Tag Archives: Doombuilder

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.