-- INTRO --

Below is a series of notes and thoughts about my participation in the Secret
Santa project. 

-- STUDYING THE SUBJECT --

I've been assigned Chris Kassap (lupinx-Kassman) as my imitatee.

The hardest part about studying LK's work is that a bunch of his maps are not
released yet. They exist and are playable, but aren't released, and his 
impression of his older work is that it doesn't reflect his current style, 
and is him learning the ropes of Doom Editing.

I disagree with this, though - his older works do indeed reflect his current 
style somewhat - LK, like other mappers such as Erik Alm, Darkwave0000, or Josh
Sealy, like SPACE. Lots of space. The more, the better. His outdoor areas are
large and give the player lots of room to move.

By contrast, indoors, it's cramped, but detailed. Care is also taken to 
light each area. This wasn't always the case before, as in his earlier works, 
but as his skills mature, so does his style. Seems to like railings on walkways
a lot. Understands sources of light and basic lighting. The detailing is almost 
copy-paste at times, but you can tell that he tends to experiment with 
different textures and such in order to give his maps an interesting look where
pure structure won't suffice. Some textures work well together, some do not - 
but they are still used in a way that makes sense and don't clash terribly in
terms of motif and style. Of course, some of this is seen in his earlier works, 
and back when the zeitgeist of "detail" cast itself over the Doom community.

In speaking of texturing, his texture use sees loads of variety, as opposed to
single swaths of color, with high amounts of contrast in every screenshot he 
takes of his works. Places where lights and darks contrast sharply tend to use 
less color, but the colors themseleves are vibrant or deep ones. Really likes 
the "base" or "tech" motif and tends to eschew organic ones, which is a shame,
since I'd like to see more of that from him - his emerging style seems to 
favor the scale of nature rather than man-made structures.

Architecture seems to be built to "wow" with its scale and shape. Lots of local
symmetry in areas with "structure." Monster placement seems bunchy, though - 
but that may be because of map size. His works don't exactly have too much 
similarity between them, save for the broad characteristics that I mentioned 
earlier.

Kassman's maps in CC4 (cchest4.wad) make use of "satellite" locations - little
self-contained areas that seem to serve as a break from the large areas. Maybe
they were a break for him though - creating maps as large as his could be
exhausting, creatively. Though that could just be me projecting - if I had to
make something that large, I would try to add smaller things in order to 
not stray too far from my comfort zone. 

Another similarity that I'm finding between him and me is the constant 
striving for perfection. The evidence is there with his "rejected" pieces and 
maps, and he publishes rarely. This shows that he cares about his work.

All that being said, I'm going to be challenged significantly by this.
I already know how I deal with making spacious maps, and that is "poorly" 
(see CC3 MAP29), but to be honest, it seems that LK suffers from the same 
difficulties - the challenge to fill the space with monsters, items, and 
scenery. Sometimes I think that Doom was never meant to scale that largely.

-- POST MORTEM --

-- CREATION --

Since I'm not exactly crazy about the base style because it forces me into some 
bad habits, I decided to make a map that would be a combination of my style and
his - one that would favor his love for space. That's why I picked a castle.

Castles are big, LK's maps are big: perfect, right?

Starting off was bad - I immediately made a smaller area: the kind that I'm 
used to rather than something large. Since I was kinda off to a bad start,
I overcompensated with the giant half-circle and sea. This was all well and
good, but it created another problem, how could I populate this with stuff?
There's so much room! I decided to leave it the way it was and move to the 
next area, the back of the castle. Eventually, I just started creating some
branches in the map and finding a way to connect it back to the start, trying
to avoid the pitfall that I created for myself in Coffee Break MAP11 - the 
beginning was only visited once. I also made sure that every place in the map 
was used as much as possible, in order to give the illusion of nonlinearity 
where it doesn't exist in actuality.

Despite the love and care that I put in this map, I think I utterly failed to 
make it seem like a "lupinx-Kassman" map, because there aren't many smaller 
inside areas, and the texture variance isn't too amazing, but I hoped to 
capture the feeling of a competely expansive space, and there's heavy use of 
primary colors, and enemies perched in high places and ledges, so hopefully 
invokes LK-like feelings. 

-- MAP FLOW --

As the map started to grow in size, I started to worry about making the map 
un-navigatable, as large maps tend to be. The level design technique that I 
usually employ to mitigate this, however, is making the player see where they 
WILL go before they CAN go there, which makes players create mental notes of 
where important landmarks are. You always have to be careful not to give the 
player goals without giving them notes of where to go next. Doom has to rely
heavily on this, since it does not maintain a list of "objectives" that the 
player can refer to, or a sassy sidekick to remind them of where to go next.

I have a certain flow to making a map - I tend to make them interconnected,
John Romero style, so that when I define the route that a player takes, I can
just change tags and items accordingly when I don't have a specific idea or
script for the player to follow yet. This happened early on - the red door at
the beginning wasn't originally locked when I was making the map, but became
a locked one once I fleshed out the route the player would take through the
initial "keyless" run. Once that key was grabbed, the next area, already seen,
becomes the next goal.

For example, if the player sees a locked door, they know that the door will
need to be opened by something that they don't have in order to go through it,
so while it isn't a "place to go," it is a "place that they will need to go 
later." Such things create lists in a player's mind: "I can't go there, but 
once I find the key, I'll have to go there next." Stuff like this is PARAMOUNT
to creating a large map so that the player doesn't get lost, frustrated, or 
bored. Outside of Doom, this technique can be seen in Metroid, Zelda, or other
"big world" games.

On the flipside, you can't show the player an obvious goal that they can't 
get to, or they will make every attempt to reach it, eschewing everything 
else. Right in the beginning, I show the player the red key. "That is your
goal," it says. "This is where you need to be first." The journey to that 
point is a series of landmarks and "places to go," showing the player what 
every hidden key will open. But the key that isn't hidden is the red one - they
will need to get there at all costs. I don't show the player where the rest of 
the keys are - if they see another key, they won't know which one is 
accessible, and they will get lost and frustrated, and this is because they now
have two goals, not one. You have to keep the player focused on a singular goal
in large maps; never let them wander, or you will lose them forever.

-- ITEM PLACEMENT --

Placing items and enemies is no picnic in a map this size. I was constantly
second-guessing myself in terms of monster use and placement, worrying if the 
player would be discouraged about entering areas, or lead into prepared 
ambushes. Large maps, without heavy variance in features and terrain, will
cause activated enemies to bunch up as they slowly lumber towards the player,
and this could cause unwanted crowding, but you don't want to place enemies on
ledges everywhere, as the abundance of "snipers" will frustrate players.

The only way to enforce crowd control and to ensure that certain enemies are
activated in different places was to create little invisible "pits" to hide 
them in, and pop them up once the player entered key areas. Cheap, I know,
but I tried to mark these areas whenever possible, in order to warn the player
first, so they wouldn't be taken too off-guard before the encounter. Another
tactic to use for that sort of thing is heavy use of the "ambush/deaf" flag,
which kinda felt like cheating, but it did the job. That deaf Cyberdemon in
the center area keeps waking up, in every source port, and I don't know why.

-- CONCLUSIONS --

All in all, I'm glad to have actually made a map that takes me out of my 
comfort zone, and hopefully the knowledge that I gained in making something 
like this creeps its way into other maps I make. I'd like to thank Brian
Knox for the opportunity, and lupinx-Kassman for having a distinct enough 
style to imitate.

- Matt Tropiano