Ancient Lab

[Turbulent]

A single map vanilla Doom 2 experience. Descend into the old fort and find a collection of derelict machines. Before your arrival, the demons have smashed the gates and slaughtered everyone. The forces of hell must be purged from the Ancient Lab!

 

This is the first wad I’ve made, it was a fun process. I learned a lot and I’m open for comments and criticisms to improve in the future. 

 

IWAD: Doom 2

Tested on: Crispy Doom (recommended), GZDoom 

Difficulties: Ultra Violent, Hurt Me Plenty

 

Download:

https://www.moddb.com/games/doom-ii/addons/ancient-lab1

 

Screenshots:

 

Spoiler

 

[netcurse2000]

 

[Biodegradable]

 

[Murdoch]

Looks pretty damned solid for a first map. I do not have time to play it right now but shall bookmark it for maybe tomorrow.

[LadyMistDragon]

The wires in the blue key room were neat!

 

 

 

 

[pbldcttr]

the blue key room was indeed wicked. i loved the tiny details and the ashwall cave was funky too. the gameplay was fun as well. only found the chainsaw secret. i really enjoyed this one!

[Wo0p]

On 7/7/2023 at 7:40 PM, Turbulent said:

A single map vanilla Doom 2 experience. Descend into the old fort and find a collection of derelict machines. Before your arrival, the demons have smashed the gates and slaughtered everyone. The forces of hell must be purged from the Ancient Lab!

 

This is the first wad I’ve made, it was a fun process. I learned a lot and I’m open for comments and criticisms to improve in the future. 

 

IWAD: Doom 2

Tested on: Crispy Doom (recommended), GZDoom 

Difficulties: Ultra Violent, Hurt Me Plenty

 

Download:

https://www.moddb.com/games/doom-ii/addons/ancient-lab1

 

Screenshots:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Very nice for a first map ^_^ I liked the details, the timetested "ambushes" and the room layouts that make it hard to exit a room before dispatching its inhabitants. Good work :) keep at it! Found the chainsaw and the soulsphere, rawr!

 

(Played on UV, GZDoom, no jump, no crouch, freelook)

[Turbulent]

I appreciate all the comments so far. The videos in particular have already taught me, what I assume is every mappers first lesson, people will see and play your map differently than you. Probably pretty obvious, but it's cool to see and also something I didn't think much about when designing the rooms. 

[Pickles]

Played on PRBoom+

 

Your map seems to suffer from "I know everything about the map so I'm going to create parts of the map based off knowledge that players might not have" syndrome a bit. Especially with the Rocket Launcher. That fight at the blue key can be on two totally different levels of difficulty based on if you found the secret rocket launcher earlier in the map. As you can see from my gameplay, I did not and paid for it from the midpoint onwards.

 

Moving on: This map looks really nice visually. You really realized some locales here, even if the likelihood that an area like this could possibly exist with so many extreme style shifts is dubious at best. The caves feel almost comfortable as if I've been in them before. More specifically, it reminds me of the caves you'd usually find in TNT Evilution. Rooms are decorated with shrines or computer desks, really anything. You did a nice job in making sure each room had just enough clutter lying around to make sure nobody started just thinking they were walking from box to box. I especially liked the wires you ran in the Blue Key room.

 

About the combat: The aforementioned syndrome effects the combat of this level quite a bit. I ended up beating the map without the Rocket Launcher because I couldn't find it naturally. I ended up needing to use IDDT to locate it on another run. Each encounter has been carefully structured to apply constant pressure to the player in a variety of ways. Actually, each encounter taken on their own are pretty good. Rooms aren't too big to properly accommodate the fights, nor are they crushing you with claustrophobia. If the RL weren't in a secret, I'd say this map feels perfect difficullty-wise from a player's point-of-view.

 

My last major not is there is NOT enough non-secret HP in the map. Without the secret supercharge, this map feels particularly difficult to overcome, probably more that was intended. Once again it feels like fights in the later parts of the level were designed with the idea that you would have that extra 100HP in mind.

 

Final Verdict: This is a decently fun, good looking map. The secrets are a little too close to mandatory for comfort, and the map itself is a bit eclectic in places, but I can honestly say I came out of this map with a generally positive experience. 6/10

[Harmonica]

My playthrough. A pretty nice first map and fun combat. I realized that I had missed the rocket launcher at some point, but decided not to go back looking for it as the level seemed very much beatable even without it.

[Riclo500]

Awesome!