Death Bear

A year and a half in the making. Hope y'all enjoy this! Hell yeah! LET'S GO!!! HYPE!!!

Maybe I should do a full Rudy wad. Who knows?

Hell yeah! I got into a fistfight behind the local Waffle House prior to making my map. Enjoy the waffles!

I don't think you actually realize what this means? They're not rejecting wads that are stock asset in nature. Check this out. Don't copy the base iwad assets directly into your pwad.

TO ME, Speedmapping is an art all in its own, and honestly, most of my ability to speedmap is harnessed by repetition and training. My speed and efficiency came from understanding the editor, knowing how I work best, and mapping A LOT. I've also given myself exercises and challenges to perform that have stretched my abilities and allowed me to get faster. I've tried to develop workflow that breaks my bad habits (sometimes to no avail). What I can do in an hour or two, now, is pretty crazy, all things considered. The crazy thing is, that when you spend more time up front learning how the foundations work, the faster you can get when it all becomes second nature. This isn't a post meant to brag, but what I'm telling you is to cut yourself some slack if you're not as fast as you think you should be since you're newer. It takes time and effort. That's my first suggestion. Romero may have made that map in 6 hours, but that was also back then. I imagine he could've knocked that out a lot quicker with the tools we have today. What I've seen people like Muumi and Danlex and MANWITHGUN do with that small amount of is hard for even me to do. But I never stop learning and mapping. My second suggestion is to learn hotkeys, learn door builder, and learn stair builder. Hotkeys, I'm not an expert at and I'm STILL fast at mapping. I committed to muscle memory the ones that save ME the most amount of time. Door builder, I don't ever use, but it's a very quick way to help you get a door right. And guess what, when you have one standard door, my third suggestion will help with subsequent doors...or you can keep using the door builder. Stair builder is not just for stairs, and understanding how it works, even at a base level, can help quickly with detailing, as well. But do also use it for stairs. My third suggestion is copy-paste. This may seem like something that can spiral out of control and look like a copy-pasta map, but it can save time if the objective is to map quickly, and you can always edit what you paste to bring variety. My fourth suggestion is to keep your scope down. If you want to be fast and get a bunch of maps knocked out, don't try "speedpainting the Mona Lisa" straight out of the gate. Although when I started out, I was easily doing 200-300 monster maps that were 20-30 minutes a piece, I would suggest anyone else to start smaller than that. Learning the efficiency of not letting your map get away from you is important, in this case. No more than 3 rooms/ areas or less is usually my suggestion, and re-use of areas and use of loops to limit backtracking becomes important. Practice how to place monsters together in ways that force the player to solve a problem with multiple solutions, and to do it without overwhelming the player in numbers, to start. Scope creep is real, but on a time crunch, it is Mapper's Bane. My fifth suggestion is to stay out of visual mode as much as possible, if trying to map quickly. There's lots of reasons why, but when you're pressing yourself (like I did) to make maps in 5 minutes or less, you learn just how much time you actually spend doing things in visual mode that are more efficiently done in 2-D mode. Becoming familiar with things like lighting values, floor/ ceiling heights, names of textures and flats, and numbers of specific line action values in a given format are all things that have made me faster. My sixth suggestion is to visualize and/or sketch your idea out first...but only if it works better for you. Sometimes it does for me, and sometimes it is better just to throw down lines in editor. Case in point is the tale of my two friends @BluePineapple72 and @myolden, who I'm bringing in, if they care to share some of their tips. I've noticed that Blue often spends time sketching maps, while myolden throws lines down in editor and goes from there. Find what works for you. Now, I could probably keep writing at length, since Speedmapping is my bread and butter, here, but I'll leave you with one more. Commit. Come up with your idea or your central gimmick, don't get overworked with questioning yourself or painstaking over every little detail. (Or do it AFTER you've built the essentials). Throw lines down, make sectors, add combat scenarios, and test your maps. Ask other people if they would test your maps and get feedback. If you enjoy it enough, you'll continue to get better at it. Don't stress yourself out.

Well, we're at the end, and I've found myself very...busy. I'm slowly making my way through the wad, but I figured I'd share a little about Maps 13 and 33. Only a little. It was an honor to get played and reviewed again, and it was really nice to see positive reviews for MAP13, not counting the bloody softlocks. I'll get those fixed for the final-final version. It's nice to see my work enjoyed, ESPECIALLY City of the Dying Sun. This was my most ambitious map of the grandest scale out of anything I've made to date. I stretched my paws out a little bit and challenged myself to try and make a big map that wasn't a slog, and it really was a challenge after spending the better part of two years making smaller maps. I WILL say that it was supposed to be much bigger, because I wanted the secret path to be a COMPLETE alternate path to the main progression, and lead to an epic alien slugout before going to MAP33. Magnum Opus Syndrome hit me hard, but I don't regret it. For time constraints, it was cut, but maybe we'll see what became of it one day. My biggest personal complaint with this map is that I didn't really account for backtracking, and I think I could've dealt with that a bit better. Thanks for playing! MAP33 (named for a Star Wars reference) was meant to be a breather, and since I fancy run-and-gun, and this set was sorely missing it in favor of grandeur, I thought it would be enjoyed as something truly different. I guess it came off as underwhelming in context, but oh well...I suppose it would next to a whole bunch of big maps. I shelved the original vision for this, which was originally going to be my ONLY map...which was titled "Metropolis of Falling Stars", and was meant to be even more epic than MAP13, but smaller in physical scale. The problem was all of my time was sunk into the blood, sweat, and tears it took to get MAP13 finished because I spent probably 2 weeks massively frustrated as my map continued to break. I got to learn about nodebuilders and bigger maps, which I'm thankful someone pointed it out finally and fixed my problems immediately. So, yeah, all of my mapping energy went there, and I nearly burned out. In the end, it paid off for at least MAP13, I think, and MAP33 will just have to exist as it is. "Metropolis..." is another map for another day. Final fact: The Blue Key Shrine in MAP13 was modeled after this, which is a landmark here in my hometown. I've been here several times, and for those who might know THIS MOVIE that I loved growing up, it is actually seen during the training montage. The movie was filmed and took place here and I actually trained under and ran in circles with several of the area Martial Artists that were in the movie. Just thought that was a fun thing to share. This map actually meant a lot to me beyond just being a grand test of my mapping and something I am proud of, at the end of the day. Cheers, friends! Look forward to seeing this pick back up again in June!

Yup. And for a lot of the reasons that echo what is above. And I’m in the middle of making one, too. So, I definitely encourage you to continue if you’re enjoying yourself, because ultimately, that’s why I’m doing it. I believe that so long as there is Doom, there will always be people around to play it. 😏🤘

Thanks for leading the project @Misty! This was fun! Good to see it on archive. Congrats!

Hell yeah! It was fun getting to map from memory for these four projects! Nice to see us at release stage! Congrats, everyone!

Hell yeah! Time to put some yella’bellies in the grave! New PUSS hype!

Looks like I’m back for round 5! 🤣 looking forward to seeing what y’all think. I’ll add some comments in mid-month about my maps, for those interested. Not sure I’ll be able to keep up with the playthrough, but I’ll try.

Eagerly awaiting your mapset release. Show us what you got. THAT SAID: I'm enjoying this so far.

Like the friend above suggested, screenshots, format/ intended sourceport, etc. would be nice and helpful. However, I'm also a bear who sometimes likes surprises and get curious when people post first maps. In Ultimate Doom Builder, it defaulted to Doom 2 (Doom in Hexen), so I played it with GZDOOM. I previewed stuff and opened it in SLADE first. Gotta be at least a little cautious. Here's a video (Enjoy!): Short little map, mostly functions well. I'm going to encourage you to keep mapping, if you enjoyed it. I can give you some actionable feedback, if you're interested, but you'll have to actually let me know if you want that. I will say that in the video, you'll notice two softlocks in the elevator room. Probably would do well to fix that. Cheers!

Got a few visual and texture issues to deal with in MAP33, so also the missing flats are a known issue. It was a whole thing and it seems we still missed a few. I'll work that out later this week in a new update. Also... That's now two calls for progression at that point being easy to miss. I'll adjust that, as well.

Thanks for the feedback! Probably the grandest thing I’ve made thus far. I’ll be sure to telegraph the intent of the secret exit a little more clearly in my next update.