El Inferno

Finally got to play this amazing map (yesterday, as of now), been meaning for a while after watching MtPain's review. I managed to forget absolutely all details from the video so it was a nice blind experience, I only wish I was a bit more awake for it (did a playtest of some 1 hour long sunder tribute map right before this, bad life decisions).

Really fascinated by these non-linear interconnected layouts like in this map, want to incorporate it more into my mapping and this map is a great case study for that.

During the playthrough I noticed how the map very often spirals around 'locally' by opening progression with walkover triggers organically. This works really well for the maps flow and doesn't seem, at least on the first glance very hard to replicate; of course, everybody does cool progression bits here and there occasionally but the systematic use of them here seems to do the trick. I imagine you'd draw some nice geometry in the editor and then figure out how to make these small loops everywhere.

More 'global' non-linearity of the map was also quite interesting, I noticed at least one place where monster closets were used differently depedning on which key-path you take (which seemed to lead to some bug in my playthrough, I think, a closet with cacos opened by they were facing away and blocked off by soundlines). There seemed to be a few branching points across the map and its interesting how it works together with all different parts opening up as you progress in different directions.

Very non-orthogonal geometry which still appears highly structured is also something I want to do more, most of the time I lean to one of the extremes: embrace the 64 unit grid or go full gridless free form style, and find it difficult to do something inbetween. The texture palette helps here of course with not having to worry about alignment along the skewed lines etc. I would probably opt to choose textures which are easy to work with if I attempt geometry like this.

I'm quite experienced with limited texture mapping so the fact that the map looks great while using only graytall, fireblu and doortrack doesn't surprise me as much. I usually limit myself to 5-10 textures when I start a map anyway, even if its not imposed by project rules or whatever.

Anyways, always more to learn in this craft.