Tag Archives: wad

My First Doom 2 Map

Tainted Waters.

It began as an exercise to challenge myself to actually sit down and learn Doom Builder.

The goal was to explore a variety of features and gain familiarity, enforced by the tight deadline, and to a degree inspired by Romero’s single session creation of e4m2. There was no planning involved, though in my downtime I would think on the layout for ways to improve it. Now I did hit a snag in my plan of weekly map releases…

I recovered faster than I feared it would take, but it did hit my self-derived momentum, but I had a new momentum, in the form of a not completely horrible looking level that was a functional layout. Functional layout meaning a player spawn, exit, triggers, locked doors, keys, secrets, and a variety of encounters. So I got back to it, having already clocked 20 hours, I engaged in that infamous final 20% which seems to take so much of the effort and began soliciting friends for playtests, and iterating on it from their feedback and my own play sessions and bug finding.

It is one thing to find bugs, but another to fix them, particularly on your first outing. I quickly learned how much error catching and good faith assumptions GZDoom makes for the player, as I ran into some ugly issues and locked off areas when testing in PrBoom+ and Chocolate Doom (and to a lesser extent, ZDoom). I ultimately decided to simply state that the map is best played with GZDoom, as I had developed some mapping habits that GZDoom had no problem with, but other clients did. Hopefully those habits will be broken on the next level.

I’m releasing it now, and will be uploading it for Doomworld’s /newstuff. I’m not a great mapper, yet, but I think this is an okay first effort, and I had more fun making than I’ve had playing most games. Maybe the next one can be done in under 20 hours?

You can download it here.

Romero’s Take On Doom E1M8

It is very likely that if this is the sort of site you read, you’ve probably already heard that John Romero released a new Doom map, his take on e1m8. Many note that this is substantial due to how long it has been, but my takeaway was that it made it possible to play all of the first episode of Doom encountering only maps by Romero. E1M8 was designed by Sandy Petersen based off of scraps from Tom Hall, and it being a different mapper worked for a boss level, as the level signified change. It had the most somber song yet, and the clearest presence of the Hell themes. It was transitioning you to Shores of Hell, an episode with many maps by Petersen.

I’ll be reviewing the map on its own merits, but also in the context of being the level following E1M7, and of being constrained to the shareware content. Below the cut you’ll find not just the review, but my first playthrough of the map on YouTube. Due to GZDoom crashing and corrupting the video, you missed out on my first five deaths, so this video (recorded in ZDoom) has me changing my strategy and being aware of one secret.
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