Breathless

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• https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/a-c/breathless

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Advanced engine needed  : Boom
Primary purpose         : Single play
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Title                   : Breathless
Filename                : Breathless.wad
Release date            : 7/2/18
Author                  : Nirvana
Email Address           : [redacted]
Other Files By Author   : Abscess, Snowblast

Description             : Breathless is a large, Boom compatible slaughter
                          map for Doom 2. The theme is deep blues punctuated
                          with cyan and is heavily inspired by Swim with the
                          Whales, both in aesthetics and difficulty. The wad
                          is inspired by a lot of things visually though,
                          from Metroid Prime's Phazon Mines to Sunder. I
                          wanted to make each individual area fairly unique,
                          so despite it being one large map and all within
                          the same colour palette, the areas hopefully still
                          feel varied. 
                          
                          The map has a slaughter 'design philosophy' and is
                          based around a lot of large set-piece fights, with
                          some smaller encounters here and there. It is
                          designed to be hard on Ultra Violence -consider it
                          close to SWTW map 3 for reference- and is balanced
                          mainly for this mode. HMP and HNTR are both
                          implemented with the former tested a decent amount
                          (not as rigorously as UV) and the latter given some
                          quick runs. Hurt Me Plenty is fun to play and I can
                          Max it fairly consistently without too much
                          trouble; I would suggest playing on this difficulty
                          first, as UV is punishing. Don't say you weren't
                          warned :D
                          
                          The wad has a lot of secrets, so look around if you
                          want to max it!

Additional Credits to   : Mr Zzul (Killer5), Loveless, Bemused, Benjogami,
                          Archi, 38_ViTa_38. See the wad's credits file (lump
                          in the wad) for texture/music credits etc.
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* What is included *

New levels              : 1
Sounds                  : Yes
Music                   : Yes
Graphics                : Yes
Dehacked/BEX Patch      : Yes
Demos                   : No
Other                   : No
Other files required    : None


* Play Information *

Game                    : Doom 2
Map #                   : 1
Single Player           : Designed for
Cooperative 2-4 Player  : Player starts only
Deathmatch 2-4 Player   : No
Other game styles       : None
Difficulty Settings     : Yes


* Construction *

Base                    : New from scratch
Build Time              : 8 months approx (including testing) on and off
Editor(s) used          : GZDoom Builder Bugfix, Slade3, Photoshop
May Not Run With        : Frame issues in Zandronum
Tested With             : GlBoom-Plus, Gzdoom 3.2.5, PrBoom-Plus, Zdoom,
                          Zandronum 3.0


* Copyright / Permissions *

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

You are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format;
and remix, transform, and build upon the material. If you do so, you must
give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if
changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way
that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. You may not use the
material for commercial purposes.

* Where to get the file that this text file describes *

The Usual: ftp://archives.gamers.org/pub/idgames/ and mirrors

I always like it when mappers include a text file with some information on the map in it, so I thought I'd do a write-up on my process for making Breathless. The other reason is because this map has been part of my life for the better part of a year and something that has given me a lot of joy (and frustration) throughout. I'm mostly writing this for me, but hopefully someone will get a bit of enjoyment out of reading this. This is kind of embarrassingly, narcissistically long, so apologies in advance for that.

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The map started as just the colour theme of blue on black. Something I like to do when I make maps is to make a large room and start filling it with cool looking objects, structures and colour themes. I'll build some mountains or a floor pattern or something and play with colours until I like it and the save what I make as prefabs. A lot of details in Breathless came from this exercise: the blue circular cliffs and the large pattern on the floor in the cyan tower (which is an outline of a CC4 floor texture traced over and then up-scaled) were prefabs from that room. 

I really liked the look of the secret fight in map three of Swim with the Whales (the one with the mancubuses on ledges surrounding you) and I wanted to make a map entirely composed of that aesthetic. I built a room with some podiums in it using that colour scheme, but with a more neon blue. It looked fairly cool (and the large podiums would eventually be used on either side of the exit portal at the very end of Breathless) but maintaining that theme for an entire map seemed like it would get dull quickly. 

I decided to scrap that room and attempted to build something more based around a rocky theme, interspersed with dark blues. Although I scrapped this room, it put me in the right direction. After this I basically didn't do anything related to mapping for a few months. I only started working on the map again because I got an image in my head of a chaingun sitting on cascading waterfalls and decided to work with that. The chaingun eventually became a rocket launcher, the space shrank and what is now the opening fight of Breathless took shape. 

As an aside, I was originally going to make it that the map started outside, above-ground and you walked into a decrepit, Dark Souls-esque castle only to fall down into complete blackness to find a BFG. I scrapped this because I played a wad of Bemused's and he had done the exact same thing at the start of one of his maps...goddamnit Bemused. 

Once the first room was built I got into a fairly good work-flow, building an encounter a day for almost a week. Most of the map was built in this period. I knew from the outset that I wanted to build a large Miasma-style slaughter map with a lot of different themed areas and a lot of hard encounters in it. Most of the map built itself just based on this principal. 

I already had the idea for the cave in my head, because I have always been a big fan of Metroid Prime and wanted to make something similar to the Phazon Mines. At this point the map was all one shade of blue -the cyan came later- and the idea was that the blue crackle texture was going to look like it was seeping into everything.

Unfortunately, I got carried away fairly early and realised I was honing in on the dreaded 65,000 sidedef limitation and didn't really want to have to get a new nodebuilder to deal with it. This was before the cave or the attached room were built (I built the area for the final fight before this as I knew I wanted to finish the map with a large Sunder-type structure) and I decided I was going to end the map there.
I was going to link up the area from the black key switch to lead to the final fight area with a simple staircase structure and end the map there. 

Somewhere in all this I was watching runs of Stardate 20x6, which has that pink BFG in it that looks so fantastic. I decided I wanted to do a simple colour swap, in order to give the map its own personal flair and so I would have another colour to place around the map -I also wanted to learn how to work with Boom palettes. A lot of the map was constructed by this point and it was honestly a slightly frustrating revelation how good the cyan looked, because I realised I now had to go back through the map and change a lot of things to utilise it -the tower being the main victim of the cyan brush. 

I kept seeing this cave in my head and could picture how well the colours would interplay and I decided to just say 'fuck it' to the sidedefs limit and started work. I think I built the entire first part of the cave in one stream -I don't have the VODs unfortunately. After this I reached my first real impasse with the map. Despite having a fantastic work ethic up to this point, I ground to a halt at this point and just coulnd't work on the map.

I did some extraneous stuff for it while I had 'mapper's block' though. The midi for the map was originally always going to be a rendition of Gwyn's theme from Dark Souls, but none of the midi sequences could really match the beauty of the original, so I decided against using it. All 3 of the midis used in the wad were considered for the map itself; I must have looked through about 50 midis in the process. I wanted something kind of sonorous but also intense and eventually settled on Sif's theme from Dark Souls instead of Gwyn's, because I found a really nice sequence of it. 

The other thing I figured out was the map's name. I wanted something that encapsulated the theme of the map, which takes place in a sort of ethereal deep-sea world. The map was named 'Abyss' for a long time, due to it being similar to the abyssal plain in the ocean's depths, but I came to the conclusion that the name was a bit obvious -I think it was also the name of someone on the Doomworld forums- so I needed something else. For some reason the name 'Breathless' popped into my head, which is the name of a French film that I have always loved. I think it worked for me because it evokes images of drowning -something that you might feel sometimes on Ultra Violence in this map :|

After a long time of doing nothing with it, my girlfriend suggested I just draw some random shapes and try and work something out from there. This is how the large cyan room came to be. I drew a bunch of triangles, then copy and pasted and flipped them and stuck it together to become the large floor/ceiling motif that made the final room. Creating all of those 242 sectors was a massive pain in the arse honestly, but I am pretty happy with the result. This was also captured on stream and I had help from Benjo and Pinchy to cut down on the time it took to build. 
 
The layout of the map was basically finished at this point, but I went back and created a few secret areas and the exit room. For the super secret fight I wanted to make something a bit ridiculous, hence all the zombiemen, but also something fairly challenging. I wanted it to look different from everywhere else on the map and so it has the blood pools to really pop against that cyan rock. I love how it looks, despite its simplicity. 

For some reason I had this strange idea for a 'secret exit' that you could only access if you found the super secret area. The concept was just that it would be an 'alternate ending' kind of thing for the map, which is why the exit room looks slightly different. I also really liked the notion that if you look for secrets you actually get some sort of small reward in the form exiting the map from the 'true' exit (not like those other plebs.)

At this point of course I thought the map was 'finished' and it stood large and in charge at 90k sidedefs (92844 as of now), but the state it was in once the layout and monster placement was complete was not pretty at all. I had massive, inexplicable framerate lag due to some poorly designed teleporters, I had a huge palette bug in Prboom-plus that made the entire screen look like tutti-frutti and there was an immense amount of errors, cheese and imbalances throughout the level. None of these issues ever would have been discovered or rectified before I posted the wad publicly if it weren't for all of the internal testers I had. I wont thank them all again here because I did that already in the credits list and in the forum thread, but it does need to be said that they basically took this map from an unplayable mess to what it is- perhaps still, in some people's minds, an unplayable mess. 

The testing process has been incredibly long -almost as long as the build-time for the map itself- and brutal at times. I wanted to tear my hair out fixing some of the issues I have discovered. One thing I have learned is that making your first major map a 92k sidedef monstrosity is not a great idea. The other thing I have learned is that seeing other people experience something you have created is a pretty great feeling, even if it's just a map for a game from 1993.

Thanks for playing!

-Nirvana