Getting Back Into Doom/Quake Mapping

I made a *LOT* of levels for Doom between 2020 and 2022. Well, relative to my norm, that is.

The page about me on Doomwiki

But since then, I haven't done any mapping. It's been about a year or maybe a bit more. But a few weeks ago I started working on a small 3-map set for Heretic, and it honestly feels good to be back. I had taken a long break from mapping mostly due to creative burnout, but also to distance myself from the Doom community a bit. The amount of stress I had dealing with them was just too toxic for my mental health and I had to take a long step back. But I've slowly been feeling the creativity trickle back in, and it honestly feels good.

Something that's been on my mind, however - and maybe this is just me - is how different my maps feel. It makes sense: I build maps not for them to be popular, but for them to fill the niche I want to play. They're strongly built first and foremost around my own preferences, which tend not to align with what's popular, or at least common, in other Doom maps. This is probably why so much Quake and Doom 64 influence shines through them; Quake is my favorite FPS game overall, and Doom 64 is my favorite Doom game.

But that leaves me wondering... what exactly is "my style"? I think for any of the Doom engine games, it would be like this (and this is probably not what others see, but whatever):

Somewhere in-between Doom and Quake overall. Not too far on either side.

Everything done by hand. No use of the curve tool, 3D floor tool, stair builder tool, etc, and minimal copy-paste.

Level layout and combat inspired by Quake, especially Quake episode 3, but not episode 2.

Actually, layout and combat from any game by American McGee, my favorite classic Id mapper.

Visuals and atmosphere that borrows from Doom 64.

Some layout and combat inspiration from Sock's levels for Quake.

Some layout and combat inspiration from the level mappi2 for Quake.

Basically don't do what John Romero would do, because I don't like most of his maps.

Punish players for just running into a room, award them for being patient and using corners/columns/cover.

Occasional groups of "popcorn" enemies, which I take from shmups.

A difficulty curve kinda like a shmup, and playing with how difficulty is realized from shmups.

Layouts where the player can either dance around columns for combat, or hide around corners and peek out at enemies.

The rare arena fight, but the enemies that get spawned are quite staggered so that it doesn't feel overwhelming, and there's lots of cover.

"Big Finish".

Angled/blocky architecture, never excessive curves, which just end up looking ugly. Lighting is probably more important from a visual standpoint anyway.

TRIM.

Breaking up walls with multiple textures.

Columns on the edges of walls or in path bends.

Angled room corners.

Small pits of liquid that run along the edge of a wall, likely giving some lighting.

Stolen/broken floor tiles.

Minimal use of slopes except for decoration, 'cause they're awful for movement.

Ceiling details to give a more 3D feel to the level.

Subtly guide the player (but not too much) so they spend less time going "where the heck am I supposed to go?!?!"

I'm sure others are going, "...that's your style? I thought it was X, Y, and Z." But it is, I just don't do every one of these things on every level. But there are a few that are especially common, like the bits about the blocky architecture, doing everything by hand, the way I do walls, and the use of cover/punishment for "RUN IN GUNS BLAZING". Still, in the end, all of this comes from my one over-arching goal: make the levels I want to play, not what will be popular.

Quake Mapping

My first few forays into Quake mapping were rather rough. It's just so different compared to Doom mapping, and I don't really mean from a technological standpoint. For *years* I avoided Quake mapping because I couldn't wrap my head around designing a good level in true 3D. But I did eventually manage once TrenchBroom 2 came out.

The two maps I've released aren't *bad* maps, but I've never been 100% happy with them. Something about them feels less like I made them for me primarily, and more like I made them to be popular, thus breaking my cardinal goal of mapping. A lot of it was also just that I'm still getting used to Quake, but I don't think that's totally it.

Still, I'm getting the itch to try again, and this time around I want to do it in such a way that I'm more genuine towards "make the maps I want to see", community opinions be damned. But... what would that mean for Quake? I can't just take my Doom style and directly apply it to Quake, it won't work. Some bits will, and I'm 99% sure my future Quake maps will share some similarities with my Doom maps as far as style goes, but not everything. I need to start exploring what my style for Quake will be.

My gut tells me that it's going to land somewhere in-between Quake and Doom, but will probably be a bit closer combat-wise to my Doom maps, just not as far towards Doom as my Doom maps lean.

Programming???

Doing this mapping has been a nice break from programming. Going forward, I don't foresee myself doing quite as many maps in a year as I did in 2021 again. That was just a wacky year for me for mapping. So I don't actually foresee this cutting into my programming projects much. If anything, it gives me a nice break from programming on occasion, and taking breaks is something I have to be more diligent about.

I recently got the S-Lang UI for the Common Lisp rewrite of Benben working, as well as the OKI MSM6258 chip emulator. My next goal is to get rendering working, rework how log/warning/error messages work (time to abuse the heck out of the condition system!), and then focus almost exclusively on the backend VGM library. I also still want to add Titan support to my Aya Gemini server, but I might put that off for a bit since it's just not an important feature for me, and no one has requested it.