Library right before the storm [BOOM | First map]

[StorkGreen]

Description:

So, it's just a one boom-compatible map, i have made. Battels on UV and HMP are slaughter ones, but on HNTR map is easy and basic.

Cuz it is my first map, i would like to hear some "you made this wrong" stuff, i know i need to improve.

 

Tested: DSDA v0.21.3, GZDOOM v4.7.1

Maps: MAP01

Music: Birth of Good / from FF7

Graphix and textures: all by me, except waterfall from plutonia

Screenshots:

Spoiler

 

 

Download: Link

 

 

Edited December 13, 2023 by StorkGreen

[Kan3]

I tested it in the 3rd difficulty level.

 

Let's start saying that there are some really coll detail in this map.

I loved the way you used middle texture to create torches supports, not to mention the books, great use of linedef, sectors and textures.

About the details, I've noticed you cut off some tile at the starting area, but the floor is pointing in the other direction x)

The overall map, though, becomes a bit plain, with not much variation in height, or light, or palette, the walls kind of lose the details you were putting in the first areas and that's a bit of a shame, cause it's a cool map to see.

 

I got some issue with the midi you used, cause I think it doesn't fit very much.

 

What instead has bothered me during my time spent in there, was the gameplay itself.

It's quite totally unbalanced as a whole, from the beginning to the very end, it's utterly unfafir.

 

You start surrounded by imps, demons and revenants with the possibility (if you wake up fast enough) to get a shotgun, but this part was a piece of cake, quite rough, but manageable and quite fun too, but then... more revenants from a wall and an archvile from behind... with, again, only a shotgun... when I found out you give the player a rocket launcher (a bit hidden the shadows behind the wall from where the revenants come for some reason) I've already died 3 times in  row, cause the slim columns are not much sufficient to protect me from the archiviles mixed with the tracers.

in the next room you finally give the player some rockets, but having to fight hordes of hell knights coming from two sides with 3 archviles in the middle is a bit rough.

Next the cyberdemon, not a problem at all, nice fight since you haven't much room to cheese it, but not nice at all with the dozen of revenants at the corners.
I escaped by finding a secret area with a plasmagun, that spawned some mancubus and... archviles at my back with no cover at all and a inescapable lava pit in front... Definitely a bad choice.

Next it's the turn of the slaughter area, when you brought a lot of hellknights, revenants and cyberdemons in a probably not even 1024x1024 units area.

There are 2 more areas that are exactly frustrating as these, if not more.

The thing is, it's perfectly ok to keep the player under constant heavy pressure and impending death, but you need to give the player some air, some way to escape certain death and not force him to spam saves waiting for rnjesus to save the day, cause this keeps the player from enjoying to play the game.

You can "fix" this by just wide some areas, give more cover, give more weaponry and powerups, cause it really looked to me like you almost tried your best to kill the doomguy here.

[StorkGreen]

14 minutes ago, Kan3 said:

I tested it in the 3rd difficulty level.

Thanks for comment!

As i said - UV and HMP is slaughter, and I tried to do it hard for me. All the fights I let exist after I get win them few times in a row. So, I was thinking i made them hard, but beatable.

Yeah, about the first arena - I should place a ssg here, not in a secret. Kinda bad idea from me.

 

I guess i should next time make only UV hard & slaughterish, and let HMP as "everyone enjoyable" one

[Kan3]

2 hours ago, StorkGreen said:

As i said - UV and HMP is slaughter, and I tried to do it hard for me. All the fights I let exist after I get win them few times in a row. So, I was thinking i made them hard, but beatable.

Remember though, a wad is usually never hard enough for the creator of it x) It's almost impossible for a creator (unless very experienced) to guess what a random stranger will play his creation: a lot of obvious mechanics, tactics, or evident pickups, traps, monsters, won't be this easy to get even for the most skilled players.

That's why I've been quite harsh, you won't get much love as a new mapper if the average player get his ass kicked multiple times in possibly not very fair maps (hoping you'd like to continue this road and publish some of your work maybe in the future).

 

And still, it's my opinion, that can be more or less biased, I'm definitely not the authority in here, at all x) So keep going!

[Degree23]

Ok yeah there's a few things that felt irritating. I played through some of it on UV.

 

- It's a really hot start. Not a problem in and of itself, because even if you die it's not like you've lost 25 minutes of playthrough, but the SG is useless here. I'd move the SSG from the secret in this room to being the starting weapon.

- The AV coming into that first room is extremely frustrating to deal with on top of everything else that appears. There's very little cover, and you have no guarantee of stunning it even with the SSG. (You can also avoid all of this by not firing and running around to hit the switches and never encounter the AV) 

- There really needs to be some armour somewhere in the first couple of rooms.

- Not being able to pick up the PG before enemies teleported in to the rectangular room felt like I was being trolled. It's not uncommon for powerups to lead to traps, however in slaughter maps it's much more common to be allowed to pick up the weapon, as it's usually an indicator of an imminent large fight.

- A lot of AV use with not much cover in general. Even when you get to the BFG, the fight is quite cramped and there's so many Cyberdemons to deal with that it's very luck-based. The Soul Sphere and MegaArmor you have behind the Cyberdemons are really needed before this fight, not as a reward for beating it. This was as far as I got in the map.

 

There's definitely potential here though. It may be a benefit to try and balance for only one difficulty if you're new to mapping. This could be done by making it with UV in mind, but then adding in a bunch of extra health, armour and ammo for lower difficulties, as well as taking out the hardest parts of fights.

[StorkGreen]

3 minutes ago, Degree23 said:

There's definitely potential here though. It may be a benefit to try and balance for only one difficulty if you're new to mapping. This could be done by making it with UV in mind, but then adding in a bunch of extra health, armour and ammo for lower difficulties, as well as taking out the hardest parts of fights.

Thanks! Yeah, i guess I was wrong, when I tried to do my first map hard. My problem was simple, I balanced fights for me, not for player. So, it became unfair for them

I'll do next map with this in mind, so it will become better (i hope, at least, huh) 

 

And yes, i will try to do mostly one difficulty next time (in terms of fights), to see, how it will be

[galileo31dos01]

Hello, I played your map on HMP and thoroughly enjoyed most of it, so I'll get right away to my thoughts:

 

- The first area was the most troublesome from my part. I'd get stuck occasionally in the hanging corpse behind one of the pillars, the one close to the archvile spawn. I did find the SSG from the get go and directly used it instead of SG/CS after some deaths. The one other "less" of a problem is the timing of the archvile, sometimes it'd teleport immediately to the switch, other times like 4 seconds later. This is more of a mechanical thing, and further into the map I ran into similar situations...

 

- ... Like for example the HKs: a fun rocket-pushing setup, and the perched archviles function fine, though again I noticed the rate of teleporting was rather slow for a numerous ambush -- one side can still catch your back when rocketing the other, which is the good part, yet there'd be pauses of 4-5 seconds before another HK spawned. Continuing on this same room, the imps in RK fight had the same problem (without exaggerating, but one imp teleported like full 3 minutes after the rest). 

 

- The secret blue armor, the cover for one archvile seemed alright, but getting hanged on a corpse a bit too high to notice in the rush wasn't it. I preferred to bumrush the vile and tank a hit, then ignore the mancubi and come back later. 

 

- Big empty room with plasma in the middle, simple circlestrafe to the win. 

 

- BFG and co, I first yote myself out of there and had the cyberdemons take on the archviles, or that's what I thought before a couple found their way inside lol. The cybs seemed skippable, but not so if I wanted the blue stuff they were guarding. A thing I just realized, the BK is actually freebie, that's a pretty neat twist. Not sure why there were two lone cacodemons on my way back to the library, but anyways...

 

- Final room, it's tricky thanks to the chaingunners popping at inconvenient times, having to work in the middle with the HKs and cybs duking it out, a suitable finale overall. The issue with slow teleporting HKs struck back, though as I was carrying the BFG the risk of getting auto-splashed was null (different would have been without BFG, seems like all the rocket boxes are in case you go RL-only). I would set crushers with the archviles after a certain period of time (also in the dummy sectors), to speed up the cleanup. 

 

- I did a general check on UV and HNTR. The latter is nicely done throughout, if significantly much easier than HMP at the end, particularly the final room having all the cells in the world for a bunch of imps and HKs that appear in low numbers. I'd maybe keep some chaingunners for pressure. The rest of the map should feel gentle to those not wanting slaughter, so it's all good imo. UV the one most notable difference imo was the additional archvile in the secret, which brings me back to the hanging corpses -- might want to use non-blocking variants here. I may suggest a green armor at the start on HMP, given that it's identical to UV, so that is a little less equally rude. I liked the other twists, specially in the big PR room. 

 

- Back to teleporting monsters, I see in the editor you got the basics already known, though there's room for improvement -- adding more tp lines, reducing unnecessary space, using merged sectors for sound propagation rather than tunnels (a more economical alternative). I would highly recommend checking this thread to learn how to make the best foolproof teleport closets. 

 

- Lastly, as a minor thing, the title is partially cut off in the tally screen, the words 'library' and 'storm' more specifically. 

 

Overall, a solid first map with generally cohesive ideas, rough-around-the-edges visuals in parts yet an understanding of color variation (surely gzdoom's dyn lights seem intended to enhance the lighting), and yeah pretty good skills settings from what I saw. Thanks for sharing and keep it up!

[StorkGreen]

7 minutes ago, galileo31dos01 said:

Back to teleporting monsters, I see in the editor you got the basics already known, though there's room for improvement -- adding more tp lines, reducing unnecessary space, using merged sectors for sound propagation rather than tunnels (a more economical alternative). I would highly recommend checking this thread to learn how to make the best foolproof teleport closets. 

 

Overall, a solid first map with generally cohesive ideas, rough-around-the-edges visuals in parts yet an understanding of color variation (surely gzdoom's dyn lights seem intended to enhance the lighting), and yeah pretty good skills settings from what I saw. Thanks for sharing and keep it up!

Big thanks to you! Especially for the guide. I used non blocking corpses in a hell pg fight, but, as i can see, not all of them was non blocking (i guess, i messed up with one the tipe)

I putted 2 cacos for like "you still need to shoot" thing, but, it was pretty useless as i could see. I also added crushers to the AV, in a final room. You just need to go to the "pre-exit" room. I think it could be better, if I add a switch, but i haven't idea how to do that for multiple tags (now i am thinking about voodoo dolls, it could help) 

[galileo31dos01]

21 minutes ago, StorkGreen said:

You just need to go to the "pre-exit" room. I think it could be better, if I add a switch, but i haven't idea how to do that for multiple tags (now i am thinking about voodoo dolls, it could help) 

 

Yeah you're safer working in a voodoo doll setup for that, because it's unlikely that one ever notices the crushers if the exit is two steps away. Maybe the doll that opens the last door could also turn those on.

[StorkGreen]

8 minutes ago, galileo31dos01 said:

Maybe the doll that opens the last door could also turn those on.

Oh, yeah. Thats good idea