NaNoWADMo 2023 - The month-long mapping challenge!

just getting my maps in a more playable state. ill put the wad here soon

Well, October is done for this year.

While I managed to make a spooky Doom64-style single map, sadly I couldn't finish it due to irl stuff that came unexpectedly & thus lack of drive to make more.

I did post a couple of screenshots in this thread which nothing has really changed since then besides one new area I added.

But regardless it was a fun while short-lasting mapping session with some basic scripting & UDMF features that I tried.

I hope @NoReason participates in this.

Can't believe we're already at the end, but it's November in every timezone I'm aware of. Another NaNoWADMo complete, and this one had the most mappers of any year so far!

Keep posting your updates and I'll keep adding them to the list of projects at the beginning of the thread. Remember: they don't have to be complete or totally polished to share, and feedback is helpful at any stage.

I hope to see you all back in 2024!

Deadline has been reached (?) and as i wrote in the first post i completed many community project maps as well as some standalones.

• Amalgoom MAP30
• 95 Never dies E3M5
• Two new DM Maps in 90s style donated to a Discord project
• Another map for a collab project
• Fastest Shovels 11 source wad and a map
• A pair of testing speedmaps

On 10/30/2023 at 11:52 PM, BigBeanDotGov said:

Its the last day of the month here so uh

NanoWad2023 01.zip

It was good.

https://youtu.be/gQTmTMNfOZo

Heya, as the monumental mapping extravaganza that is NaNoWADMo has concluded, I wanted to post about what myself and @Yumheart have been working on this year!

In classic fashion, we've made a sequel to our project last year - "Doomed: By the Hour", which we've creatively titled: "Doomed: By the Hour 2"

It's another megawad filled with speedmaps (the aim was to stick to 1hr, but we were far too ambitious for that so the maps were generally made between 1-3hrs each) with a lot more custom dehacked & textures than last time! We're not quite done yet (and need to do a bit of playtesting), but I'm hoping to release the set over the weekend!

6 hours ago, scwiba said:

Keep posting your updates and I'll keep adding them to the list of projects at the beginning of the thread. Remember: they don't have to be complete or totally polished to share, and feedback is helpful at any stage.

I have decided to just publish MAP08 "Trouble In Tiny Temple" from the three maps I was able to make this month, so I guess you can add that to the list.

Link:
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2725595

Also here  are few screenshots of my maps, including MAP11 that  I wasn't able to finish.

We haven't worked on our project at all in a week. It's still nowhere near ready to release in any form, but here's what the current state of each map looks like. I'm still debating if I should also release some of the original MIDIs I made for this.

I think my main takeaway is that I need to get better at actually completing maps quickly. I've gotten fairly decent at making a layout quickly but during that process I neglect all other aspects such as texturing and thing placement, as I do them in a seperate phase, which I take my sweet time on because it can get fairly tedious.

Guess who gets this extended to november.

70% done maybe.

Sorry for the late submission, my internet's been crapped out the last few days.

I've been rather busy this month, so I didn't get as much done as I wanted. I still scraped together a map so I at least have something. It's nothing grand, in fact it's my first time mapping in boom and the second level I've ever published so don't expect too much.

Enter_the_Facility.zip

On 10/31/2023 at 2:30 PM, Heretic926 said:

It's time for my submission. I was busy making maps for many community projects, so I had little time (one week before the deadline!) to make something for this challenge. Thus, I made only one map.

 

And honestly, I'm kind of proud of myself since I haven't attempted to speedmap something and make something decent. Read the text file before playing. Feedback is really appreciated.

 

Edit: Did an oopsie with the conveyor belt that supposed to trigger an ambush after the player picks up the red key - now it should work.

 

DOWNLOAD

Wait are you supposed to put filkes here? I'm kinda keeping these maps for my Megawad project.

midi and irl stuff have been getting in the way a bit of the maps but here map 1 for a taste.

title screen music: Sapphire Cosmos by pcorf

map 1 music: Extradimensional Beings by CoTeCio

intermission music: Mystic's Glance by David Shaw

Darkening e2 textures: ukiro

tell me what ya think

dbmwmap01.zip

22 hours ago, Petyan said:

Guess who gets this extended to november.

  Hide contents

70% done maybe.

The left bit looks kinda like the symbol of a certain chaos god...

On 11/2/2023 at 10:05 AM, Skela said:

Sorry for the late submission, my internet's been crapped out the last few days.

 

I've been rather busy this month, so I didn't get as much done as I wanted. I still scraped together a map so I at least have something. It's nothing grand, in fact it's my first time mapping in boom and the second level I've ever published so don't expect too much.

  Reveal hidden contents

Enter_the_Facility.zip

Don't sell yourself short. It definitely has more effort applied to it than most first maps!

Here's all my mapping output this october, busy times

21 hours ago, Pechudin said:

Wait are you supposed to put filkes here? I'm kinda keeping these maps for my Megawad project.

Post you WIP projects you mean? It's definitely encouraged, just to show off what you've done and to get feedback from players. But posting something doesn't mean you can't keep working on it or use it for something else down the road.

Mmm okay, I might get some more testing that way.

For this month I decided to something slightly different; I've been wanting to try my hand at making music for a while, so rather than mapping I wanted to try my hand at making some MIDIs for Doom!

A while ago in the NaNoWADMo Discord @JustAthel recommended Mixcraft to me for MIDI editing while it was on sale in the Humble Bundle. I've sat on it and a cheap MIDI keyboard for a while but I figured this would be a good opportunity to attempt some actual composition, and since I'm just using MIDI instruments I figured I wouldn't get too bogged down with things like VST parameters.

My original plan was to try and replace some of the Doom II tracks I don't like. I'm sure some people will murder me for this but I really think Doom II's OST is a downgrade from the first game's in a lot of aspects. It feels far less atmospheric than Ultimate Doom's and there aren't many more action-y tracks to make up for it. And I don't think there's a single person on Earth who'd associate the track titled "DOOM" with the franchise. But perhaps I'm throwing stones from a glass house since when trying to replace my first target, The Healer Stalks, I was struggling to get the atmosphere I wanted down from the outset. So instead I decided to just attempt to make a song from scratch without aiming for a specific tone or in-game purpose.

The tough part for me was figuring out how to make something that sounded like music and not just random keymashing. So I tried to teach myself some ultra-basic music theory. Stuff like chords, beats and measures, percussion rhythm, harmony etc. If there's anything I could pick up from just listening to music, I could hear the "segments" that make up the measures, so I tried to make sure my measures would sound correct as standalone "segments". In addition I recognised how beats and segments would be repeated in a track, sometimes with a new section afterwards. Again, basic-ass stuff. =P

I think taking a more "mathematical" approach is how I got something that actually sounded like music, if that makes any sense at all. After about a week I had finished a single, minute-length music track. It certainly could have been expanded and had a rather abrupt ending, but for the first piece of music I ever made, I think I did a pretty good job with it.

Once I exported the song as a MIDI I had to face a new problem: The song sounded completely wrong in Window's MIDI playback! The instruments were assigned correctly, but the differences between Acoustica Instruments and GS Wavetable Synth made it sound incredibly muddled. Sure, GS Wavetable Synth is well-known to be crap (the difference between their Override Guitar instruments is particularly embarrassing), but if it didn't sound right in GS Wavetable Synth it probably wouldn't sound much better in superior soundfonts or MIDI synths. Initially I took a trial-and error approach, making changes in Mixcraft and re-exporting it over and over until it sounded better. Thankfully Athel suggested I use Sekaiju to make adjustments to the MIDI file directly after exporting it. I think Sekaiju is too oblique to recommend it for making MIDIs from scratch, but for doing things like changing instruments, adjusting BPM or duplicating tracks for new harmonies, it does the job.

After that I made a second MIDI: A replacement for Doom's D_INTRO track. I figured a title track would be fairly quick to make compared to a level song. One thing I ended up struggling with however is since Doom and most source ports don't care about MIDI length and just start the title demos after a hardcoded amount of time, I ended up doing a lot of trial-and-error to avoid getting the song cut off without just upping the BPM too much. Doesn't help the timing's slightly different if the title is being shown after a screen melt instead of the initial boot of the game. If anyone would be bothered to measure exact timings for how long the title demo takes to play, at least one person would appreciate it. ;)

I was planing on making more MIDIs, starting with a D_DM2TTL replacement, but I uhh, got distracted? I recently got ADHD meds, while they're making me a lot better at being productive, they don't necessarily make me better at sticking to one thing that is productive. In particular I've been getting around to finally clearing out my room of stuff I don't need and re-organising it. And in the realm of non-productive October distractions, something something Wowie Zowie.

Despite my very casual take on NaNoWADMo and low output, I'm pretty pleased with what I came out with and I'm infinitely more confident in my ability to make music now. Really want to have another shot at making chiptune at some point. Both MIDIs are available here if you think they're good enough to use in anything: Yoshiatom's NaNoWADMo 2023 MIDIs.zip

There's one other thing I did for NaNoWADMo...

As October was coming to close a friend of mine gifted me Tower Unite. After discovering it's kart racer minigame has Steam Workshop support I had a very dumb idea that would involve doing some mapping...

You know Doomsday of UAC's famous overturned truck you start out in? How about we make it driveable for the first time in almost 30 years?

After painstakingly converting the sectors to be 3D floors so it can be exported as an OBJ, spending far too long figuring about Blender's painful UX and dealing with Tower Unite's 10 texture limit, you too can now confuse your kart racing competition with an ultra-niche reference!

Even if I didn't do as much as others, I had a great NaNoWADMo this October. Looking forward to seeing everyone finish/polish up their projects!

here is the result of this month of mapping! It was great fun. If I participate again tho, it will probably be on a lesser scale.

SHIT I wasn't able to finish my map, sorry.

Apologies about being almost two weeks late with it, but I still wanna' share what I did during NaNoWADMo. It's the first map of a planned 10-Map WAD called Doom By Numbers where each level has a theme based on the number in the map list. The first map I've put out has 1 very big thing for its mapslot.

I used OTEX textures for this, and even did my own music track! Hopefully I can also do unique tracks for the other planned maps.

Check us out finishing 23 days after the deadline for NaNoWADMo!