[/idgames] Doomed: By the Hour - A Boom megawad of maps made in an hour by finnks13 and Yumheart

[finnks13]

 

Doomed: By the Hour is a speedmapping project made for NaNoWADMo 2022 by myself and @Yumheart (with a super secret guest map made by @gabirupee!) full of maps that were (mostly!) made in an hour.

 

We went for a classic megawad in style, so the maps are in three vaguely themed episodes with a sensible difficulty curve throughout - while the final few maps do get a bit slaughtery, it shouldn't be too challenging on UV and full difficulty settings are implemented too! We swapped each mapslot, so odd numbers are mine and even numbers are Yumheart's (with the exception of Map12 & 13 where it's the other way around!) though we mixed up the style for the secret maps.

 

There's some changes to the weapon roster - the classic pistol, shotgun + chaingun firerate buffs, and the plasma gun shoots red plasma and has no recoil animation after firing - and also three custom enemies that should be fairly familiar to people (I won't spoil them here, you'll meet 'em soon enough :P)

 

PICTURES:

 

PLAY INFO:

IWAD: DOOM2.wad
Maps : Map01 - 32

Compatibility: Boom (-cl 9)
Coop Starts: No (To Come)
Deathmatch: Nope
Difficulty Settings: Yes (HMP is mostly untested, but HNTR has been tested a fair amount)

 

Full credits can be found in the accompanying textfile!

 

DOWNLOAD:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/megawads/bythehour (/idgames)

 

Old Versions:

Spoiler

bythehour_rc1.zip (RC1)

bythehour_rc1HOTFIX.zip (RC1 Hotfix - fixed a UMAPINFO error & a softlock in Map15)

 

Thanks for giving our wad a go, and if you've got any feedback then we'd love to hear it!

Edited August 3, 2023 by finnks13
updated download link

[Arsinikk]

Congrats on the release! Can't wait to check this out!

[gabirupee]

These maps are really fun and impressive for a speedmap project, im glad i made a map for it c:

[Ludi]

Happy to have helped playtest! Glad this turned out good B)

[Firedust]

Some of these maps clearly don't look like they were made in under an hour, stop lying :p

[DrRock]

I Played through the first three maps and am enjoying myself a good deal so far. Certainly looking forward to what the rest brings.

[Dusty_Rhodes]

Congrats on the release! Really great wad, definitely worth the play. I haven't beaten it yet but these two have a lot of fun levels up their sleeves.

[finnks13]

Hi everyone, I've just uploaded a hotfix to correct an error I made with the UMAPINFO when doing the final cleanup of the wad - going from Map32 to Map33 was NOT intended! There's also a fix to a softlock in Map15.

 

Download link is here, or in the OP: bythehour_rc1HOTFIX.zip

[galileo31dos01]

This is good shit here. I'm digging the visceral gameplay in short spam, matches with my current mood. And I know assuming isn't the best move but I sensed that the difficulty would dial up much sooner to diabolical (e.g. m12 BK part???) and I wasn't wrong xd, holy stimpacks... Thanks for making this!

[galileo31dos01]

Couple minor issues:

 

Spoiler

- In m13, the two chaingunners on platforms can be knocked off, might want to flag them impassable

- In m32, this cacodemon didn't notice me, though I didn't check if it would see me from a further distance. Maybe the sector could be more arched or something?

 

That's about all for now I think :) * resists the urge to request deleting the two floor archviles at the first phase in m31 because %$#@& them raw deep *

 

I'm on m18 currently and I'll repeat myself, it's really good diabolical shit you both cooked together. The super secret map (32) on HNTR was a blast, almost literally. I guess I could do similarly on higher by being much more mindful of the "unprotection", but I'm satisfied at the moment. 

[Yumheart]

On 11/3/2022 at 8:34 PM, galileo31dos01 said:

I'm on m18 currently and I'll repeat myself, it's really good diabolical shit you both cooked together. The super secret map (32) on HNTR was a blast, almost literally. I guess I could do similarly on higher by being much more mindful of the "unprotection", but I'm satisfied at the moment. 

It's great that the lower difficulties work this well! And thanks for your finds on map13 & 32 :>

Edited November 7, 2022 by Yumheart

[DrRock]

A few thoughts on some of the maps(just arrived at Map 15):

MAP 05:

Spoiler

The beginning of this is pure evil. No idea if there is a consistent sequence of frags that make this more managable but clearing it felt more like luck to me than anything. Exploding the barrels at the beginning seems mandatory. Still a fun map though, but damn did this kick my ass to hell and back.

MAP 06:

Spoiler

Played without carryovers due to a last second death in the previous map(didn't feel like going through the entire map again). Tons of of fun to get your bearings and clear out the teleporting hordes. One of my favs so far.

MAP 14:

Spoiler

This must have taken me a good seventy or so tries over the course of a week and I never once got too upset at any of my deaths. Very immaculate combat design all around. Even the beginning never got too tiring; probably because I just like rocket-blasting foes way too much. Running in loops after getting rid of the Viles seems to have done the trick. Congrats on cooking up such a devilish yet fun challenge.

 

[DrRock]

A couple more maps for me to give feedback on:

 

Map 16:

Spoiler

There are a few slime trail graphical errors in one of the areas in this map. It somehow doesn't show in the screenshot but you should still be able to quickly figure out where they are located approximately. Assuming this is something you find to be big enough of a problem to want to fix. It didn't bother me to much but some mappers probably don't like having any of these leftover in their projects, so I mentioned it.

Map 24:

Spoiler

The ending battle is super fun but the damaging floor causes the defective rad suit glitch, which can be a little annoying given how lengthy this section is and how quickly players have to chew through the health pick ups here. Tweaking the floor damage might be something work looking into.

 

The difficulty ramps up like crazy on UV towards the end. Not enough for me to want to give up completely but the WAD definitely took off the kid gloves come Map 25. Figuring out these combat scenarios is still pretty fun, even when getting my ass kicked mercilessly by them.

[Keyboard_Doomer]

Hello,

 

we're going play half of the maps for Thursday Night Survival today.

The session starts 5 hours from the time of this reply and you can expect it to be active for 4+ hours after that.

 

The lack of coop starts is not an issue for ZDaemon but we might need to skip some maps if they turn out to not be too multiplayer-friendly (like MAP11 seems to have some puzzles that might not work out too well in multiplayer).

[Keyboard_Doomer]

Thanks for joining us for both sessions, finnks13. I hope you had fun.
I believe you witnessed most of these in action and not even sure if you want to bother fixing multiplayer-only stuff but anyway, here are the issues I know about, mostly multiplayer stuff but some are also present in singleplayer:

 

MAP01:
    - the bars (sector 36) at the start can get players stuck in multiplayer
MAP06:
    - archvile jump can blast you out of the map near the blue key, into sector 38
MAP07:
    - the tag 667 sector (sector 42) is a lift which I believe can cause issues, especially in multiplayer, if someone presses on the lift and it then happens to be lowered at the same time as the last arachnotron dies.
MAP10:
    - the tag 14 bars (sector 101-103) can block progress in multiplayer
MAP11:
    - apparently the voodoo doll puzzle to reach the red key can become stuck in multiplayer when many players are randomly pressing various switches
MAP16:
    - A player is effectively stuck if they end up in sector 14 or 52. The intention seems to be for the player to commit suicide if that happens but unfortunately that's not reliable on a multiplayer server and stuck players tend to often go AFK which becomes a problem if they're then the last ones alive. Easiest solution seems to be to just make lines 324-327 impassable (making the sectors damaging is not really reliable either because a player could still stand on the edge to avoid being damaged).
MAP18:
    - red key becomes inaccessible in multiplayer if the player that reaches the area dies before pressing the switch (line 124) to lower sectors 11 and 14 again
    - an imp can sunk into the floor in sector 41: pic1, pic2. I assume this is a node builder error and hopefully should be fixed after rebuilding the nodes
MAP21:
    - the barrel trap in sector 40 only works once so in multiplayer other players just get stuck there, you could just make the sector damaging
    - sector 137 is not damaging so players can idle on it indefinitely and avoid dying while being effectively stuck
MAP22:
    - the tag 1 bars (sector 28) can block progress in multiplayer
MAP23:
    - the tag 12 bars (sector 76) raised after getting the red key can block progress in multiplayer
    - I think line 258 could be made to lower the secret faster, it's quite slow after already waiting for the teleporter to lower right before that and I don't think it would affect the difficulty much
MAP24:
    - the nukage at the start of the map is an inescapable deathpit until a certain point which is unfortunate because:
        -> you're effectively stuck if you go to certain areas (e.g. sector 13 or 143) if you don't want to intentionally suicide (problem in multiplayer as mentioned for the MAP16 issue)
        -> it's possible to get a radsuit before that point so you might have to wait a whole minute to die
    - several misalignments on lines using the PLUTSQR2 texture, I didn't take note of all of them but they should be easy to see and fix in 3D mode
MAP25:
    - stuck if an archvile blasts you into sector 33 (2 different areas) before sector 20 or 37 is lowered
MAP26:
    - stuck if an archvile blasts you into sector 46
MAP29:
    - HOMs on lines 1543 and 1544 after sector 233 is lowered after pressing line 2199
MAP30:
    - The teleporter (line 1703) to the final room doesn't work in ZDaemon. The issue is the floor-ceiling height difference of sectors 186 and 299. Make it less that 32,768 to solve the problem.
MAP31:
    - the tag 28 bars (sector 134) can get players stuck in the east area in multiplayer
MAP32:
    - the map name in the intermission says "spikey" while the map name on the automap says "spiky"

 

And finally, you got some nice custom monsters so would be good to give them some nice custom obituaries (and custom name for the end sequence while you're at it because why not).
You could do that by adding a text like this to DEHACKED:

[STRINGS]
CC_SPIDER = The 1000 HP Cyberdemon
OB_SPIDER = %o was quartered by a quarter HP cyberdemon.
OB_WOLFSS = %o was dicked by a plasma dick.

 

[Ravendesk]

Remembered about this wad today after a discussion about racing maps. Is there any chance that the wad is getting finalised/released to idgames? :) Cause it's a lot of fun.

[finnks13]

50 minutes ago, Ravendesk said:

Remembered about this wad today after a discussion about racing maps. Is there any chance that the wad is getting finalised/released to idgames? :) Cause it's a lot of fun.

 

To be honest, I think we both kinda forgot about this project after the TNS session and got distracted by other stuff. I've been meaning to finalise a bunch of my backlog for a while now, so I suppose I should get on that :P

[finnks13]

Hello, I'm bumping the thread to mention that the wad has successfully found it's way on to /idgames, so if that's your speed, now's the time to download it from there and presumably play it ^{(or not, I'm not your mum)}

 

It's here now -> https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/megawads/bythehour

 

Thanks to everyone who played the older versions, we both really appreciate it :)

[TMMMS]

noticed a weird typo when playing in gzdoom 4.12.1

 

when killed by a green cyberdemon i get the custom obituary but between the letter o and n in cyberdemon i get an unusual character that looks like this

^zw

^nb

^sp

only with no line spacing whatsoever