Powerlord

I'm a little over halfway through the megawad, but I have to say this is some of the most outrageous and lighthearted fun I've had in a good while! So colorful and fun-loving, hard to really expect what's next but I know it's gonna be a total joy to run through! My critical mind does feel that not every map has to devolve to having an absolute monsoon of imps, demons, and hell knights begging to be plugged and splattered with the rocket launcher, some maps could lose these more spammy fights and not suffer in the slightest. Reflecting on it I feel this way, but actually playing it I feel like I'm just gulping down some tasty soul food and seeing what crazy kooky map design is up next! The mall and pleasure dome are some of the few slaughter maps I've ever been excited moment to moment, although I suppose that might just speak on my skill. The bright colors and comedic disposition I feel are a great remedy to slaughtermapping's otherwise too serious or effortless aesthetic and vibe. Great job!

Most of my problems lie with revenants and shotgunners, also mancubi health pools. I value consistency over most things in games really so it can be extremely frustrating to go into a fight with no armor against a crowd of revenants, eating a stray tracking rocket and being reduced to single digits if not dying outright, reloading a save, eating another stray rocket but it barely even makes my screen flash red because it was in the teens or something. Shotgunners, while a bit more understandable and mostly relying on range, still can ruin level starts with a lucky shot that puts you to 30 or 20 health. Mancubi also randomly decide if they wanna eat 3 SSG shots or rockets and die or live with just a few health points, I usually auto-swap to the chaingun just to make sure to pick off the last few points but it often leads to me getting tunnel vision trying to finish the mancubus so some imps get fireball shots on me or the like. At the very least with monster behavior it's something you can adjust to and understand on the fly, you can see if the monster is attacking or just shuffling in place or infighting or in pain etc. You can't tell if that revenant rocket is 10 or 80 damage. I really think they should just sit somewhere around 30 or 40, close to hell knight/baron projectiles. To balance it out I think I'd make the non-tracking rocket move a bit faster so they aren't quite as ineffective as they are now.

I'd really like to stick with DSDA, but the main thing keeping me from finally going over is that there's no "minimal" hud that also doesn't give you map stats like monster and secret count. GZDoom has a hud that just shows keys, armor/health, and current ammo, all as numbers with little icons. It's the perfect amount of information and making sure the information doesn't clog up my screen for me. With DSDA I either have to stick to the classic hud that, yknow, is iconic and all, but has a lot of information I don't really need for moment to moment casual play, or I have to take the hud that just has a lot of jumbled up information that's hard to discern, and also states monster and secret count, which I really don't like. GZDoom is also just generally more convenient and obviously allows for the millions of mods that people make (although I only ever run mods for easy pistol start and swapping out monster sprites without changing gameplay). A minor thing is that I very much enjoy crosshairs that change color to indicate current health so I don't have to look at the bottom or corner of the screen in the heat of a firefight to know I'm dying, and DSDA doom also has this except there's no real scaling option so it's either a handful of tiny pixels in the middle of my screen or a massive gross blemish on it. I hear you can mod the engine yourself to fix these issues but I can't put in all that effort of learning how when GZDoom is still right there. Anyways, I realize I've only stated my personal stake in the comparison so here's some more info that might help somebody in general decide which they'd like. GZDoom is the most convenient for sure, very easy to set up and pretty easy to configure along with it running smoothly with any mods or iwads out there (except for some I'll get into in a moment). It also has a lot of modern options if you'd feel inclined to turn them on (you shouldn't, but you can!) but for the love of god please turn off texture filtering. The downsides would be that it does feel a bit off from classic doom even with the most fine tuned settings, some things will just end up looking and feeling ever so slightly different for people that're used to playing it lots through more vanilla-accurate ports. That and with the way GZDoom draws actors and lines and basically the whole game in general, the engine can choke when played with maps that feature a fuckton of things or painfully intricate architecture, namely slaughtermaps. DSDA is very vanilla accurate, isn't too hard to tune to your liking, and is still able to run most modern mapsets that don't feature GZDoom exclusive hacks. Basically, anything that's still doom to its core should run with DSDA, like eviternity or the majority of the DBPs. You can even still run it with opengl for those that like to use mouselook but also not hurl from the weird effect mouselook has in software renderers. The negatives are mostly what I stated above, you can't run many (if any?) gameplay mods with it and it's not as customizable, missing a hunk of quality of life features GZDoom has. Basically, if you just wanna play some normal ass doom, DSDA definitely has you covered. If you're a bit picky or can't play vanilla and need to slap on 6 gameplay mods for a fix, or if you're incredibly lazy, GZDoom's got you. Sorry for the massive message lol

I'm not sure why you felt the need to get all hostile, I figured this was a thread for people's opinions. I didn't say blood was perfect but I like it a lot, some people don't and that's fine but it should be just as acceptable to like something as it is to not like it. I've no interest in solely bashing the game so I suppose I'll leave my answer to the thread's title as is and carry on elsewhere.

Surprised to see how many people don't like blood that much. I love blood, and for one fairly simple reason among a lot of smaller helpful ones. It is one of the most satisfying games I have ever played. Blowing a zombie's head off with a double barrel blast so hard it makes the headless body bounce around nearly as much as the decapitated head, watching a hellhound's corpse slide towards you limp and harmless after zapping it with the tesla cannon, and of course the unparalleled explosion physics, it's just so damn satisfying to play. It's funny to hear people complain about hitscanner hell and poorly designed bosses when we're also talking about doom and final doom, I think several decades of swimming through swarms of ultra refined limit removing doom mods might give some people a little bias. I think blood stands on its own even compared to incredible modern doom heavy hitters like eviternity or valiant or ancient aliens, but I think even then it's unfair to compare a base game made before the new millennium to the incredible masterpiece that is modern doom map design. Like sure, you could say blood compared to those games can be unbalanced or annoying, but comparing them to doom 2 won't do Sandy and them many favors either. I personally think it's one of the most satisfying and flavorful first person shooters ever made with only a few hinderances to mar it.

I do, and I think it's pretty normal and healthy. Doom might just be my favorite game of all time with unlimited replayability between all the level sets and crazy mods that overhaul just about everything (although I rarely play with mods nowadays), but even so pizza everyday gets a bit disappointing. Playing something else, even something bad, just brings doom's highlights into sharper focus and offers me the few things doom can't (and shouldn't at that). I usually get super hyped up off some new megawad release, play it and have an absolute banger of a time, play through a handful more and enjoy myself, then inevitably drop some playthrough or other halfway through and get distracted by other games for a month or two. But I always come back, and I think that's how most doomers feel about this game. A big part of doom's appeal, at least for me, is how special and different its levelsets can be and how this game can still surprise us despite some of us playing this game for decades. The single most thing that can suck the uniqueness out of something is making it a routine or schedule, so the best way to play doom is just whenever you feel like it. You'll almost definitely be coming back soon. I will say in my earlier days of dooming, loading up a bunch of monster and weapon mods, it was a lot easier to burn out. Level design kind of gets invalidated by most mods, in terms of gameplay, atmosphere, even lore for the maps that do things like that, so there's a lot less to hang on to. Just my take on things.

I played witchaven on a whim once with super low expectations cuz it's yknow, a janky ass capstone game, and I don't know if it was my trench-level expectations or some genuine charm but really I didn't have a bad time with witchaven. I wouldn't say it was good but I do think it was entirely tolerable, nothing in witchaven wowed me but neither did anything really incite rage or reluctance or annoyance in me. I blazed through it in a day and I just came away being like "huh". It might be partly for my affinity for melee FPS, but yeah suffice to say I feel there's a good reason this was the only capstone game to get a real sequel. I also think it's a more enjoyable time than hexen not because it's actually better designed than hexen in a traditional sense but because my playtime isn't 80% wondering where to go and getting lost and not being able to find the 8th switch behind a not secret secret wall or whatever. Indeed might be a bit of a troglodyte opinion but when my options are easy to digest trash that comes and goes within a day vs wallhumping indigestion that will last far longer in my brain over the occasional bouts of enjoyable set dressing and well designed combat, I choose the trash. Oh yeah, witchaven 2 on the other hand was painful, don't think I'll ever pick that game up again

Doom discords have been a wealth of playtesters for me personally. Places like jimmy paddock's hangar and the davidxnewton discord usually have at least one person that'll give your map a run through. Other than that, as said above, don't take it personally. There are a lot, lot of new mappers for doom at any given time, which is a truly wonderful thing, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of making you feel like you can't stick the landing anywhere. Just keep trying, and remember it's always important to make maps for yourself as much as others.

Thank you so much for the review! A slight correction, this is only my first map under this name. I made three maps a while back, 5 or so years I think, under a different name and I admittedly wanted to distance myself for them for my return so I took a new name, didn't like the old one anyways. I'll try not to repeat too much from what I say in the readme or in my doomworld post for dark web, but long story short, I can still appreciate some of the weird ideas I had in my older maps but they were far too big, ambitious, and simply lacking in polish (and combat design for the most part lol). Needless to say, this map's goal was to reign in my desires to cram everything into one map and to fixate on making the map more pleasant to look at and live in. I've been having a lot of difficulty working on my next map, focusing on difficulty and low-tech aesthetics this time, but this review has been a nice shot in the arm and hopefully I'll see my next map on here soon, even if it's as disappointing as it feels to me at the moment. That's the learning process, after all!

I'll pare down everything everybody else has already said, things like you're never really aware of just how many people your wad reached or that popularity is at least semi-random and you should expect it. One slightly different thing I guess I could add is that while nobody's going to complain about having a bunch of people play and enjoy their level(s) and have things to say about it, mapping is, at least for me, more of a selfish enjoyment. I make maps that I like, that entertain me and make me proud. Of course I consider other players and my own blind spots and try to make it the best it can be, but ultimately the activity is to satisfy me, not to blow up on doomworld or something. If I'm the only ever person that plays my maps, then it's still a very worthwhile effort to me because the activity and results are valuable even if I never release the work. Everybody's gonna see and feel differently I'm sure, but that's how I work. I hope you feel better about your stuff and it gets a little more attention in the future, but also make sure you don't rely on that attention to sustain your mapping career.

Echoing dynamite a bit, there's really nothing wrong with making a smaller map, especially for your first time. A lot of early mappers fall to that temptation and make these massive levels that are missing polish, good encounter design, and/or aesthetics. Nobody has to make anagnorisis on their first try, just get the basics down while making a spritely fun little map. What I'm doing, since I'm still relatively new to the scene, is taking each map I make as a challenge to do a few new mapping tricks. My last map, I experimented with a lot of lighting. My third map, I focused on nonlinear gameplay and calibrating teleport ambushes. Echoing dynamite again, I would definitely say stick with stock doom 2 textures starting out, texture packs can be absolutely massive and give newer mappers overchoice. Although on the topic of gzdoom and the like, I've seen fresh mappers do okay with the format, but it's less about being complicated and more about using a mapping system when you really don't need to. Boom compatibility can do a surprising amount, and it'll work on a ton more source ports than just zdoom. Over half of the community prefers other source ports like prboom, woof, etc, so make sure you're considering that when determining your mapping format and only use zdoom format if your map simply cannot exist without things like uh... cutscenes and room over room and slopes or whatever I guess lol, I haven't played a gzdoom exclusive map in ages. In any case, just keep mapping! You're not getting paid and you're not going to miss a deadline, so take your time and work on it when you want to. If you come up with a cool idea while mapping but it either bloats your current map or doesn't fit with any of the themes, just remember this isn't your last map ever! You can always make a map in the future that incorporates these other cool ideas you have while keeping the original map as is.

Decino's video on the matter turned me to not having them on at all and for me personally it's made me enjoy the game a lot more. Knowing even a rough approximation of the level ahead of you ruins a lot of it for me, and can set expectations for the level it should have no reason to adhere to. Playing without stats also avoids spending an extra half hour humping walls and cursing the map designer because you couldn't find one or two secrets and/or monsters. Secrets should be just that, secrets, at least your first time playing through. If you don't find them all, or hell even any of them, then so be it, nothing stopping you from playing the mapset again sometime right? Turning map stats off helps me enjoy maps for what they are and I don't think I'll ever play with them again (when playing new material at least).

I just got back into mapping myself, but what's been helping my workflow coming back is making a weird shape in the editor, like a spider or a question mark or a mushroom cloud, just something irregular. I make it the last major room in the map, then make everything else thinking about how it flows into that last room with the weird structure. I don't know if that'll help, but that's how I do it.

Nevermind, figured out the issue (was deleting linedefs and it was messing up sectors).

Hi everybody, I'm not too informed on renderers, source ports, nodes and the like, but something weird keeps happening to my maps. I'm using UDB and mapping in boom format. I don't use any kind of boom special effects, I just use umapinfo so I don't have to mess with dehacked. I test with both gzdoom and prboom, and in gzdoom everything goes fine, no homs or weird issues, even when using the software renderer. Problems seem to arise when using other source ports like Prboom and woof. There's no hint of an error anywhere in UDB, but in game random linedefs will seem to bug out, either appearing as HOMs, an infinitely repeating panel of either the floor or ceiling flat, or the linedef texture seems to render fine but at its top and bottom HOMs seem to spill out. These linedefs that it happens to have nothing in common as far as I can tell, coming in various lengths and distance away from things, sectors, and clumps of other linedefs. Even weirder, it seems to happen semi-randomly. So far just drawing another sector over the linedef seems to get it to behave, but I'd really like to know what's causing this and hopefully something I can do to prevent it. Thank you for your time and help.