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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):

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.

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