I’m really going to have to hustle and catch up on posts, so bear with me. I seriously regret not keeping up with everybody’s dev logs. They’ve all been really interesting, and would’ve seriously helped me stay inspired for my DOOM projects.
Going back to my speedrun was pretty nostalgic, but mostly traumatic. I didn’t remember which of my saved WADs was the actual successful run, and I had to go and just look through every single one of them, most of which were my most infuriating near misses and attempts. This ranged from being killed with the exit in sight, to making a perfect jump just to have the hallway bodyblocked by an imp, to perfectly doing everything just to run onto a nonexistent bridge because I didn’t manage to flip the switch when I rushed by earlier.
I still don’t regret my experience though. The first time I made the “jump” was an enlightening moment where the mechanics of DOOM suddenly massively opened up for me, and the actual mechanical, Nintendo-hard intensity of trying to get the perfect speedrun gave me a refreshingly familiar feeling of immersion in a game’s most core play. If I never did this speedrun exercise, I feel like the kind of levels I aimed to create during the modding period of the class would’ve been really different.