I originally wrote the following text as a response to a Doomworld thread called should i start by making a big map, a medium sized one or a small one? However on reflection I think it turned into more of a rant about playtesting than actually helpful advice to the guy, so it goes here instead.
Undead+priest said:
Ok after seeing so many good maps i decided to try making my first one...but i wonder one thing...should i start by making a big map,a medium sized one or a small one?
I have found mapping tends to divide itself into two stages, architecture and gameplay.
The time to do the layout and architecture tends to increase proportionately with the size of the map, provided you keep the detail density roughly the same as you go. The second stage however, increases at a much higher rate as you increase the size of your map.
When doing the monsters you usually go in waves. You open a door, there's a wave of monsters ahead. You fight your way through them and press a button or pick up a key or whatever, at which point another wave appears. And so on.
So you put the first wave of monsters in at the start, and playtest a hundred times until you're sure it's not too easy or hard or whatever. Then you move on to the next.
But now, you have to play past the first wave of monsters to get to the second part. You can't just skip the first wave with god mode or whatever because the balance of the second wave depends on what you have left when you finish the first wave. But because you're in a hurry to get to the part you want to test, you're probably careless, so on half your test runs you die before you even get there.
Now imagine the numbers increasing as you add more waves. It's not hard to see yourself having to play the start of your map a thousand times. And that's not even including doing skill levels, which effectively triples the amount of playtesting you have to do.
[Disclaimer: I should say this is all based on my experience during CC3. Having been accused of making the most annoying map ever for CC2 I realised I needed to spend less time on making fancy bits of machinery - itself a reaction to all the idiots around at the time who refused to play maps that weren't pretty enough - and more time on the actual gameplay.
So I had six huge outdoor monster teleporters along with about four smaller waves inside caves and buildings. The large waves each required playing about a hundred times before I was satisfied with the difficulty level and monster distribution. What with dying carelessly I probably played the map close to a thousand times, which explains why it was so late.
I'd love to know how much playtesting other people do. In particular I'd love to know how Doom Marine made Deus Vult without going mad...]
Incidentally burn-out from CC3 map playtesting was one of the reasons I pretty much lost interest in Doom last year and now keep saying how jaded I am in reviews. While looking for a reference for this in old updates I found a progress report which says pretty much the same thing as I wrote here.
Pet Killer
Okay so you have three wads in two zips.
pet containing pet2.wad (E1M1) and pet.wad (E1M2). Yes, they're out of order. You're supposed to load both at once - I guess they didn't have wad combiners that early on.
- pet2/E1M1 is just a square box with a lift and a bunch of troopers. You're supposed to get the chaingun to do the real map. Getting 100% kills here is interesting as there's a couple of sergeants in alcoves at the top of a really high wall, and you must shoot the far one from a moving lift.
- pet/E1M2 is your typical oldschool map, with a completely random theme, illogical lighting, fullbright to complete darkness transitions, higgeldy-piggeldy linedef placement, all that good stuff. More unusually for an early level, it is quite hard.
petkillr, which replaces E1M3, is a harder version of E1M2, with an extra maze and about twice as many monsters. You can play spot the difference, yay! It just gifts you the chaingun for free without any messing about with pointless introduction maps.
What intrigues me most about this wad is the ending - it looks for all the world like an E1M8 thing where you have to kill some barons to lower a wall. This is especially true of pet.wad which doesn't have any other barons in the rest of the map. On the other hand in petkillr it'd be really annoying to get to the end having missed some and having no idea why the exit isn't opening. You aren't forced to get 100% kills, indeed you can get to the end without seeing the baron that guards the plasma gun.
There is also a cyberdemon that is trivial to dodge. So then you have the version of petkillr in wadpak2. You have to leave the thing alive and come back for it to get 100% kills here, because otherwise the map will end halfway through - it replaces E2M8. This seems to be a deliberate choice by wadpak2's compiler, I doubt he'd put it at E2M8 by pure chance. Very strange.
Last time I said there was more to follow. Here they are. Damn this shit takes too long to write.
Alpha Map This map01 replacement was apparently made by an experienced Duke3d mapper, so I guess he's at an advantage. It's really rather good - wide open design, plenty of interconnection, height differences, glimpses, and a complex route that crosses over itself. Decent detailing, but not overdone at all. Difficulty is fairly easy provided you don't play like a moron; it helps a lot to find the super shotgun secret early on. The text file says it needs ZDoom and it's true that the first version he posted on Doomworld had some bugs but the final version is good. Pleasure to play really, and highly recommended.
Escape from Castle Chezcrea This, as the author points out several times, is his first map. You pretty much have to run it in Boom compatibility level - it needs comp_dropoff=0 and comp_telefrag=1, and runs on map30. It's a prison in a stone castle, with a sewer underneath. It looks beautiful, but I think it's one of those maps where the author has put a tremendous amount of effort into a bunch of things that nobody else is going to notice. For example:
There's a slaughterhouse with a conveyor belt that can be started and stopped. Initially a baron is on the conveyor, and if you watch it go through the machine it comes out the other side, dead! It's a clever setup where the first baron teleports into a holding sector and stomps on a second one, whose corpse is now free to teleport onto the other side of the machine; the first baron then teleports again into a room full of barrels, which kill it. However I totally failed to see this happen on my first time through the map as I was too busy sniping at all the other monsters in the room from the safety of the doorway...
Perhaps worse. There are a couple of tan rock walls exposed behind holes in the grey stone, which can be "broken down" once you have "picked up" a pickaxe. However no Doom player is going to be expecting to do such a thing, Doom is not that kind of game, and there's no particular hint that you're supposed to stand in front of the pickaxe and press the use key to pick it up. It just looks like more random detail.
If you find the sewers and the exit it's fairly obvious the actual exit room is meant to be "underneath" the big grating you find once you escape from the jail cell area. There's a service elevator back up, but very little reason to actually take it if you've got everything from the castle before leaving it - except if you want 100% kills. There's a chaingunner hidden up there for whom you have to basically go up the lift and immediately back down. I found this irritating.
It's a decent wad which you should try it if you like hunting for things (the secrets are very well hidden) and wads that use nearly every Boom feature they can get away with. Ultimately a little too awkward for my tastes though.
Year 21 -The Vanishing Point- Small, but highly detailed map which calls itself a speedmap[1]. You have four rooms around a central garden area where the exit teleporter is located. The start is annoying because you can't easily get out of the south room and get the shotgun before the first two imps block your way, so you have to use the pistol on a load of imps. Of course only then did I find the hidden berserk box behind me... The rest is pretty easy, it's all small monsters and not very many of them, but there's not much health available so it's not trivial. I'm not sure I liked that three of the five secrets are identical tiny alcoves with identical rewards, and I kind of expected something to appear on the exit as I approached, but nothing happened. And are those recoloured textures becoming a cliche? That dark green version of BIGDOOR3 seems to be in every wad these days. Anyway, recommended. It'll only take five minutes to play.
A New Nightmare Episode 1 replacement. Rooms and halls for the most part, often very cramped. Architecture is remarkably irregular, like linedefs have been flung down with no particular attention to the grid. However, unlike the 1994 maps it claims to ape it has quite a lot of simple detail. You know, the walls aren't just flat, they have computer panels set into them, etc. So a weird mix of old and new. Appears to have missed the point of the original E1M8 ending.
Beyond Horrible Episode 2 replacement, sequel to A New Nightmare, and more like a community effort (well there's a couple of maps not made by the original author) Definite improvement since the first but still could go further. In particular it needs to get away from that whole maze of small rooms and corridors thing. E2M8 is quite small and if you don't feel like rocketing a cyberdemon you can press a series of buttons to open a different exit - not bad.
Tech Tower of Ladyboys Someone took one of the maps of one of the /newstuff trolls and tarted it up a bit. Interesting idea. The map is about as good as you could hope for, really - it has a bit of extra detail and textures, and a few more monsters, but I'm still quite indifferent.
No Relief Four Doom maps: E2M{4,5,9,6}. Mid-nineties feel, random theming, fairly messy texturing. Gameplay is pretty awkward, especially in E2M4 where there's hidden switches to find (it took ages to get out of the first area), darkness, and an annoying lack of resources. However, I'd have probably enjoyed this wad a few years ago. I'm too jaded these days. Running round the giant outdoor area at the south of E2M9 was fun though. Probably the best part[2]
Maximum Difficulty Two rooms stuffed with monsters. Runs on a weird map name ("FGHB") so if you use an engine that can't handle nonstandard map names you'll have to edit it to even make it run. Pretty much worthless[3]
[1] What is a speedmap, anyway? I usually take it to mean "100 minutes", as in the various dwspd/sbspd/*spd wads they've done since 2001, so I was initially quite nonplussed when I saw how polished Year 21 is. Then I read the text file properly and spotted "10 hours". Even I've made half a decent map in a day's work. (Map01 of unfinished megawad took about a day and a half. With Yadex!)
[2] Really the only reason these two wads were interesting were because they exposed some bugs in rboom - No Relief E2M4 has bad GL nodes, which rboom didn't handle very well...
[3] ...and Maximum Difficulty has really large vertex coordinates, which illustrated a problem with sound origin coordinate calculation that PrBoom-plus had already fixed. Also the various bits of SMMU and Eternity that PrBoom 2.3 imported should be able to handle the non-ExMy/MAPxy map name, but it was broken somehow.
Wads for 2008-04-03
10, 11, 13 Years of Doom Ages ago I wrote about 10 Years of Doom and off-handedly mentioned 11 Years of Doom. Of course I never got round to it but then a 13 Years of Doom appeared and reminded me.
10 Years of Doom Well, I've done that already, but it's basically a bunch of small disjoint areas with a Doom hell castle theme - that is, green stone, marble, blood etc. Replaces E3M4.
11 Years of Doom Significantly better; less symmetrical, the map writing is more integrated with the rest of the map, and it's a Doom 2 map so there's more of a variety of monsters. It's pretty easy - there's only one place in this large level I felt in danger of death. There are a lot of secrets spread out over the level, of varying difficulty to find, from "clever" to "slightly misaligned wall texture". I didn't really care for the Wolfenstein part (but it is admittedly small, and well-hidden.) It runs on MAP02.
13 Years of Doom Amusingly in development for a long time, it came out a couple of weeks after Doom's 14th birthday. Unfortunately it's not very good. Sorry to say it but this map was made by a group of people who all clearly had no idea what the others were doing in regard to theme, difficulty level etc, and then pasted together, so you end up with quite a mess. It also trips one of my pet hates, which is disabling large parts of the automap, in this case just so the map still reads "13 YEARS OF DOOM" clearly.
Keep Running A Boom map masquerading as a Doom map. Seriously it uses a lot of Boom stuff but apart from maybe using all six keys you will hardly notice. It looks like a pre-sourceports Doom2 wad. The main area is a magma canyon with some bridges and buildings around, but there's tech bits, hellish blood pools and and grassy river valleys right next door (literally) The gameplay is quite annoying due to low health and being constantly peppered by buckshot. It's very top heavy. I don't mind the Doom2 theme but the gameplay needs work before I'd recommend this map. Suggestion: bring the monsters in in waves, don't just have them all right there at the start.
DOOM: The Final Conflict A re-upload from 1994. You'd be forgiven for skipping it as it starts with a maze. Hint: the exit is clearly labelled provided you don't pick up any of the light goggles which litter your path - or you could just cheat, like I did... There's some other stupid puzzles as well, it's a shame, it puts you off before you get to the town section and the ending, which aren't so bad.
More to follow. I still have like a dozen files I should post at least one sentence about.
Dodgy Wad Conversion Utilities
I had instantly recognised Doom: The Final Conflict but couldn't place it.
I searched the usual places - the wadpaks, heroes.wad, etc. - couldn't find it.
Eventually I remembered that other source of old maps I have, the D!1000 disc.
On there we have fc2.wad, which is a dodgy Doom2 conversion. There are a lot of
dodgy Doom2 conversions on that CD and they have certain things in common if you're familiar with the original. For example, one (and only one) imp will be turned into an archvile. I concluded they must be being mechanically transformed and resolved to track down the program that was doing it.
It wasn't hard - I quickly found the culprit, DM2CONV, which turned out to be quite a powerful program, with a versatile, if messy, configuration directives file format. (Strictly therefore it's the default configuration file that's responsible for the conversions, not the program, but that's just semantics.)
It even comes with public domain source code, albeit in Pascal...
STRIKE!
I play Doom2 MAP01 a lot. It's probably my most played map(*). Usually I run round it while testing some new engine code I've been writing.
A strike is defined as beating MAP01, having acquired the rocket launcher, and killing all the imps outside with one rocket (you know, the secret area with the shotgun, that outside) You get extra points for style if you fire the rocket as you enter the area for the first time, running sideways through the secret door as the imps wake up.
The bowling analogy is obvious because you get exactly two rockets. You can of course "pick up the spare" with the second rocket, which is easier, but that's not what I'm talking about here.
Anyway the point of all this is that I'd always believed it to be possible, but never managed it until recently. Given the number of times I've tried to do it while running round MAP01 (admittedly not tried very hard) you'd think it'd have been more often, but sadly not.
Of course then I find it's been done a bunch of times in various Compet-n max demos - including the current best time in that directory, although the guy doesn't get the extra style points - but still.
(*) It's between MAP01 and MAP02(**), the latter of which I often find myself running round after I've completed some PWAD that replaced the former. But since MAP01 is so small and you can pretty much just run to the exit - unlike MAP02 which will take a while, and you will almost certainly have to fight - it's probably my most played. It's definitely my most beaten.
(**) What about E1M1? I didn't have a copy of Doom until quite some time after Doom2 so MAP01 had a head start. I run Doom2 more often than Doom as it's the default IWAD. E1M1 is slightly harder to just run through without killing the monsters as there are sergeants, no easily available chainsaw, and some narrower gaps where the monsters get in the way more easily. So definitely not E1M1.
Markdown
I wrote this entry with Markdown just to see what it would be like.
I realise I'm unfamiliar with the codes you use compared to HTML but I don't think it's saved me any actual time to write in Markdown. It's still taken hours to finish this post.
The HTML output has lots of blank lines that I wouldn't have put in.
It's certainly easier to write some things using it - **[wadname](wadurl)** is slightly less typing than <p><b><a href="wadurl">wadname</a></b></p> - but you can't just load the file into a browser to preview it, you have to process it first, so there's an extra step to contend with.
Of course that preview step might be better integrated into my update script. Not really sure how, though.
