30/04/2026, 23:21
Currently listening to: Lifelab - Fractals (2002)
Well, it has been a year since I started work on "finishing" work on Torment Of Screams after it was rightfully abandoned by the original team for the lack of work & communication. You'd think that after a year I would have most of the maps together in a playable state? Think again, because in reality I haven't been able to produce a single level myself for the megawad that is completely finished and / or needs minor bugfixes atleast. This is of course my fault due to the fact that I haven't taken the project seriously enough. I thought that I was good enough of a mapper that I could wing it by making an Alien Vendetta quality maps one per week, which is hillariously wrong and I can see why the Doom community old guard tries to deter new mappers from making 32 maps, it's only a recipe for disaster and burnout. As for me, I was thinking for months that I needed that perfect flowstate on the weekends to make competent layouts, which obviously doesn't come because such thing doesn't exist! It's like starting to eat healthy / going on a run at the 1st of every month and you are motivated for those first three days and once the motivation runs out and you stop, you think to yourself: "eh, I'll start doing this again next month" and the cycle will repeat again and again, same with mapping. If that one sudden spike of motivation gets me to do three rooms in one level once a month, this is just useless and anyone else saying other things are coping, that was what I was doing too. I was chasing perfection for far too long blindly, not seeing that my lack of experience and work ethic (if you could call it even that) torward building maps was gonna bite me one day, which is now. I'm gonna take the blame for being too egotistical in this matter and I should've known better because this past year has been all wasted on nothing important.
So, does this mean that the project will once again get abandoned? No, not at all, I'll go on a bit of a ramble about my idea before I get to my point. I was again replaying a wad called Kama Sutra in March this year, where the maps aren't long at all while providing amazing, explosive gameplay and I suddenly thought - this is the most fun I had playing Doom, even av or hr don't compare. Yes sure, av looks way better and has more coehesion, but tbh I never cared about these thing that much compared to the gameplay because if you're having fun then that's all that matters. I remember playing ks04 (one of my favs from ks e1) and I was thinking - this is brilliant! Why wouldn't I make maps like this where they are rather small but route-flexible and fun to blast through in 3-4 minutes? And all this got me thinking that why couldn't TOS be like this? It's a fun format, doesn't take too much time and the gameplay could be very explosive, not to mention all of the speedrunning tricks that all small maps have, Kama Sutra is practically full of them! My idea had to wait a little bit however because of exams and such, but I cooked up MAP02 in it's entirety in only two days, and I'm gonna be honest - it was the most fun I ever had mapping! Not counting fighting HOM's and VPO's ofc :D
I recently thought of a quote that my chess coach said, and (paraphrasing) it's that if you're spending forever to find the perfect move, you will find that you have no time for the rest of the moves and thus, everything falls apart. And I think that he's completely right in both the chess and mapping context, because if I would've continued from here with the same delusional idea that TOS will be perfect, it will never release at all. I will have to accept that it will not be perfect which is a little scary to think about but at the same time it's encouraging because I'll be less scared about making mistakes, if it makes any sense. You might also be thinking as to why I didn't share any screens of MAP02 yet? Well, I'm trying to get this wall of text on my website before May comes around, it's 11PM here lol. I guess I'm too lazy with my website, evidenced with Speed Demo Index but I will promise that it will come back in May, I need to fill the tables there. Same thing with blogs, I will try to post them more often than once a month that's been very rushed. Let's do once every Friday or something where I WILL (yes, WILL) share more about TOS and irl in general, I have so many ideas for this! But OK for now, I will try to keep high optimism about my project, because it only helps :-) Take care for now and thanks for reading..