I really enjoy reading about the mapping process of wads I like, so I thought I'd write a bit about each map, and get Scotty and Gazebo to do the same. Contains spoilers for some secret areas, so read after playing.

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General Info                                                /-/
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Fractured Worlds is a collection of 8 blue/cyan Boom compatible (cl9) maps, spanning a wide variety of themes and presenting some challenging set piece encounters and incidental combat. There are some large and small maps, and each one contains a secret fight, accessible by finding the hidden purple keycard in each level. There are 6 maps by me (7 including the anti-Underhalls map at the end) and 2 secret maps by Scotty and Insane Gazebo, taking the map 31 and 32 slots respectively. Maps jump from tech gardens and deep caverns to grand neo-gothic architecture and abstract void spaces. 

The wad's main goals revolve around mixing up gameplay, with most maps having varying amounts of incidental combat, set-piece encounters, platforming, and exploration. The concept for the purple key and its corresponding secret areas came entirely from trying to make the colour purple look good in software mode. The wad was tested in Prboom-plus and it took a lot of work to get the purples to not turn into sludge. The idea to have each map have a secret encounter that used purple as a theme stemmed from this, with the fight in Starlit Core (Map 5) being the first one built and inspiring the rest.

The name 'Fractured Worlds' came from the shifting themes of the wad, as I wanted each map to be visually memorable and to be able to stand on its own, while also feeling reasonably coherent with the other levels in the set. As with naming all of my projects, the names for the maps and the wad itself took months to settle on, with a huge list of words built up over this period.

Originally, the project was going to be a series of Scythe/Plutonia themed maps, designed to be incredibly fast-paced and interconnected. I was going to restrict myself to using zero enemy teleporters in order to promote building encounters naturally into the environment and force myself to consider enemy placement for each area as it was being constructed. Fractured Worlds actually began while Entropy was being built, and I was trying to avoid any large-scale maps due to suffering from burnout working on that wad. In the end, Tomahawk is the only real remnant of this concept, as I quickly decided that I wanted to ramp up the detail once I had settled fully on the new palette and started to see the kinds of spaces I could make with the Essel textures Ribbiks provided. 

This meant that I had to do many passes over maps as I incorporated new textures/resources and began aiming for higher levels of detail and large-scale design.


INDIVIDUAL MAP INFO:

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Map 1 — Tomahawk by Nirvana                                 /-/
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MUSIC: The Combatribes Level 6 by Kazunaka Yamane — Sequenced by Stockman

This wad was built around the original concept of Scythe/Plutonia style maps with tight layouts and interconnectivity as a major factor. The idea was to have nearly every section of the map connected to one another to form a deathmatch-style circuit, allowing for free-flowing movement and fast gameplay. 

The map was basically meant to force the player to stay in constant motion and to be a warning about the difficulty of the set, with every weapon being some sort of trap. I also wanted to give a BFG in map one to set the pace a bit and to allow players to be ultra aggressive, and to get used to insta-gibbing the baby cybers. The map was mostly inspired by eaxt.wad.

While the gameplay and layout were finalised a long time ago, the textures were overhauled more recently, with all the old Plutonia brick replaced with the bronze and Stardate trimmings, and a lot of red accents removed and replaced with the more complimentary blues. While this map was the first to be fully completed, the secret fight in the map was added after the completion of the other maps, as originally I intended to leave it without one. The map's name was meant to reflect the swiftness and aggressiveness of the gameplay, so Tomahawk seemed fitting. 

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Map 2 — Midnight Tengu by Nirvana                           /-/
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MUSIC: Moonblood Map 21 by Deadwing

One of the maps that took the longest to come together in terms of theme. This map was also textured when the wad was still meant to utilise Plutonia textures, and it caused me a lot of trouble when I wanted to reskin the map later on. Implementing gameplay was somewhat painful as well, as the spaces took a while to take shape. The Dojo fight was the first piece of major gameplay that was implemented, and the nature of that fight and its aesthetics informed the rest of the map stylistically and in name.

I had been watching Cowboy Bebop for the first time while making this map and heard the midi on a stream somewhere, somehow it made sense to bring some jazz vibes into the map's theme and I loved how it came together.

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Map 3 — On Electric Winds by Nirvana                        /-/
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MUSIC: Ambient/Djent by ninja.kitty (rearranged by Ribbiks) 

This map was perhaps the most challenging to complete, and a real bugbear for me throughout the process of making Fractured Worlds. I had the opening area and the first cave section mapped out for what must have been months, with a vague layout of the large outer area and its structures and some squiggles of interconnecting hallways attached. I sketched out some of the outer area on paper and landed on the design for the structures I wanted, as well as the rest of the layout. Eventually, after staring at the map for months on and off, I sat down and just started drawing lines, building basically all of the platforming section near the yellow key in one sitting. The rest came together after that.

Much of Electric Winds is me experimenting with boom gimmickry, such that this behemoth of a map has some of the more unique encounters in the wad. The viles lowering each other on lifts is one of my favourite concepts, as it messes with player expectations of how the encounter is going to play out. I put a 32 block in there so that if players got really screwed by the viles they could maybe survive with a few 20 damage vile blasts.

The final fight is a straight ripoff of the fight from Darkwave32, as Ribbiks suggested I should do something with that fight idea and I liked the concept. The liquid changing fight was also a vague idea given to me by Ribbiks, which I tweaked a bunch and turned into a fully-fledged encounter because I liked it so much. It was incredibly painful to get the voodoos and control sectors to behave, but eventually the timing worked out and the resulting effect is pretty unique. Thank Ancalagon for the switch that shows you the effect beforehand, because you were just dumped into a pain sector originally.

The name was mostly an attempt to convey the tech meeting with the more natural elements of the map. Drawing this much 'natural' geometry really got me acquainted with the 1 pixel grid; it also drove me to the brink a few times. The midi Ribbiks supplied for this is astounding, and fit the theme I had come up with perfectly.

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Map 4 — Hyperspeed Descent by Nirvana                       /-/
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MUSIC: dfd5_r by Ribbiks

Hyperspeed Descent and The Outermost were originally part of the same map, which I ended up splitting into two and completely retexturing/rebuilding. This map was originally just the rocket launcher and BFG section for about a year, before I finally sat down and built the entire thing over the course of a week or so (sometimes I am productive.) Ultimately the map didn't come together until I found the midi for it, which Ribbiks later extended and touched up a bit.

I knew I wanted one of the secret fights to be berserk-centric, and I knew I wanted to force UV/Maxers to do the fight properly, so this resulted in the incredibly rude, missable shoot-switch at the beginning. The original concept was to have punching a baby cyberdemon reward the player more than if they chose to use another weapon, but ultimately I came up with the current encounter, which tries to have the player plan out their moves to get the cyber infighting and weakened so they can finish it off with berserk. The option to go back for the plasma and return was put in so people wouldn't be mad that they have to punch a cyberdemon.

In terms of spectacle, I think the final fight of this map may be tied with Electric Winds' finale visually. I'm reasonably proud of the lowering pyramid of barons and hell knights teleporting in to attack the player; something about organic monster tps built into the map itself feels particularly satisfying from a mapping perspective.

The map's name was taken from my huge list of random words that I keep for wad titles, and was intended to capture the fast gameplay and tech theme, as well as the player's hurtling down towards the 'core' in the next map — LORE!

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Map 5 — The Starlit Core In Meltdown by Nirvana             /-/
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MUSIC: Dread by Xaser

Most of the major rooms in this map were constructed reasonably early on, but weren't finished until I went through the maps one by one to flesh them all out and complete them. The final fight was inspired by concept art of the Library from Halo 2 (the end of Quarantine Zone,) and the Pacman-type shape of the main structure, built around a central core, made me want to have the fight force movement through the centre. This also iterated on the blue key fight, which I think of as 'meditations on circle strafe,' as they both attempt to build circle strafe fights that necessitate more interesting movement and thought. 

The secret encounter was originally in Hyperspeed Descent, but due to the berserk fight being added, I moved the entire thing here. Getting the barrels to be consistent was incredibly annoying, and lots of nuance was added to the fight (such as the purple floor being a few pixels too low for the cybers to shoot you when standing on it) in order to pronounce the gimmick. The 'no sound' element returns from Entropy, but it's less of a death-sentence and more of a warning for blind players, as the fight is completable, though messy, if you fire. There was originally a radsuit before the fight started, but it essentially nutrilised most of the threat, so it was removed in favour of a megasphere that allows players to tank the pain sector on the way to the encounter a bit more readily.

The map didn't come together until the platforming sections were added into the first area and the later connecting part between the blue key fight and the penultimate fight. Perhaps my favourite sections of the map, as much of Fractured Worlds is an attempt to vary the types of gameplay player's face.

For the name, I just wanted something long and abstract, that also captured the final room of the wad. 

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Map 6 — The Outermost by Nirvana                            /-/
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MUSIC: dts_redux by Ribbiks

The Outermost took the longest to piece together. The map is a real mish-mash of themes, as I wanted to experiment with fusing separate texture groupings together into something vaguely coherent, but ultimately maintain some sense of jarring the player. The opening section and flesh cave were built fairly quickly during a couple of streams, though they went through a number of visual changes. The atmosphere of the map didn't come together until the large void space with the single red tree were added midway through the map's construction. I wanted players to understand that the tree signified something, but be unsure of what, and the ambiguity of it, and odd nature of its placement, was enough to make the space interesting.

Orginally, the map had a weird wooden tech section in the middle and a dark green brick area connecting it to the opening. Throughout the course of building the map I likely retextured those areas 4 or 5 times in an attempt to make myself like them. Ultimately, after calling the map finished, I decided to just delete the entire centre and start again from scratch. This turned out to be the right call, as the blood-filled cave section ended up looking much better and tying in the texture themes in a much more coherent fashion.

The super secret area was vaguely inspired by Nier: Automata, with the entire concept revolving around some sort of visual shock to the system. I also really wanted to play with the idea of creating detailing using only lighting and contrast, as well as the fake contrast created by the engine. The area was originally going to just be a series of puzzles to complete, but I decided I wanted something more shocking, and so I messed around in Dehacked a bit and ended up settingly on the weird void cacos. The teleporter out of the area wasn't monster blocked for a while, so the cacos would pour into the map if left alive, but unfortunately their pure blackness just looked too awful against actual textures to allow it.

The name for this map was actually changed at the very last second, as I had a list of words I liked and 'Outermost' suddenly stuck out to me more than its original title.

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Map 7 — Dreams of a Higher Being by Nirvana                 /-/
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MUSIC: Dark Siege by Jared Boice

Nothing worse than ending up in Underhalls afer being immersed in an atmospheric wad! I had been playing a ton of Ghost of Tsushima, and I became enamoured with the graveyards scattered around the world. A lot of the shapes in the graveyards were squares and rectangles, so it seemed feasible to make them look ok in Doom. The gigantic eye is a bit of a throwback to Entropy, but also because I've always loved Breath of Fire 2 and the cutscenes with the game's penultimate boss, Barubary, in them, so I wanted to use that image in a wad. The tiny eyes came later and were inspired by the Abyss from Dark Souls 1's DLC. 

I knew I wanted an odd little secret in this map that would provide the player with nothing, and the mechanics of it were decided upon after the fact. The ocean nods to Breathless, and I did consider a midi change when you discovered it at one point, but it felt on-the-nose (not to mention midi changes still being busted in Prboom-plus.)

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Map 31 — Dark Matter by Scotty                              /-/
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MUSIC: Alice by Jimmy

Around the time I made this map I was tooling around with combat ideas revolving around barrels blocking monsters from spawning in, and I decided I might try building an entire map around the concept. The midi selection (Jimmy's 'Alice') set the tone for this map and inspired the aesthetic for a large tech installation surrounded in bleak darkness. I built the bulk of this one in late 2019, around 2 years before the wad was released, with the secret exit arena being added late in development.

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Map 32 — Amarite Accelerator by Insane Gazebo               /-/
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MUSIC: Dreams by Christopher Stevens and Tim Clarke from The Incredible Machine 2

Having recently played Sunlust, Stardate 20x6/20x7 and Magnolia I was feeling pretty inspired to come up with a map full of gimmicky encounters. I’d only fairly recently returned to the community and was blown away by a lot of the creative encounters in those wads. Some of the encounters in the map are my own versions of fights present in those wads with a few tweaks, some of them I hoped were original.

The reverse crusher fight, for example, was inspired by the infamous Sunlust29 mexican wave fight. 

I was pretty nervous about how people would react to the map given how experimental it felt, but people seem to have enjoyed it quite a lot which was a big relief. Nirvana’s early work on Fractured Worlds also helped inspire the visual design of the level. And a big thanks to Bemused for explaining to me how voodoo powered light sequences worked.

The secret fight was added almost last minute after I discovered my map was the only one that didn’t contain one. Glad I did, though! (And boy were those voodoos a pain to get working.)

Expect to see a lot more voodoo shenanigans from me in the future. :)


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""7      THANKS FOR PLAYING!       /""7                                           
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