DBP21: Occult Secrets of the Third Reich on Mars

glorious work gentlemen.

Probably a tangent better served for another thread but check it out anyway.

I'm happy how DBP has taken a life of its own. It's been very successful and you guys all owe it to yourselves for volunteering for it (mappers AND players.) Pretty soon DBP will have a combined greater number of maps than all three BTSX episodes combined in a fraction of the time. And people like them! Thats pretty amazing!

When I pitched DBP, my model mapset was Scythe 2. The idea being that with Scythe 2 has its own short episodes with their respective themes contained within the megawad. The goal was to imitate that but outside the 32 level megawad format. Each month youd get a new short episode with a theme totally removed from the previous, but just pure fun Doom.

Gaspe is right that making the maps short gives newer mappers an achievable goal in the ~30 day time frame, and other mappers adhering to that rule in a successful project makes it enticing to people who would like to help. For me, Scythe 2 was the mapset that encouraged me to start mapping. It had just enough attention to detail to look good, and easy to reproduce. I want DBP to be for interested mappers what Scythe 2 was for me.

Theres also some other reasons for it. Even though DBPs are growing in general length due to new contributors, I dont want to lose sight of keeping DBPs as little coffee break maps. Doom maps and megawads in general are huge, and depending on skill level, can take weeks to complete. Short maps is a niche mostly held by speedmapping sessions, but the month time-frame and combined effort is meant to be quality-focused. Since these come out once a month, I dont want players ever getting bogged down by content overload. They should be able to enjoy each DBP episode in an evening or two with enough time to anticipate the next one when it arrives.

Also ive read and listened to consensus from game reviewers for other games that have had to answer from commenters about games with 1000s of hours of gameplay (such as an open world sandbox or RPG) that in general, length of game doesnt really contribute to fun, and in many cases, length can be a detriment by elongating the path to the payoff of winning the game. I personally agree with this statement as megawad fatigue is a real boner for me as a player, and it sucks. Even maps that are good are exhausting to play if I'm spending over 20 minutes in them. From what ive seen in twitch streamers who play Doom wads, they dont articulate that opinion directly, but their expressions are undeniable. Long maps are a drag unless youre ready for them. A random long map popping up in a DBP can be an unwanted surprise.

In a community project especially, a long average map can drag down an entire mapset pretty badly in terms of overall experience. And when people review DBPs episode by episode (as they generally do) vs. map by map, this can be a real bummer for people who followed the rule; those who spent more of their mapping time insuring it for higher quality rather than general playing time. It helps the project as a whole for mappers to stay consistent in length. It is better for the other mappers who participated in this to not have their good but short maps steamrolled by the memory of that one map that occupies a large chunk of the general playing time and wasnt a particularly remarkable experience.

Also my last and most obvious point, people like to win! So a project with more maps and more intermission screen music is a relief! Especially if each map comes with a particular challenge in it that makes the victory worth it.

In hilarious news a dude, who shall remain unnamed for his own good, found this little easter egg twice:



and then sent off this pm to Large Ancient William: