Li'l devil

Related to previous status update, I honestly don't have motivation to release anything or even do anything anymore except for just playing wads. At this point I've tried myself in pretty much all areas and the results are disappointing. Either I'm entirely bad at something, as is the case with speedrunning, or I put a lot of effort into something that results in almost no payoff, as is the case with mapping.

I think when it comes to mapping I've reached my skill ceiling, but whatever I released was usually not even noticed, let alone liked. Making maps is difficult patience-wise, and even when I have a lot of patience, the results still end up being not worth spending time on it. I get lucky if even 3 people leave any feedback on my map at all, to the point that I feel like crediting individual people for just playing them. I know a solution would be to just work non-stop on a megawad for like a year, but with my attention span creating a single map is already a massive undertaking.

Writing reviews has other problems, but this time even bigger than them being unnoticed. Basically, I'm one of those people who by default thinks in negatives only and tends to take positives for granted. It's just a trait of my character, but that being said, I can write about positives, it's just very hard to do. I can like a work, and like it a lot, but the individual positive aspects tend to blur in my memory, and in the end the only positive things I can write amount to "great atmosphere, neat design, good gameplay, etc". In the few reviews I wrote, I had to play with a notebook near my hand to write down every thing I liked so that I wouldn't forget it.

But an even bigger problem is that right now and in recent future I want to play through all the "classic" wads first, because I feel so out of the loop with Doom. How can I have a qualified opinion if I haven't played the "must play" wads first? So I'll have to catch up, but it'll take a long while, and there's nothing I can really write about these cool wads. I've just finished Ancient Aliens and what can I say about it? It's great! That's pretty much it. Also it has a BS softlock on map 24 that made me restart the map. That, and a few other annoying moments that I remember, but this is negativity again, and writing about that would make it seem like I hated the work.

Even just posting on the forums isn't satisfying for the most part. I just do it out of boredom and 90% of my posts are dumb joke filler that some people probably find annoying too. But I don't have any ideas what else to write about.

So all this makes me think that people like me (likely the majority) exist solely to just consume stuff others produce, be it wads, reviews or something else. We're here so that people with actual talent can shine and seem better compared to us. But at least I'm hopefully in the majority!