Jump to content

Not Jabba's Not the Cacowards Review Corner (rd reviews The Iron Forge)


Recommended Posts

  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Blank Space:

 

AXHbjkdt.png JIgyqb3t.png

 

From Tears:

 

zXImOWGt.png QDcUHCBt.png

 

Mucus Membrane

 

7zDl41Lt.png Qg1pyElt.png

 

Ovum:

 

X8HXzQGt.png vOlEGkSt.png 7AyDaYnt.png nbmtFtYt.png

 

Eden:

 

DWiU8RHt.png rJ5LOYAt.png xCLNOQft.png vwymXiVt.png LHelGKkt.png

 

@rd. (no, I still don't know if that stands for anything) first appeared on the mapping scene with a rather explosive bang that was hard not to notice, releasing at least a half dozen hot-looking individual maps in separate threads over a very short span of time. This is the first time I've played any of those solo maps, however, due to a development style characterized by mostly finished RCs that languished in their respective threads and never saw an /idgames release. In fact, I don't think any of rd's maps have ever been declared "finished" except for their collaborative contributions to an assortment of Mayhem projects—not that rd's friends haven't petitioned to get them all assembled into a compilation on multiple occasions (AHEM). Of course, all of these maps are firmly polished and stand on their own two feet perfectly well, assuming you remember to stop waiting for the "release" and get down to actually playing them. The five maps I'm reviewing here are ones that I specifically tucked away for later attention; I know there were more, but I'd have to recall their names and dig them up via a forum search, which means that for practical purposes, they're lost in the mists of time for now. 

 

Rd's work is quite hardcore, probably in the top echelon of stuff that's not uber-niche, and I've never been the best person to talk about this sort of thing. I did, however, give it a serious try, and so far my victory count stands as follows: Blank Space on HNTR with some good luck and one death; a surprisingly comfortable max of From Tears on HMP, albeit with several deaths; Mucus Membrane on HNTR after a glut of suffering; and finally, a "good faith play" of all five maps on UV with god mode for reviewing purposes, which for the record is how I play most truly hardcore stuff. I suspect I can do better with further study, as rd is a very skilled mapper and they're all plenty fair.

 

The reason the maps are so tough is that rd's mapping style encompasses and integrates every means of imposing difficulty in the book—specifically, the lock-in arenas and smallish freeform pseudo-arena spaces that are common in modern slaughter combined with resource starvation and spatial pressures similar to the Chord series, with every battle of course being dominated by high-powered monsters that are tricky to deal with in conjunction with each other. From Tears on UV is particularly intense in the way that it uses limited ammo to keep pushing you forward into deeper trouble, refusing to give you respite from the powerful foes you haven't been able to kill yet. It is largely linear except for one optional side arena, meaning that if you can manage to silence everything trying to kill you in the first half, you'll have some breathing room to contemplate what to do next or (gasp) save your game—though victory is perhaps most easily achieved by hoarding as much ammo as possible through evasion until you get to the later encounters. Blank Space and Mucus Membrane are both much more open-ended despite their similarly small size, each one throwing you straight into the middle of combat and playing out primarily as a resource management puzzle, since you have multiple options for where to go and what to pick up but will release more monsters at every turn as you do so. With Blank Space (the easier of the two on any skill setting), it's basically a matter of choosing from various accessible weapons vs. the handful of health and armor pickups vs. collecting ammo to clear some space for yourself. In the more exacting Mucus Membrane, you get most weapons early but have to be extremely careful about both health and ammo usage in order to survive, as there is very little of either immediately available. In MM, small decisions can have a huge impact on gameplay: do you try to maneuver your way through the space-hogging hard-hitters to collect more rockets and the Berserk pack around the far side of the building, or duck inside and push through the gantlet of hitscanners and Arch-Vile in an effort to carve out some relatively save ground, or, god help you, attempt to survive the hornets' nest and grab the yellow key right away? The similarly styled Chord maps are much more linear, since their linearity/semi-linearity was used as the means of controlling the challenge. Adding nonlinearity to that same style of combat creates a lot of depth—especially in Mucus Membrane, which has multiple completely optional areas.

 

I should also mention that rd has a strong grasp of how to create interesting settings, though you can probably tell that from the screenshots. One thing I particularly like about their mapping is that they have never been very interested in the void setting that's formed the basis for much of the slaughter genre (with all due respect to the mappers who have created super cool maps using that setting). Blank space is something of an aesthetic inversion, with a pale sky stretching to infinity and onyx architecture, though some of the genre's more common tropes are present—bright red highlights, midtex platforms enabled by fake floors, and a layout constructed as islands over a sea of death. By contrast, From Tears is all-interior and brutalist, with a lot of essentially orthogonal architecture that emphasizes the routing aspect of gameplay and the tight confines in which monsters will try to corner you. Mucus Membrane might be a fairly typical indoor/outdoor map if not for the monster placement, but the combination of very dim lighting and bright yellow sky make it feel much more distinct, as well as creating an interesting dynamic where it's very easy to see monster projectiles but harder to see the monsters themselves against their muted background.

 

The three maps I've discussed so far all feel something like musical etudes; they're all pretty small and quick (if you can stay alive), and they serve to test specific skills in contained settings. For players of rd's skill level, I imagine they must feel like short, energizing workouts. Ovum and Eden, which I believe were rd's last two major solo releases, are larger and more fully fleshed.

 

Ovum, which takes place in an oppressive fleshtech-and-blood setting that perfectly matches the tone of its combat, is probably the strongest map that I played in terms of gameplay. It's dark, crowded, and utterly evil—every space is tight relative to the intense fighting it throws at you, and nearly every monster is very dangerous in those spaces. There's easily enough ammo to kill everything, but your ammo reserves are a constant concern even so, as it's easy to run low at specific points depending on the route you take or, more likely, run out of a specific ammo type you need to deal with the most powerful monsters in your way if you don't budget your pool well. You could call that imperfect balance, and it may be, but given the broader hostility of the map, I'm inclined to believe it's not accidental. The 10% damage of the blood floors is not to be underestimated, and radsuits are limited; managing the amount of time you spend in the liquid is a huge factor in the upper leg of the map, and makes your life that much harder as you jockey to get in a good shot while under fire or to maneuver around enemies you're not up to beating at the moment. Indeed, every piece of the puzzle seems to make every other piece more dangerous—constant motion is essential for survival, but movement is challenging throughout the map. There are also several fun secrets, and once you've found any one of them, you should have a pretty good idea of how to look for most if not all of the rest. In particular, keep an eye out for the one near the end of the map that leads to a very cool optional battle.

 

Eden, which is perhaps regarded as rd's magnum opus for the time being, trades in a bit of that tight no-holds-barred design for a more unusual layout style and a more beautiful, surprising aesthetic theme—though it's still quite combat-focused, as you'd expect. The map is set in a beautiful watery garden under a starry sky (or perhaps floating in space?), with a sort of wood and metal boardwalk fortress making up the first half, and the second giving way to a huge, lush natural paradise drenched with waterfalls. It's also got a nice modified palette that does neat things to the warm colors and makes the greens more vivid, and a few other cute details such as a wood skull key. As with Ovum, the setting itself seems to reflect the combat design. I mentioned that I god moded it based on expectations from playing the rest of rd's maps, but I shouldn't have, and I'm interested to have another go at it on UV without cheats; it's a spacious map with abundant resources, and I have a feeling it's the most accessible map I've reviewed here despite having far and away the highest monster count (about 16 times as many enemies as Mucus Membrane when all is said and done). It's almost as though rd decided to design it in the opposite style of what they'd been doing in previous maps, though it's still a hefty map and no pushover, especially at the finale. The early part of the map (in the boardwalk fort) is somewhat Ribbiksy and more confined, a running battle punctuated by some arena-like fights, but mostly scattered teleporting/roaming enemies that you can deal with at a slower pace if you like. The second half (in the jungle paradise) goes full-on slaughter, though as I said, there's a lot of freedom of movement; the whole sprawl is populated twice, with the second part leading up to the fiery endgame. As with Ovum and Mucus Membrane, a lot of the coolest content is optional or secret, so make sure to watch for that—if you can see an area, there's a way to get to it.

 

Rd is perhaps more polyglot than pioneer, but all of these maps are excellent as a result of their study and mastery of a variety of challenge modes. The hardcore genre was almost oppressively dominated by a handful of voices throughout the 2010s, at least in terms of popular interest, and it's really nice to see a fresh mapping style that feels like it contends pretty effortlessly with the heavyweights—though I realize these maps all came out in 2015 and 2016 and I could have played them ages ago. Most of these maps show a willingness to pulp the shit out of their challengers that's roughly on par with the US women's soccer team, but if you're looking for a fight, you'll certainly get it. The lower difficulty settings also offer good opportunities for skill-building; if you're looking to work your way up, I'd start with Eden or From Tears sub-UV, and save Ovum and Mucus Membrane for when you really want a hurtin' put on you.

Edited by Not Jabba

Share this post


Link to post
15 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

Fixed the credits.

To be precise, Matthias did the map, and I made all the detailing and tweaked the gameplay. I hate when the map has potential, but it is missed because someone is lazy to spend more time on it :-P

Edited by damned

Share this post


Link to post
7 hours ago, damned said:

To be precise, Matthias did the map, and I made all the detailing and tweaked the gameplay. I hate when the map has potential, but it is missed because someone is lazy to spend more time on it :-P

 

Oh it's not only laziness, but also lack of talent :)

Share this post


Link to post

many thanks for the writeups @Not Jabba, it was really fun to read :D

 

I'd always kind of felt Paradise map03 was the weakest map in the set, so I was (pleasantly) surprised to see it on your list. I didn't really realize until after I'd made all the maps that they're pretty jam-packed with arenas and discrete combat scenarios (which sounds silly because, well, it should have been obvious), with map03 maybe being the most blatant offender. which is generally ok with me because I do really enjoy that style of combat, but yeah, map03 especially felt like one or two of those fights should have been replaced with some more incidental stuff to break up the pacing a bit more

Share this post


Link to post

Violence by @AD_79

 

FQcfEkvt.png edMpncit.png 3w4CdWnt.png K2ohppPt.png

xdcq0SKt.png EcZoQHot.png mKmlcjSt.png PteGh8Vt.png

 

AD_79's Most Promising Newcomer year was dazzlingly prolific. Everyone had spent the whole year watching the development of 50 Monsters, which saw a full beta release that October but wasn't finalized until 2017—and then little more than a month after that beta came out, he dropped Violence on our doorstep. The nerve of some mappers, racing like hares and yet still showing up those of us who work at a tortoise's pace.

 

The cleverly punning title of course refers to the map's color scheme as well as its gameplay. Released in a time when color-themed mapsets were still a relatively new gimmick, Violence may have faced a bit of skepticism (from me, at least) for being "the other purple mapset," but it bears little resemblance to Stardate. Even the purples are different. Where Stardate's purple range is deep and saturated, Violence's is more soft and pale, like a lavender (though my memebrain insists that it should be referred to as "light urple"). If the whole aesthetic looks familiar, that may be because the Purple half of Mayhem 18 was basically a love letter to it, reusing the palette and many of the textures from AD's mapset. One thing I like about Violence's aesthetic is that it's not a one-trick pony, though. Although purple is dominant, particularly due to the sky, there's a lot of work done to make the color scheme into a trinity, with bright yellow and red standing out as strong highlights almost everywhere you look; the more purple-focused Mayhem did this too, but usually not as strongly. So as with most maps in Stardate, you get an overall look that's a lot more focused on color than it is on architecture, but Violence handles the aesthetic in its own way.

 

As always, AD's gameplay is firmly in the Alm/skillsaw camp, and Violence does a particularly good job with the fast pacing and bloody verve that characterize that style. What's really nice about it, for me, is that it's never very difficult, even though it has plenty of surprise attacks and moments of heavy combat. The monster population is rarely dense, the vast majority of enemies are fodder, and there's almost always plenty of cover to run for if you have to. But at the same time, there's always something happening—more enemies popping up or teleporting in as you grab items, and still more enemies around the next corner for you to barge into while zipping around. You're constantly well-equipped, but also constantly poised to use your big ammo for the sheer fun of it, as the mapset presents you with opportunity after opportunity to kill a whole cluster of enemies with a single shot of the SSG or rocket launcher. And that's just the incidental stuff—I'm not even counting the times when it practically begs you to rocket your way through small armies of Imps and zombies packed into tight spaces. The speed and tension of the gameplay go hand in hand with the ubiquitous placement of popcorn zombie hitscanners, which are the epitome of unfair level design glass-cannon combat, never a severe threat but always ready to take a bite out of you if you're not on your toes every second of the way.

 

For a mapset with such a strong sense of gameplay cohesion, though, it also has solid mapset anatomy, with each map presenting different sorts of fights. "Excavations" (map 01) is light and open, resembling typical introductory fare except with the nonstop ambushes and strings of bonuses that characterize the whole mapset. "Sinkhole" (map 02) has some close-quarters brawls in side buildings but mostly revolves around a single big fight in a sinking arena, while "Offshore" (map 03) is more of a whole-map-as-arena rampage across a concrete-and-metal construct reminiscent of an oil rig (the whole setup reminds me so strongly of a map in @A2Rob's Running Late 2 that I'm 90% certain the RL2 map is an homage to it). "Offshore" throws in some nice variety to the color theme as well; the rig sits in a sea of bright yellow liquid that, somehow, you just know is poisonous without having to be told. And then there's the title track, "Violence" (map 04), a loud and visceral rocket/plasma-fest that weaves in and out of tight spaces and keeps coming back to explosive battles down in the more open blood canals running through the map's center.

 

The low-stress, high-energy gameplay is backed up by a synthwave OGG soundtrack, which seems like a natural choice in retrospect, though it feels unusual when you first start up the mapset. There are even lyrics in the last track, which again takes a minute or two to get used to before eventually becoming something that you take for granted as part of the map's character. Since the flow of gameplay is so fluid, the trancelike nature of the tracks is a comfortable fit, and seems to osmose into your bloodstream and become a part of whatever driving force keeps you moving forward. The music even appears to become a literal part of the map for one beautiful moment in map 04, where the lights shut off and the walls drop and you're suddenly thrown into the middle of a rave with your rocket launcher and dozens of shreddable low-health enemies.

 

Having finally played it, I think Violence may be my favorite of AD's work. Stylistically, it's more distilled and exciting than 50 Monsters, but the fact that it's a solo release where all the maps can play off of each other as a cohesive whole makes it easier to appreciate the depth of AD's mapping than any single community project map. Back in 2015, I was perhaps put off by the music choices and the way the aesthetic was handled vs. Stardate, as well as the casual semi-speedmappy nature of the set, which made it seem like a throwaway release that was piggybacking on AD's creative energy from the megawad he'd just finished. But nowadays it feels perfectly at home with many of the more contemporary releases I've played, and it's so energetic that it would probably still be noteworthy if it were released today. Maybe that just means it was ahead of its time.

Edited by Not Jabba

Share this post


Link to post
  • 3 weeks later...

Thank for your review. Had a blast reading it.

 

Here is the full OST to WOS for anybody who enjoys it.

 

 

Edited by pcorf

Share this post


Link to post
  • 1 month later...

Spectrum by @Capellan

 

lT5uTuXt.png JQ6MOCHt.png MSZ36zyt.png oyF2irYt.png JU3pKXHt.png

xkLMOJGt.png TBBhRmdt.png 8a6uq4It.png HVp2xBgt.png

 

Capellan has been mapping for nearly as long as Doom has been around, but he's clearly not afraid to reinvent himself now and then. And if Requiem was a pragmatic (albeit inaccurate) acknowledgement that Quake was going to subsume the Doom community, then Spectrum is basically a huge "fuck you" to the influence Quake has had on subsequent games, and the reasons that Doom has lived on and to some extent outlasted it. Specifically, Spectrum flips the middle finger at the color brown. The experiment of this E3 replacement was to design Doom maps without any brown at all, as a love letter to what a colorful game Doom is. With no brown getting in the way, the mapset becomes liberated, reveling in the full rainbow of colors available in Ultimate Doom: gray, green, light gray, pale green, dark gray, dark green, red, very light tan, and the occasional splashes of blue tech or pink flesh.

 

Okay, so maybe it's not that broad of a spectrum. Moreover, these tend to be the colors I associate with Doom 1 anyway—brown is more the domain of Doom 2—and so if you open up these maps with the -nomo setting, you might well miss the fact that there's an experimental theme at all (not that they aren't nice-looking, and not that Doom isn't still markedly more colorful than most post-Doom FPS games). But here's the thing: no brown means no brown monsters too. And that's where Spectrum gets super interesting. It removes the most basic element of Doom's combat—the bland but virtually essential Imp—thereby giving Capellan the challenge of building gameplay solely from the more interesting but less obviously flexible elements of the bestiary: two hitscanners, three melee enemies, and two basic projectile-throwers that have the drawback of being too tanky for their threat level.

 

So you may well be wondering, are these just regular Doom levels with a ton of peppery snipers filling the holes in the fodder roster, plus sporadic ammo sponges to grind your way through? And in truth, there is a bit of that in the first few maps. M1 is straight-up shotgun vs. zombies, and M2 relies heavily on sniper surprises and health starvation (though both are pretty easy maps, and shouldn't take you long to get through). M3 is the turning point, both the source of greatest frustration and the place where the monster usage starts to come together into something more interesting.

 

The main combat mode that dominates the rest of the set is a fast-moving scramble, but at the same time, no one enemy is that much of a threat; it's more of an ensemble thing. The spongier Cacodemons and Barons serve as intimidating space-hoggers that try to push you around and corner you, the melee enemies support them directly by crowding you from multiple angles, and the hitscanners serve as an ever-present sting that keeps you on your toes and makes you keep moving. You have to prioritize the hitscanners as targets, leaving the bigger enemies to keep harrying you from room to room as you try to maintain the resources you need to survive. Meanwhile, trickling teleporter waves keep showing up in areas you've already visited, ensuring that you can't easily gain a foothold to use against the enemies you haven't killed yet. The whole span from late M3 to M7 is like that, and I found it really injoyable; it's intense, but still fairly low-stakes due to the enemies used. "Technology" (E3M5) is the best of the bunch at honing that combat style to perfection (which is why it was one of my top 20 maps of 2019), but M7 isn't far behind. 

 

There's a solid amount of health in these maps to keep you going, but ammo tends to be quite limited, to the point where a continuous player will often question whether or not it's a good idea to pistol start, trading in their armor carryovers and chainsaws for 50 bullets and, occasionally, the full 100 health. In that way, it's very similar to Sigil. It works in Spectrum's favor, though, since it goes in hand with the scrambling, resource-gathering combat style. Capellan has noted that he wanted to make the secrets really count, and they certainly do, either for a planned max run or for continuous players who go back for them after beating each map to prep for the next. The benefit of this, from a level design perspective, is that it makes the map feel like every scrap counts, and gives a true sense of reward to people who are able to hunt down the secrets. The place where this is most apparent is the midpoint of M3, where an insta-pop shotgunner horde ambush creates the real threat of a ragequit for players who haven't gotten to the best parts of the episode yet. I actually managed to survive that fight on the first try (but not the second, third, or fourth) by reacting quickly and having already gotten a plasma rifle. That said, the real fun is for observant players who've already found the sequence of secrets that circumvents the entire ambush, allowing you to flank the shotgunners and take them out through a window. Sorry-not-sorry for the spoilers there; you still have to find the secrets for yourself, of course.

 

As great as the overall style is, it's also nice that M8 and M9 add a little bit of variety to the mix and round out the episode. M8 is a tense arena fight featuring a custom boss (always a welcome addition, imo), a variant of the classic r667 Overlord with a few different attacks that push the player's retreat and emphasize the unfriendliness of the assembled Barons who want to keep you from doing so. M9 reverses Spectrum's whole schtick hilariously—an entire map of nothing but brown, populated mostly by Imps and a boss fight with the episode's only Cyberdemons.

 

In the end, Spectrum isn't just about having no brown. It also spits in the face of the idea that shooter gameplay needs to be built around basic, conventional building blocks, which is perhaps also a legacy of the Quake series and the era of brown FPS games. By challenging himself to use a strange and diverse array of niche enemies without the bread and butter, Capellan was able to create a unique, dynamic gameplay style. In doing so, he shows another thing that Doom mostly does better than Quake, and another reason we're still here playing it. I can't help but wonder whether this whole idea would be even more interesting in Doom 2, which has quite a bit more brown to prune. The more colorful elements of the D2 bestiary that would remain—Arch-Viles, Revenants, chaingunners, Arachnotrons, and Masterminds—would play pretty well with Spectrum's combat style, I think. In any case, Spectrum's limitation is the kind I like to see—not just simplification for simplification's sake, but a conceptual obstacle that forces the mapper to engage with the level design process in a totally new way.

Edited by Not Jabba

Share this post


Link to post

Thanks for the review!  I had a lot of fun making SPECTRUM.  Glad you enjoyed it, and that you appreciated the very deliberate decisions to challenge the traditional fundamentals of Doom gameplay (even the ones I agree with and like!).

 

Three reasons I did this in OG Doom instead of Doom 2:

1. I'd never* done an OG Doom episode

2. an episode of 8 maps +1 secret map seemed like the right length, and doing that in Doom 2 would mean starting on map12 or so, which seemed weird;

3. (most importantly) the absence of Imps is much more significant - Doom 2's wider bestiary would have obscured this a lot more.

 

 

* not technically true, but the one I did was made before Doom 2 came out, and it was awful, so let's pretend it never happened

 

Share this post


Link to post
  • 1 month later...

Incidentally my top two 2019 DBP's are the last two to be released in 2019: Umbral Platinum and the Christmas one. The former one is not a partial conversion, but it has some of the best mapping work, worthy of beating out MBG I thought. But the ones mentioned here are in the better batch, too (along with CFC).

Edited by FrancisT18

Share this post


Link to post
3 minutes ago, FrancisT18 said:

Incidentally my top two 2019 DBP's are the last two to be released in 2019: Umbral Platinum and the Christmas one.

Just to clarify in case it's necessary, those are 2020 DBPs for the purposes of this thread, because of how the Cacoward year works.

Share this post


Link to post

That makes sense then...so I'm assuming 2019 begins with MBG (DBP08) and ends with Alone (DBP17)

Edited by FrancisT18

Share this post


Link to post

That's a very nice write-up of a solid year for the DBPs, @Not Jabba. I'm glad I took that year out from community projects to refresh my batteries, but I did miss out on some great work whilst I was at it. Alien Bastards and Legend of the Hidden Tech in particular are favourites of mine. @Big Ol Billy deserves all the plaudits and praise he gets - his productivity on these projects has been incredible and he's definitely elevating the form!

 

I can at least be thankful that they were there to play, and unsullied by having been a tester, a lot of the time!

Edited by Phobus

Share this post


Link to post

Thank you for experiencing the pure awesomeness that is MINDBLOOD GENESIS! Glad you enjoyed it! About my map for Legend of the Hidden Tech I've been wanting to release that map separately as an isolated challenge but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

Edited by SuperCupcakeTactics

Share this post


Link to post

Wow, thanks @Not Jabba! A write-up retrospective like this is something every mapper probably dreams of. With the relentless pace of DBPs (I'm leading a fairly ambitious one this month), there hasn't always been a lot of time for me to sit back and reflect, so this brought back a lot of memories!

 

While I'm thinking about it, here are some somewhat random reflections for each of the projects touched on here. I figure NJ and readers here are the most likely to be (marginally) interested, so here goes. TMI incoming...


DBP08: MINDBLOOD GENESIS

Spoiler

This is a really cool one that I myself had nearly forgotten somehow! @SuperCupcakeTactics deserves a lot of credit for putting this together and, in a sense, launching the DBP series Mark II after the hiatus and the fairly impulsive DBP07 Xmas project, which was initially approached as more of a one-off farewell. 

 

In a lot of ways, I feel like I'm always trying to catch up to Cuppy, who just seems to have an endless stream of cool, fun ideas. I think you can see me being both really inspired by--and also trying really hard to measure up to--SCC here. I remember banging out all four of my maps in a fairly manic post-Christmas break two-week sesh. 


DBP09: LOTHT

Spoiler

Obviously a special one for me as my first outing as a project leader of really any kind. The write-up really helped me appreciate how the theme came together in a neat way. My original inspiration was trying to think of a novel way of doing a Mesoamerican set like one of my old faves, Brotherhood of Ruin. No diss on sets like that, but as I thought about it I wanted to put some kind of spin on the premise that didn't have that, shall we say, problematic subtext of "rampage through this non-Western civilization and slaughter everything in sight." I also think it's generally just good practice to have some kind of x-meets-y element to a visual theme for contrast, narrative progression, etc. So I started throwing in tech elements and it just really clicked. 

 

EH4omAR.jpg.28fe593002a6b0cdfb856fc01d550d7d.jpg

(My original crappy concept sketch for what a LOTHT map should feel like--some elements here did work their way into my map "The Steps of Knowledge")

 

It also made me feel slightly more comfortable with the inevitably exoticising element of this well-worn theme, which tends to collapse various distinct old civilizations into a vague mush of "otherness." Here, of course, we get that, but are constantly reminded through the tech elements and pseudo-backstage scenes that this is an artificially constructed aesthetic put together by a malevolent corporation, not a real human culture. And you're not a colonizer wiping out the indigenous population, but instead a little contestant trying your best to survive and resist in whatever small ways you can.

 

The game show idea was always vaguely suggested by the title, I guess, but the name choice was mostly impulsive. Making the bookend "prison" maps really made it feel like there was actually a story, though. If I remember correctly, almost all of the maps were made without any clear sense of that framing, and mappers were even somewhat surprised by the bookend maps. So on Not Jabba's question of "inspiring assets or strong directorial hand?" I think it's mostly the former. Indeed, as I've said before, it really can't be emphasized enough how intensely collective the DBP process is, regardless of who's leading. The core group is constantly working out stuff on Discord where 95% of DBP stuff happens, and these map sets really just bubble up from that constant creative, collaborative energy.

 

On "Risk Blazer," I'm amazed in retrospect that I almost rejected it for being too hard and gimmicky! Now I feel like it may be the ultimate and most ideal "bonus map" in all Doomdom (admittedly, I'm kinda biased). It's another model of Cuppy ingenuity, and I think it's just so impressive how many different little mechanics are strung together in this rollercoaster ride of a map. I'm also slightly amused that it lets you escape into.... Doom 2.

 

I'm still kicking around the idea of a LOTHT: SEASON 2 and even have some resources gathered for it. One of these days...

 

 

DBP11: LILYWHITE LILITH

Spoiler

I love the description that this is set in that 80s-music-video-fantasy world ala Meat Loaf, Total Eclipse of the Heart, etc. I really thought @Jaxxoon R was gonna bring home the first DBP Cacoward for this one! The aesthetics are so strong and pretty distinctive even in the vast realm of Doom content. Real DBPheads--if such creatures exist--notice we half-reused this theme in Biotech is Godzilla. Needless to say, we're all waiting with bated breath for Scrangus' next DBP! (fingers crossed)

 

As an old-school prog rock fan this was easy to get inspired by, as you can see from Cynthia & Henry (which riffs in a loose, free-associative way on Genesis' "The Musical Box") and the boss map (which obliquely references the Gabriel-era epic "Supper's Ready"). Both were made largely in my typical manic creative bursts, the first while visiting my significant other (and Doomguy Gets a Puppy co-author) and the latter in a single night after listening to the inspiration song.

 

FALL OF SOCIETY

Spoiler

Fun project, we should really do something like this again--I think targeting ZDoom 2.8.1 is an interesting space to work in. It was also cool to have the tools to indulge a bit more in narrative ideas. Here the terminal texts are adapted from one of my old professors' ethnographic studies of Pennsylvanian communities that have been effectively ransacked and turned against themselves by fracking companies. Here I tried to do a sci-fi twist on the well-worn idea of capitalism-->atomization-->environmental devastation.

 

DBP13: ALIEN BASTARDS!

Spoiler

This is a very personal one for me, believe it or not, even though NJ is right saying that ultimately the background narrative doesn't really matter. For the curious, though, the basic premise is that the loose extended universe of 90s Apogee games has become so politically corrupt and hyper-capitalist that heroes, especially older ones, now work in a contract-based gig economy with little in the way of benefits, stable employment, or good pay. Consequently, you're Halloween Harry, and you've been living on a tiny spaceship with other ex-90s heroes--Duke Nukem, Doomguy, and Cosmo from Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure--bidding on odd jobs, working constantly, and barely making ends meet. (You'll see an early poster notifies ship residents that they're independent contractors, and you end the set by finding the US-number tax form for independent contractor income.)

 

After you-as-Harry fall asleep at the wheel one day, tired from stress and overwork, you accidentally stumble onto a secret alien base. They attack and kill your co-heroes (each has a corpse and a few mementos in their respective bunks). But you set out to investigate and get revenge. In the background, TV screens suggest a developing political scandal back on Earth: a familiar-looking Earth President is caught up in some kind of financial scandal, but all of Earth's accountants have been abducted so that it's hard to prove or prosecute anything. It seems awfully suspicious that these alien bastards pulled off a scheme that was so helpful for the president, but he insists that there was "no collusion." For struggling gig workers like Harry and the other heroes-for-hire, though, it's hard to make much sense of the news because it seems so removed from the crushing economic conditions that discipline the daily lives of members of the working class. 

 

(Can you tell this project was made during the height of Mueller investigation media saturation in the US, led by someone who's spent a lot of time trying to grind out a living in the gig economy?)

 

I'm glad NJ pointed out the truly epic MAP07 here. I'm still hoping to do a sequel someday that mostly takes place in this evil-alienworld-type setting and possibly wraps up the story in some suitable fashion. Tentative title "Alien Bastards! 2: A Space Audit-ssey."

 

DBP16: CYB'S FREAKY COLONSCOPY

Spoiler

Also a weirdly very personal one, maybe even more unbelievably. The inspiration here was trying to put a positive spin on a very negative situation: my own experience with the US health care system. No, really!

 

To make a long story short, some time before this project I was recommended a medical procedure to with chronic stomach pain I'd been suffering. Unfortunately, my insurance and financial situation made it such that it made more sense to live with the pain than get medical care. I'd often used Doom as a natural pain-killer since there's something about the game that's incredibly absorbing to me in a way that dulls the pain I often have to deal with. Here the animating idea was to take it one step further--using Doom to construct a little virtual world with actual universal health care and brave doctors like Doomguy who will really go the extra mile, no matter how evil the patient or how gross the malady. So whereas LOTHT and AB! both had fairly standard dystopian settings, CFC was an interesting experiment in trying to come up with a utopian game world (particularly one I would rather live in!).

 

Dressing it all up in gross toilet humor and imagery was a great way to sidestep the pitfalls of either making the medical imagery too disturbing or the utopian setting too goody-goody/boring (the classic challenge of utopian fiction, of course). For example, I like the subtle reframing of Doom's central demon-killing gameplay: here you're only superficially destroying things--more fundamentally, you're healing another creature with each "kill" (which is why I thought it was important to replace the "Kills %" with "Infections %"). But with the scatological imagery, that retheming doesn't remotely feel like we've tried to sanitize (heh) Doom's combat or make an overearnest First-Person-Careworker/Universal Healthcare Simulator type experience.

 

The Krew really helped out on this one, coming up with some imaginative concept-driven maps that found cool hooks like Walter showing off the goofy Chaingunner-with-Cyb-body replacement in a puzzly Cyberdreamsesque map, the damage-everywhere gauntlet of Vert and Zedonk's collab, Scrangus' ingenious mechanic of shutting down the unkillable turret enemies, Glenzinho's high-wire act finale, etc. They were also especially invaluable helping out with some truly maddening bug-fixing--unfortunately, there's still a truly (maybe appropriately) bizarre bug that's holding up a proper idgames release. It can't all be joy, folks...

 

Edited by Big Ol Billy

Share this post


Link to post

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...