps maintain demo compatibility, although the changes will break demos for the maps that had to be altered (MAP02, MAP09, MAP15, MAP19, and MAP29). I apologize for the inconvenience, but luckily for demo enthusiasts, the original version of the wad is preserved on Doomshack. The file update has been live on idgames since December, so go ahead and update your intercep.wad if you are intrigued.
 
This year, I'm going to really make an effort to release better and more creative Doom content. Here are a few ways that I'm going to push myself as a Doomer in 2022:
Upload more Doom videos on YouTube. Whether they be wad showcases in DOSBox or more structured essay-type videos, I want to make sure my channel isn't just sitting there collecting dust. Push for more memorable combat setpieces. During the Interception II Megawad Club thread, I noticed that more people took notice of the setting of my maps than the combat. I think that I'm a little rusty at creating engaging, unique, and memorable combat setpieces, so I'll be spending a large portion of my 2022 mapping figuring that out. More detail. My maps don't have the most compelling visual language for the modern Doom age, so I'm thinking that I should spend some time practicing detailing. This means coming up with creative, visually-striking maps on a regular basis. For me, the hardest part is always coming up with the details, so I'll have to be more creative rendering real environments in a game engine from nearly three decades ago. Steadier pacing. I want a steady series of wad releases, a decent output in the Megawad Club threads, and a decent stream of YouTube videos on my channel. That's a lot to chew on as one human being, but I think figuring out this balance will really just be a matter of practice. Or so I'm hoping, since it will be my main challenge as a creator going forward.

My best client just accepted my business proposal to work with them on a more full-time basis. What a brilliant start to the new year!

it's time to take a look at another ZDoom WAD that has been deprecated by some seventeen years of source port changes. here is my review of Blackness (DSV 2) by @Kaiser, including further loveletters to Doom 64. If you want to check this hub out - using ZDoom v1.22 - then you'll probably need to run it in a compatibility mode. You'll also have to make a very tiny alteration to the PWAD using SLADE.

i dont take down the xmas decorations 'til the new year becomes browseable on rateyourmusic

today is another twofer - here is my review of Blind Alley X., "Forlorn", by @Searcher, which is very much like past levels in some aspects (mainly the layout) and very much unlike in others (chiefly combat).

always expect the unexpected, my review of Blind Alley V., "Necrophobia" by @Searcher, a pretty kewl pwad that's closer to modern stylings than any of the Blind Alley series to have gone before

I have graduated to Old Man. Happy 30th to me. 🎂
 
 
In case you missed it, my mapset JENESIS (in its final release form) turned 10 years old as of two days ago - my first foray into Doom single-player mapping and a turning point in my Doom mapping career.
 
...I really missed an opportunity to put out a 10th anniversary edition and call it "Tenesis", didn't I.
 
Maybe for the 15th anniversary then. I could call it "JENES15"... no. Bad Jimmy.
 
 
Here's to another 30 years of... me being alive, most likely!
 

(From "Beezleboat" by Muumi, map12 of Boaty McBoatwad.)
 
It's alive and it's aboat.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/56162516
2 mins of remembering im a musician