cassis
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Many of the best doom players have played probably thousands of hours less than a big chunk of the community that's been just casually playing since the 90s (or whatever point in time) and is not half as good. For productive play time you need at minimum content that challenges you and some capacity for self analysis. Where the tip threads (assuming they're by people who know what they're talking about) can help is giving you a basic understanding of stuff that is easy to explain but not necessarily easy to intuit on your own like bullet herding, crowd manipulation etc. Especially in challenge oriented custom maps there is an assumption that the player knows and is exploiting some basic maneuvers that make the game easier essentially and if you don't understand them you'll end up bashing your head into a wall fruitlessly. So, the tips give you a basic scheme for how to succeed in harder content and the capacity to self analyze (oh I needed to do X thing there to live) and spending your time playing that harder content will develop your mechanical skill faster. You could eventually invent the wheel on your own but why bother? So the question is really what your goals are. You're not obligated to get better and there's probably 100s of hours of content out there that's totally suited for your current skillset. Also what do you want to get better at? etc
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well apologies if I'm getting your age wrong here but the previously posted thread looked like a kid/teenager setting out to make "the hardest map," not making something especially out of the ordinary but with visibly a lot of viles and cybers and not much health, and a bunch of 40 year old doom worlders dismissing it as trolling/impossible and closing the thread. I thought that would be a shame if that's all the feedback you got so I dled to take a look at it. I had a lot of fun with the opening area going "oh no I really did just download something where a guy dumps viles on my head as a joke" and then figuring out the blood line gimmick and going "oh no this is a good map." Really enjoyed unraveling that whole part. I did end up non berserk punching a bunch of pinkies which is probably bad I guess but I was yucking it up with some friends in voice chat and ended up having so much fun that I didn't mind it at all. Then I got to the maze area with pretty low health and just don't have patience to figure that out atm though i'm sure its doable with 50hp with enough stubborness. Some health wouldn't go wrong though :p I hope you keep making things with your unique approach with maybe a bit more attention to making them palettable / outside playesting
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please read https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/95295-new-to-posting-maps-read-this-first/
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Pretty fun stuff, that arachnotron fight in 03 is my favorite part I think, needing to use their easy stunning effectively while stuff infought was my favorite gimmick. I left the mancs alive which made it more hectic, not sure if you can get away ammo wise with killing them. I actually enjoyed that cyber finale, I think you need to not be a top speedrunner to get a kick out of it though. Please do some spritespam next ;)
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This was my favorite wad this year by a landslide so I was really glad to see it won a cacoward. I really enjoy the very close quarters combat and tight HP and I hope you won't change it too much in an update, at least not on UV. I did get myself trapped at the final part of level 1 though and couldn't reach the biosuit, could maybe put a berserk in that final corridor? Fair enough if you don't though. Map 3 was incredible, tons of cool moments and setpiece fights but what really got me was this little spiral staircase where you fight a baron and some cacos. So many hard boom sets skimp on combat outside of lockin arenas and this wad does it so well. 4 was incredibly charming from bottom to top and back to bottom and back again. The number of theme changes is really fun and was fantastic. I think the exit was broken though, I noclipped and saw that there was a voodoo doll that moved onto a damage and exit floor but nothing happened. Maybe I missed something? The start of 5 was really fun and 2 shotting the cyber in the space provided was challenging (not sure this was mandatory/intended but I did it...). The finale really drags the pacing down though. It takes a really long time for all the cacos to come out and you don't have the ammo to inefficiently splash/bfg them so I ended up just sitting in a corner in no danger and waiting. After the slow end of map 5 it was more disappointing to find that instead of the combat ratcheting up even more we got a really expansive exploration level with fairly easy techbase kind of combat. Haven't finished this one yet so maybe it has mean stuff in store though :D now that I've taken a break I will probably enjoy it more, and really looking forward to the rest of the wad.
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@Clippy here you go https://youtu.be/PegInY1gMPY you just need to find a gap toward the end of the line of monsters and get back into the closet. before i went to sleep i had some kind of setup for this but when i woke up i forgot it, but it works out most of the time anyway. then you run behind the enemies to pull them back in toward the closet and away from the far end of the room and hopefully get some infights going, this is the diciest part of the fight since what the revs do is very variable and they can block you easily if you stay too long. then you slip out to the far end of the room and hug the back wall behind that bit of cover. doom enemies try to get as close to you as possible without thinking about whether or not there's a wall in the way, so doing this pulls them back into the closet and keeps them from blocking you. then you kill any revs that filter around and keep peaking to see if you're in danger of too many enemies getting around and blocking you, at which point you run around to the opposite piece of cover where the original switch is. at this point you should never die since you can just rinse repeat this maneuver. doing it with rockets you just run to the far end of the room immediately, hug the wall on your left and if you spam like 10 rockets you immediately kill enough you should be able to slip by and then circle strafe easily. @SnowyFoxxo by the way, it's really easy to get stuck on the indentation the switch is in inside the closet if you're moving along that wall. it would be good to raise the floor on that so you can't get into that indentation, or put a solid line there (dunno what the terminology is for doom.) you were right that I played 1.0. I watched your video for that version and yup, you had dramatically more ammo than me. something you want to be aware of making resource starvy maps is you're keeping ammo pools for the different weapons in order and as the author you know for instance the ideal spots to use your rockets for maximum effect. in this map shells are a much higher priority than rockets imo, meaning at any given point it sucks way more to be out of shells than out of rockets, but most players will tend to horde rockets instinctually and end up low on shells. IMO it's on the player to figure that out and adapt (that's part of the fun for me at least) but you want to be aware of stuff like this you'll tend to be blind to as an author. (of course, this is what playtesting is for so don't sweat it too much)
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fair enough snowy clippy i need to figure out demo recording with saves and inserting my doom into obs and i didn't sleep last night but i'll get you that video, eventually ;)
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I had a chuckle when I read the OP and thought you were being literal about running into several high tier demons in the whole map, but seeing the "no" video posted above got me interested enough to download the map. You're getting some 'don't make this kind of map in general' advice here which is unfortunate because it looks like you might follow it and then we'd have a less diverse map pool to work with. Whether you decide to stick with it or not you should know there's a long history of this kind of awkward cramped style, that includes some really highly acclaimed stuff (Saturnine Chapel & SD20X7 for instance) and that a lot of the notable entries are much, much more difficult than your level. I mention the last thing just so you don't worry about making things too hard at this point. I would recommend playing map 1 of Skepland and map 23 of Sunlust (the latter probably not on UV) for both good examples of cramped and resource starvy combat design and placing that design within interesting level layouts. Going Down map 2 also worth a look for heavy hitscan done well and needing to advance forward to have enough ammo. Onto the map itself, I played in prboom+ and it worked fine for the record. I think the overall tightness of ammo and hp is good, moreso ammo than hp though, but your ammo doesn't account for the variation in archvile resurrections and your hp doesn't account for the variation in guaranteed damage from the plentiful hitscan in the map. I avoided any hell knight revives in the brown brick column area by luring both down the stairs and I was still tight overall, if I had had to kill one or two more HKs there I would have been in a really bad spot. Likewise, remember with hitscan heavy levels like this that shotgunners can roll something stupid like 60-70 on an unarmored target. In the brown column area if the archvile just attacks you it's very easily dealt with but sometimes it will just chain res shotgunners basically at the pace you can kill them which is a losing battle of attitrion, meaning you need to eat some hits from them to kill the vile sooner than later. (This fight and that whole area were very fun, by the way) When balancing a resource tight map like this you should play fights a lot and see the whole range of outcomes, since doom is a very random game, and then give the player a bit of a cushion for the worse outcomes. (You can still decide to let fucking up too bad by ex: letting the vile res the whole room just be a failure state of course) The bit at the beginning where you're just shotgunning pinkies felt kinda boring/fillery. Pretty inoffensive for a first playthrough but if I was trying to do a saveless completion having to repeat that part would be tedious. I also found the doors kind of irritating in this map. IMO they should just stay open. There's a part after the "no" room with 2 rooms stuffed with hitscan where I was so low on ammo I had to kill some of them, dart into the room to grab ammo and then run back to cover which was fun but I'd get hung up on the doors closing behind me sometimes, and best case all they do is let players do boring cheesy stuff. The "no" room itself should be a lockin, I know you have no reservations about that from later in the map. It's one of the most exciting fights in the map so it's a big shame people can just run straight out and door camp it. Staying in the room it's free if you run to the end and spam rockets til a caco and a revenant or two are dead, others will be damaged enough you can easily push through them with SSG and circle strafe. However, if you play it with only SSG you have to do some really fun dancing to be able to get around enemies, a little punch baiting on the revs and playing it how it lays with the infights. SSG only this is definitely the most fun fight in the map and if you were to significantly restructure the map I'd put it at a point in the progression before you have rockets, but either way make it a lockin. I always save berserks for HP in maps like this and I didn't need the blue at the beginning of the area so I went into this fight with 100 200, could have survived with less but you might want HP at the beginning of that fight for less careful players. The hallway after this with revs then cacos is where I started to run into ammo issues. Having to run in aggressively to grab shells is fun though, and using the tiny pillars to get in really close for optimal shotgunning makes what would usually be boring (killing a gang of dudes in a hallway) pretty exciting. I'd just put a few more shells in there. If you duck out of the HK trap quickly you can just softlock as far as I can tell. I'd wait til the player gets further into the room before locking and tele in the HKs or have them on dropdown columns. Not much to say after this besides I had to box in the exit vile and zerk punch it to death, as another example of ammo issues. (How much if any punching you want to be mandatory for ammo balancing is another thing to think about with this kind of map). Overall a lot of fun and a great effort for a second map. Remember mapping is a hobby you (hopefully) do for your own enjoyment, and you should look out for what you enjoy making and playing first and foremost. Then try to improve within whatever niche you find yourself in, rather than feeling like you need to shift to more popular styles. Whatever you end up making there will be examples of how to do it better from other mappers, which is really all you need.