lunchlunch

Imitation is the unironic-est form of flattery. Little Italo is a tribute wad featuring ten maps each from @raddicted and myself. Generally these maps are a little shorter or easier than the original's, but don't expect a beginner-friendly wad... these are still challenge maps directly inspired by Italo Doom's general philosophy. Odd-numbered maps authored by raddicted Even-numbered maps authored by lunchlunch Screenshots - Many thanks to our playtesters: @Arbys550, @knifeworld, @RedBoule, @suzerduzer, @Xulgonoth, @besus, and @Meowgi Download - LittleItaloRC1.zip

I'm only halfway through MAP02 but I'm enjoying this a lot, you've come a long way in the time since I played that early wad of yours. It's a rewarding evolution to follow, good work.

Well done

This is very much my cup of tea, thank you.

You just eat them, silly :)

Hard to say if I was waking or dreaming but when I started ketamine treatments I'd have visions of floating around vistas of Sunder-like structures fractalizing and expanding, covered in specific stock textures. It made me realize I was spending too much damn time in Doombuilder but it influenced my mapping quite a bit at any rate.

I think 99% of the time, trolls don't belong in DOOM. In Kaizo Super Mario World ROM hacks it can be hilarious but that's only because those levels only take 30-60 seconds to complete. The setback for getting trolled is a matter of seconds. The average DOOM map is between 7-10 minutes, and even with frequent saves, your setback is much longer. The other thing is that in kaizo, there's only so many things happening onscreen at one time so it's immediately clear when you've been trolled and what the troll is. In DOOM it's often not clear that you've been trolled, the cause and effect is not as clearcut, it takes more trial and error to see exactly what went wrong and why. Then by the time you realize it was an intentional troll, not a mapping error, not a puzzle you misunderstood, not a fight you had any chance of beating, the "troll" has lost any chance of being humorous and is just an annoyance, if not a reason to abandon the wad entirely.

From a utilitarian POV, making and playing mods is probably a huge waste of time. For the majority of people, I don't think learning to use editors for thirty-year-old computer games will prove a "useful" (read: marketable) skill. But that's just the case with art. Spending time making it is usually not particularly "useful," it's just the best way I know of to have fun. I want to do nothing more with my life than draw, sculpt, write, customize, mod, create according to my heart's every whimsy. The only way to be "useful" with your artistic skills is marketing- drawing business logos, composing commercial jingles, 3D-modeling environments for military training exercises, or obtaining a creative-writing degree just to pen HR-culture empty-virtue BS for a company's social media page... In making art "useful," it's bastardized to the point that it doesn't resemble what we learned these skills for in the first place. For me, art is the joy of living, any job or career is just a way to support myself so I can while away the hours with my own creative passions. For most artists, we're not going to make a living from people buying our artwork, our books, our albums, or (more relevantly) getting hired on as full-time level designers somewhere. Usefulness, the ability to be productive, I don't think is really the point with art. Art hobbies might even be anti-productivity. People can dress up the benefits of art in many ways- it's "culturally enriching," it "allows for therapeutic reflection," whatever, but at the end of the day art is really just a form of escapism for both the artist and the audience. Schopenhauer believed that life is entirely suffering, but he valued art because it allows one to momentarily forget oneself. I've gotten way off-track from OP's topic but I wanted to humor this rambling thought on art's usefulness. I no longer know if I actually believe the things I say or if I'm just spitballing hypothetical ululations for my irony-poisoned contrarianism, but at this moment I feel that art itself is just pointless fun, a masturbatory, nihilistic exercise, and I would have it no other way.

@TeK (⌐■_■)About Norwitch Lane's secret, you should just be able to walk over the teleporter pad on the left side of your screenshot unless it somehow broke in the two years since I completed it. Edit- Just downloaded the latest version and tested it, I had no issues using the teleporter.

Jaded is now finalized on idgames

Great maps, I had fun playtesting

This is my favorite community project I've ever taken part in, I love revisiting it every year. Great job e/vr/ybody : )

@TheMagicMushroomMan The first time I saw The Devils was the censored version. Every time after that I've seen the uncut version, which adds the full Rape Of Christ sequence as well as the bone masturbation scene you're alluding to. It's definitely nowhere near three hours long though, if there ever was a cut around that length I imagine it was just a workprint. Ever since I first saw it like seven years ago I've wanted an official blu ray release but I don't think we'll ever get it. WB still owns the rights and they've wanted to bury it ever since it came out. I do have a decently wellmade bootleg Blu Ray copy of it though and that's good enough for me. Edit- I actually like the cheap props. The campy outrageousness mixed with serious performances and heavy themes is a vibe that only exists to the same extent in one other movie, and it actually came out the same year: A Clockwork Orange

I'll go with directors who are acclaimed but I find to be boring, hacky, or overrated- Nolan, Bresson, Cassavettes, Wong Kar-wai, Refn, Spielberg, and half of Tarkovsky's output. @TheMagicMushroomMan The Devils is top five for me, it's a perfect movie. Witchfinder General is pretty boring but if you're in the mood for a similar movie that's actually good, check out Witchhammer (1970). Alternatively, there is Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) which is based on the same historical event as The Devils.

@LadyMistDragon Ha, I own the Vinegar Syndrome release of Pigs aka Daddy's Deadly Darling (it was a blind buy). I used to try trading it away to users on r/boutiqueblurays but no one in their right minds has a desire for a physical copy of friggin' Pigs.

Don't Turn Your Back On The City

Some of my favorite pieces of art I've ever made (right next to The 10x10 Project) Edit in case someone gets butthurt because they're missing the satire-

My first and third maps I ever made. Not sure whatever happened to TestingMAP02.wad or if it was ever finished. Both are UDMF format, haven't made changes to them since their original conception in the first half of 2020. Haven't even played them all the way through since then, any time I've had a hankering to, I get a couple minutes in and get irritated by the mapping naivete present and then quit them. Edit- TestingMAP03.wad is in mapslot 04 for some reason

Crystal Castles is my favorite music artist of all time. For the last couple years, about once a month I've obsessively Googled to see if anyone has suddenly created a CC MIDI that I can use in a DOOM map. So I'm jealous of the project haha. I've only played a short bit of it and I've liked the gameplay, I have no problems on that front. However, I think that for making a proper tribute to Crystal Castles, you've gotta get in touch with a MIDI composer to commission them to making full versions of the songs with more instruments than just the stripped down piano versions that are currently in the wad. These are noisy dance songs, simplistic piano renditions can't do them justice. I'm assuming you took 'Vanished' from the Online Sequencer version, I've been aware of that version for a long time but have never used it because it's only the first ten seconds of the song on loop! Sure, Vanished is fairly repetitive, but there's more to it than that! The other thing about the MIDIs is they're so quiet that even with the music volume cranked all the way up, you can't even hear it over the sound of slaughter combat. To do this project right, I really really really have to urge you to do whatever you gotta do to get a MIDI composer to sequence these songs the right way. I can't let myself play it until then.

For me, I want to play a wad that has the mapper's soul in it, something that took a lot of time and effort. As far as Keagan's sentiment goes, I agree with the premise but not the conclusion. Mappers (and artists in general) should create something that is true to their individuality, which will sometimes mean taking risks and doing things a little more esoterically. But just because an author is doing something their own way does not make it impenetrable against criticism. Let's take movies as an example. I don't particularly love Ari Aster or Robert Eggers' work, but I will go see everything they make because I want to support Hollywood putting money into making mainstream auteur works. I'm glad filmmakers like Tarantino or Wes Anderson are able to make the movies they want to make. That doesn't mean though that just because their work is personal/individualistic that it can't be bad. Asteroid City is a directionless mess with almost nothing to say, overly reliant on its meta narrative device that Anderson has already done in his last several movies. All this is to say, if my criticism of your map is that its labyrinthine to the point of being unnavigable, "Well I wanted it to be that way" is a trite way to respond as the mapper. In this example, I'm not reductively suggesting that anything mazey is bad, but that a quality like that can get out of hand, if there's no unique landmarks to orient myself around, progression is unclear, et cetera et cetera. So be true to yourself as a mapper/artist but be aware that you still have to entertain and respect the audience to some extent.

I was just gonna DM this to you but figured I might as well bump the thread- Early Mass (Commentary) Edit: just editing my comment to mention that this was very enjoyable, looking forward to what else you make

Probably something from HR3 🙃

Glad to inspire another mapper, here's an FDA I like your use of the extra textures from Jaded, it's good to see them get some use. I played the first map and I do have a good bit of feedback for you. I'm going to hazard a guess that you're new to mapping because there's a fair share of problems that you learn to avoid pretty quickly. There's also plenty to admire though, your monster placements are generally chesslike, and the atmosphere is strong. -First area: Kind of a slow start so I skipped these enemies on my second life. Think about the fact that most players will die in your map at least once and will have to replay the whole thing from the beginning. Ask yourself, is this a strong/fun introduction to my map and is worth playing over and over? In this case, I think plinking away with the pistol at monsters that are all spread out is a chore that should just be skipped. -Crypt: You step into the crypt and it silently teleports you to the interior. If you shoot or punch while in this opening room, all of the crypt enemies wake up and crowd the space below preventing the player from dropping down. Use sound blocking linedefs around the pit so they can't hear you until you drop down. After doing something like this, always playtest it again and make sure it works and can't break. There's a room in the crypt with some perched revenants and imps against the walls. These should pop up after the player steps into the room, or else a player is just going to shoot them from the doorway like I did. In general, you should really try to break your own fights in playtesting to make sure there's not unintended ways to beat or cheat your fight. Most fights in the map can be cheesed. The final fight in the crypt is really fun, I was thrown off on whether to target the PE or the imps first, this is an example of the chesslike monster placement I mentioned before. -RL fight: Don't dump a bunch of enemies into a big open flat space where the player has to just circle strafe around them, that's boring. Close in your environment more, put up more cover, have higher and lower parts of the battlefield with steps in strategic places that offer different routes to the player. Use turreted enemies around the edges of a fight to deter camping or circle strafing on autopilot. The other problem I had with this fight is that the only cover here is the crypt. The tombstones are too low to block rev missiles and are too close to each other anyways to really pivot around them at top speed. The trees, all objects actually, block the player but they do not block projectiles (Unless you are playing in GZDOOM. DO NOT PLAYTEST IN GZDOOM). Oh by the way, I like the headstone secret. -Red key fight: This fight's nice, you have the area closed in so there's a more interesting fight dynamic here than just circle strafing. Closed in between different types of enemies has the player problem-solve on their feet, so this is another fight I enjoyed. Still, it's pretty easy to just run past the revs and camp everything out from the front of the church. -Church: The baron turning into an archvile was clever, that really caught me offguard, nice touch. The bleachers of revenants do not need to have new revenants constantly teleporting in to replenish dead revenants. These guys are threatening enough and looping all the way around the church just to pump a few rockets at a time at them is really tedious. You'll notice I did not bother killing them in my demo. I realized the second time I played this fight that you can just run right out the front door. Don't let the player do that. Though, I didn't really feel too bad about it because the pews restrict movement in the church in a way that doesn't quite feel fair when you're trying to evade massive balls of rev missiles. Maybe a couple rows of pews in the front and back could be removed. As a last note, the pulpit's linedefs should be marked impassable. As a general rule, anytime you have DOOMcute, block it off, it's really awkward and immersion-breaking to step on top of it or bounce over it. I plan to play the rest of these at some point, and I might record videos with commentary for you since it's easier to address issues on the fly, and you'll be able to see what I'm talking about at the same time. Oh, actually, one last thing- I didn't notice it in this map but something I noticed in your screenshots is that your ceilings are kind of ugly. It's something some people might consider nitpicky but it's something that I definitely notice, is when there's parts of the ceiling that are much brighter or darker than the other parts. Use a dummy sector and set the linedef action to "transfer brightness to ceiling" to fix this. For example, in your third screenshot you would make the brighter parts of the ceiling match the darker parts and in the sixth screenshot, you would make the large dark area of the ceiling match the brighter parts.

Plutonia Haste Sunder The "git gud" fast track

I think it potentially could get zoomers to try the classic DOOM games and maybe a few of those people might check out the modding scene. If one of the big names that already streamed MyHouse started streaming other wads, I think that would be the push needed to get more people into actually checking out the DOOM community. It is cool to see the spotlight on DOOM in this way though, and we have Veddge to thank for that. I expressed before that MyHouse doesn't quite live up to the massive hype for me personally, but that being said I still enjoyed it and think it'll easily be the most important wad of the year.