This map is called “Drown Stone” and it is a tribute to Stuart “Forty-Two/stewboy” Rynn’s style.

The inspiration for this map mostly came from stewboy’s more recent work, namely his maps in CC4, the Claustrophobia series, and the 32in24 series. His maps tend to be on the smaller side (likely due to the rules of the community projects he has been involved in), with the moderately sized CC4 Map 31 being the lengthiest of the levels I blasted through. The emerging themes seemed to favor heavy use of brown and/or gray, and the author also made nice use of Doom’s variety of brick textures. Interestingly, his bases seem to almost exclusively use 45-degree angles, while more rounded architecture is reserved for natural formations. Perhaps my favorite aspect of stewboy’s maps is his clever use of height variation and flow, making the map fun to navigate even when you aren’t battling baddies. The enemies work well within the layouts they are placed in, and the author seems to love sudden ambushes. I feel monster placement is my biggest weakness, and will therefore be the hardest part of stewboy’s style to imitate. One last note is that he also enjoys making music, and has composed nice melodic midis for not only his own maps, but many others as well.

Making this map was a refreshing experience, as it gave me a chance to take a break from my recent giant maps to try my hand at something smaller and more fast-paced. In an attempt to blend different aspects of the imitatee’s mapping style, I took the gray monochromatic color scheme of his 32in24-11 map, combined it with the brick and fluid theme of his cc4 map 31, and did this while attempting to maintain a scale similar to that of his Claustrophobia submissions. While constructing the level, I realized how much I tended to focus on visuals, so this time I tried to focus more on how the layout complemented the confrontation between the monsters and the player as he/she navigates the terrain. Since the author seemed to like including ambushes (especially right before exiting as seen in his claustrophobia maps), I tried setting up an aerial ambush in my map. However, Snakes saw that my ambush was a bit weak and not too stewboy-like, so I strengthened it by adding in some teleporting insurgents (which embarrassingly I think I had only done once or twice in maps prior to this one). The final touch was to inject some musical flair, so Stewboy’s midi “River” from his old midi collection became this map’s theme.

All in all, it was a nice learning experience, and the map was fun and relaxing to design. I am glad I took part in the project, and hopefully I was able to provide a few minutes of demon-slaying stewboy-style.