Moonlight - A cryptic, monsterless, puzzle map (on /idgames)

[dobu gabu maru]

Moonlight is the polar opposite sister of The Given. The map is (technically) beatable without hints, but they're available in lower difficulties for anyone that needs them.

 

>>>Download here<<<

 

(Old Release Candidate)

 

Please spoiler discussion that gives away the main mechanics of the map. Oh, and don't bother with FDAs—send me photos of your notes instead :)

 

Screenshots:

Spoiler

 

Edited May 15 by dobu gabu maru

[VanaheimRanger]

Ooh, I am very bad at puzzles.  But it's so pretty!

[Catpho]

I wonder if this is the Fez-inspired map you were talking about? Also yes, i'm getting my pen and paper.

[Linguica]

18 minutes ago, dobu gabu maru said:

Oh, and don't bother with FDAs—send me photos of your notes instead :)

 

[7hm]

Hellllll yes.

[antares031]

15 hours ago, dobu gabu maru said:

Oh, and don't bother with FDAs—send me photos of your notes instead :)

 

 

 

And of course, spoiler alert:

Spoiler

 

Edited January 5, 2019 by antares031

[dew]

16 hours ago, dobu gabu maru said:

Oh, and don't bother with FDAs—send me photos of your notes instead :)

I'll shamelessly take credit for this.

 

edit: My uncensored beta version notes. Literally spoilers, so don't click before finishing.

 

Spoiler

https://imgur.com/a/apoE7FP

 

Edited January 5, 2019 by dew

[General Rainbow Bacon]

This is sweet.  I love puzzles!

[dobu gabu maru]

2 hours ago, antares031 said:

 

And of course, spoiler alert:

  Hide contents

 

Ahaahaa you cheeky bastard! I always feared this is what would come of releasing Moonlight.

 

FYI a lot of people take a break at the point that you're at, then finish the map the next time they pick it back up. And why yes, I do love supermoons. Oh, and

 

Spoiler

Your "B" letter should be raised by one unit

 

Also for future reference, if people post their notes, could you please spoiler the unblurred image? I like seeing what's written, not just how many pages it's taken!

Edited January 5, 2019 by dobu gabu maru

[7hm]

This was fantastic. I'm not great at puzzles, but I spent a couple hours on it last night and came back this afternoon to finish it off. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes puzzles.  Nothing to do with Doom, but fucking awesome to see something like this.  What a creative use of the engine.

 

Spoilers for pen and paper images:

Spoiler

1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spoilers for minor bug stuff:

Spoiler

 

You've got a spelling error in the ending text.  says remebmer instead of remember

In #2 of the in memoriam map I think you've got the wrong letter for t in story.

 

 

Spoilers for random commentary:

Spoiler

Two puzzles stumped me.  The first one, and the last one.  The first one I just had no idea what you were going for.  It's fine, I should have figured it out based on the title, but it also just takes like a single death to brute force it.  I dunno, given where you went with the rest of the set it wasn't a very compelling opener.  I think the in memoriam map scenes to start with, then the earth puzzle, would make more sense.

 

For the last puzzle, the issue is that I never solved the dot language the way you intended.  I originally thought it was based on the structure of the lettering.  That obviously isn't the case, but it was close enough that I was able to brute force the language through context.  So when it came to the actual moon phases as letters, I was completely lost.  I still should have figured it out by actually writing the dot language out as an answer, that's definitely my bad.  Brute forced this one through a couple deaths just to see what was past it.  Went back over with clues and then it was obvious what I had missed.

 

Other commentary on the puzzles:  the candle puzzle was interesting but the use of 6 and 1 seems somewhat arbitrary.  I overcomplicated things and thought you might be doing something around binary, so I went down that path for a bit, but the 7, 21, and 42 finally sorted it for me.

 

The language was simple but fun. Definitely that & the story was my favorite part.  Honestly I would have liked some tougher questions, but riddle combined with coded language can lead to frustration, so I get it.  That said, I'd love to see this writing used elsewhere in your maps or in some kind of larger set.  After the couple hours with it I can read it without referring back to the translation page.  Our brains are funny things; my son has a learning disability where he can't keep the English letters straight, meanwhile arbitrary coding takes only a short period of time for some people to internalize.

 

The dot language was annoying to transcribe.  I still don't get how you translate it with the XY coordinate thing.  When I saw that hint on my second run through I was a bit surprised.  I liked it though.

 

The in memoriam map was touching.

 

 

Edited January 5, 2019 by 7hm
spoilers

[dobu gabu maru]

48 minutes ago, 7hm said:

This was fantastic.

 

Thanks for playing (and decoding)! Good catch on the INTERPIC error. Unfortunately the other error that you pointed out isn't valid—might wanna go back and re-examine that word ;)

 

Spoiler

Also the recurring line is "Our Sweet Prin-cess", not "Our Sweet Sweet Jess" hahaha

 

As for your other points...

Spoiler

The first one is sort of designed to teach you about "wrong answers" in the map, and can't really be made more clear than it currently is. The In Memoriam stuff was always intended to be a reward for completing the map, and sticking it in first would potentially confuse people as they might think there's some sort of order to the murals or a hidden message within (people would definitely start counting the number of lunarians and stuff). The map is kept purposely minimalist so as not to confuse folks more than necessary—and even then, you have people that, oh say, try and compare the number system to binary ;)

 

Shame that you struggled with the last puzzle because you struggled with the singing system (or "the dot language", as you put it). The singing system isn't all that complicated (I think). All words are formed from connecting the nodes on the 1-6 grid. So for instance, the letter "A" is formed by nodes 3 & 6 connecting, yeah? Or how "M" is formed by nodes 1 & 2, 2 & 3, and 1 & 4 connecting together. So what you do is look for whether the nodes are connected horizontally or vertically—that is, on the X & Y axes respectively. So for instance, for the letter A, nodes 3 & 6 connect, forming a flat line—so that's 1 point on the X column. And for M, it connects 1 & 4 horizontally as well as 1 & 2 and 2 & 3 vertically, so that's 1 X point and 2 Y points.

 

And yeah, the riddles are very rudimentary, but I figure most of the headache from this map was going to be transcribing the languages.

Thanks once again for playing and posting your notes!

 

[7hm]

Hah, yeah looking back at just what I've got on my page for the other error and the word is clearly not what I thought it was. 

 

re: one of the puzzles

 

Spoiler

I see it now for the singing language. I think my attempt at solving the second puzzle with binary is more intuitive than mapping the letter forms to an XY grid, but all our minds work differently. :)  Thinking about it some more, my failure with the last puzzle had nothing to do with that though.  It was the fact I didn't write out the singing language against the moon phases.  Definitely my bad there.

 

[antares031]

8 hours ago, dobu gabu maru said:

 

  Hide contents

Your "B" letter should be raised by one unit

 

 

Hehe, I should have double-checked it, before I use that. Thanks for pointing that out!

[dobu gabu maru]

 

Moonlight is now on /idgames! Figured the thread had gone silent for long enough that I didn't need to make any more changes. Big thanks to everyone that helped playtested it—this was the hardest friggin' map to make changes for, so having other folks help me think up alternate hints took a load off my shoulders. This is my last solo puzzle map for the foreseeable future, so I hope you enjoy!

Edited July 26, 2019 by dobu gabu maru

[Mangosteen]

I've recently stumbled on this map in idgames by pure chance and when I saw that it was all about puzzle solving I just had to try it.
I was pleasantly surprised that you were being serious about needing to write down notes, it's been a while since I've played a game that demands that much from the player. I got a bit stuck a few times (specially as early as the second and also the fourth puzzles due to not understanding some images at first) but it was nothing that couldn't be solved without a little extra thinking or just taking a short break. It was nice to see no moon logic here, pardon the pun. The looks are definitely quite unique and beautiful, it was great to see more and more art with each solved puzzle, not only in the map geometry but also in the minimap itself.
Since you have asked so nicely in the readme, here are my own notes.

Spoiler

 

I'd also like to point out what I believe to be minor typos in some of the later messages

Spoiler

In the remembrance message you get after finishing the last puzzle and spot in the bonus area the glyph corresponding to 's' appears to be shifted one row down. Likewise, what I believe to be an 'a/i' in the second message of Earthsong seems to be shifted one column to the right.

Thank you very much for this experience! I'll be checking out the sister WAD of this!

[dobu gabu maru]

On 8/11/2019 at 5:33 PM, Mangosteen said:

Thank you very much for this experience! I'll be checking out the sister WAD of this!

 

Thanks you so much for playing, and excellent catches on the errors! I've updated the wad accordingly. All these obvious spelling errors makes me feel like I'm back in middle school. Excellent notes too by the way, you're among the most organized I've seen. Small question: did you struggle with the last (sixth) puzzle? I'm always most curious how people fare with that one, since it took forever to get "right".

[Mangosteen]

7 hours ago, dobu gabu maru said:

 

Thanks you so much for playing, and excellent catches on the errors! I've updated the wad accordingly. All these obvious spelling errors makes me feel like I'm back in middle school. Excellent notes too by the way, you're among the most organized I've seen. Small question: did you struggle with the last (sixth) puzzle? I'm always most curious how people fare with that one, since it took forever to get "right".

Thanks, being this thorough on my notes really isn't usual of me. After failing to write proper notes in other puzzle games and suffering from it, I've decided to be more meticulous this time around and it certainly helped me organize and understand the puzzle logic here. Specially since each puzzle required the player to use knowledge built from the previous one.

Regarding your question:

Spoiler

A bit. At first, I only had 'sun' as a certainty from the examples of the puzzle and I wasn't too sure on how those three letters would translate to five digits.  However, as soon as I assumed that the queen would be the 'moon' as a counterpart I noticed the repetition of values of where 'm/n' and 'o/u' would be, confirming that the examples were new glyphs representing the same writing system seen in lightsong. After having set that assumption, I spent several minutes figuring out how the values would translate back to it. I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't only then that I noticed how every single puzzle had gone back to a base 6 numerical system, specially the grids of lightsong.
Of all the puzzles, I spent the most time stuck on the second. I couldn't figure out what the last example spelled as I still didn't have half of the letters and I started assuming words like 'angel' or 'fly'. I guess that the bits that involved more interpretation instead of logic were my weakest points.

 

[kuirivito]

This is truly one of the most beautiful and amazing maps I've ever played; it speaks to me in a way that I cannot put into words and may never be able to. I hope that dobu is still doing well and I'm really glad this is an experience I was able to have.

i know it's been years since this thread has been used, however I played this last year and realised that, as per the creator's request, i'd like to send the notes that i had made for this beautiful map, so here:

Edited April 13 by kuirivito
Spoilering Pictures

[dobu gabu maru]

23 hours ago, kuirivito said:

I hope that dobu is still doing well and I'm really glad this is an experience I was able to have.

 

Hi hi! I am doing well and it gladdens my heart to see another soul brave the lunar temple! This bump reminded me that I needed to update the wad because one of the hints on skill 2 doesn't show up properly :P

 

Also, please PM me your non-spoiler notes! I have a folder I keep of everyone's notes and I love seeing how folks organize their thoughts, deductions, and key information. Enough time has passed that I'll probably update this thread with a post-mortem of some sort.

[dobu gabu maru]

Moonlight has been updated.

 

Nothing groundbreaking here—fixed a missing hint, moved a couple nodes around, and added one more hint for skill 2. A big change I made was something that's been bothering me since the original release: that the hint system always displays in Boom-related ports. I hate forcing people to play in ports they don't prefer, and considering the popularity of DSDA now, I bit the bullet and reworked how the hint system works. So now instead of hint linedefs being marked as shown (and thus appearing at the start of the stage in Boom ports), I hide them behind midtextures so they show up naturally when the player looks in their direction. This took a while to piece together, as I had to find good spots to put the midtex walls (and had to make a new midtex just for one hint). That and DSDA had issues in certain rooms displaying all the linedefs at once, as revealing linedefs on the automap appears to be height based? I dunno.

 

In any case, at least Moonlight can be properly played in other ports now ^{(although dying will still softlock the player but oh well it fits thematically)}. I'll probably bump this thread one more time to update it with the notes I made during construction.