[TC] Heartwrath Islands: Shrine Of Kalgadar Mv1.0.4

[ThatKidBobo]

                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                                                  Mod Version 1.0.4

                                                                                                                                                

 

 Shrine Of Kalgadar, is a fantasy action-adventure themed Doom II total-conversion mod that is made for GZDoom version 4.10.0. This is my first total-conversion mod, so a lot of things are still very basic or unrefined.

 

 The mod should be played with freelook, jumping and crouching allowed. Settings that make the experience better are all specified in the README.txt file included in the .zip file. As specified before, the DOOM2.WAD IWAD file is needed to play this mod. (Once I learn how to make this an ipk3, Doom II wont be needed anymore, and anyone will be able to play the mod.) A total of 8 UDMF format maps with 10 music tracks are present in the mod. (Also my first time composing anything, hope they are bangers.) The mod adds new enemies, weapons, textures, items and decoration with all 5 difficulty levels replaced. Completing the mod takes around one to two hours. All custom assets that do not belong to me, are also credited in the README.txt file, these assets will be replaced as soon as possible. I'm planning to start with the weapons, as I have always enjoyed drawing weapons, mainly melee ones.

 

 The Story: The evil lord Kalgadar has overtaken the kindgdom of Southeast Chrakendein, he has killed the king and cursed the princes to gain control over the kingdom. The crops are dying, children are sick and the people of the country beg for help. You, a brave warrior have heard of the lord's evil deeds, so you want to end the lord's reign of terror and the kingdom's misery. On the way to the Island of Chrakendein, you get caught between the warships of Kalgadar's minions. And thus your days of captivity inside the Cave of Marcus begins.

 

 Why "Heartwrath Islands" before "Shrine Of Kalgadar"? Well, it's the location where the mod takes place. I wrote some lore about these islands some time ago so I'm planning to incorporate this mod into the lore I wrote, with updates of  course. For the currently avalible information about the world of the mod, be sure to read the documents you see along the way.

 

 The mod currently supports Singleplayer and Multiplayer CO-OP meaning that you can cut through Kalgadar's minions with you buddies, however since I used ZScript, you must play the multiplayer with GZDoom's multiplayer and not Zandronum. Not knowing about Zandronum's lack of ZScript support and just using it to make everthing is my fault, and I'm sorry about that. I am planning to add a couple of deathmatch maps and utilize the team deathmatch to make a "Castle Siege" mode too.

 

 Learning how to make alongside actually making this mod took me around 7 months, and now I know a lot more than I knew before so I am very glad that I made this mod. My goal is to make this a standalone game, and someday release it on Steam, but I still am very much a beginner modder, so we'll se how that turns out.

 

DOWNLOAD LINK:https://www.mediafire.com/file/ehui2iuewtfd2xz/Shrine_Of_Kalgadar_-_Mod_Release_1.0.4.zip/file

 

YOUTUBE:

 

SOUNDTRACK PLAYLIST: 

 

 

One last thing, I am VERY open to feedback so if you have any kind of issue, PLEASE be honest and let me know about it, so that I can fix it and improve my project.

Screenshots:

Spoiler

Estimated date of 1.1 update: April of 2024

Latest v1.1 video:

 

                                                                                                                              Planned and upcoming features included in the README file.

                                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                 Thank you very much, have fun.

Edited May 25 by ThatKidBobo
videro

[Shakariki Heisenberg]

havent played much of it yet it looks amazing but i found this?  

[ThatKidBobo]

14 minutes ago, Shakariki Heisenberg said:

havent played much of it yet it looks amazing but i found this?  

I've never seen that happen before. Do you have any idea what may be causing it?

[Shakariki Heisenberg]

16 minutes ago, ThatKidBobo said:

I've never seen that happen before. Do you have any idea what may be causing it?

idk it might be cus im using 4.10.0 gz.
 ive never rlly mapped for like advanced formats so idk 

[ThatKidBobo]

1 hour ago, Shakariki Heisenberg said:

idk it might be cus im using 4.10.0 gz.
 ive never rlly mapped for like advanced formats so idk 

Well this mod is for 4.10.0 so I have no idea, does this happen anywhere else?

[Shakariki Heisenberg]

1 hour ago, ThatKidBobo said:

Well this mod is for 4.10.0 so I have no idea, does this happen anywhere else?

i dont have any other ports that can try this mod since it uses alot of high tec stuff and zandronum has a zscript error so

[ThatKidBobo]

7 minutes ago, Shakariki Heisenberg said:

i dont have any other ports that can try this mod since it uses alot of high tec stuff and zandronum has a zscript error so

I made it specifically for GZDoom anyway, does it happen in any other place in the mod though?

[LadyMistDragon]

Not too bad at all! Although I might recommend only to those who like old-school dungeon crawlers, though its a fair bit better balanced. Health feels like it could restore a little more at once though. I think I understand why it doesn't though.

 

 

[Wo0p]

Uuuuuh looks fancy. Will try it out soon rawr!

 

EDIT

 

Alright. I will be brutally honest and review this as if it was a standalone game because that's what you want to market it as. But with it being clearly stated to be something akin to a beta, I'll try to be lenient in that way with the review. Full disclosure: at the time of this writing I haven't completed the game. I've overcome the first dungeon, the catacombs and got a fair deal into the shrine of... some fellow. The one with the little green asshole (His words) behind the entrance.

 

The Great:

The environments. Masterful execution of sloped terrain within the confinds of the doom engine. Meaning, without editing the engine (I don't think?) there's no way to get rid of the floaty sliding effect felt on sloped terrain. But I didn't see a single seam in the hundreds of slopes throughout and the slopes weren't so great or chaotic as to interfere with the gameplay or lead to "unfair" damage taken in the middle of combat.

Wonderful creepy atmosphere with acccompanying soundtracks that add tension and mystery to the exploration of the large environments. Some of the music reminded me of Diablo 1 with their unintrusive rhythm that, as I said, only heightens the sense of mystery and horror of the setting. Great stuff indeed! So if these are the first music pieces you have composed then pat yourself on the shoulder. That's amazing!

Ok, that was a hodgepodge of music, visuals and vibe all smushed into one category. Sorry, I hope you can extrapolate the individual segments from my rant.

 

The Good:

Consistency in art style. Referring here to the relationship between the enemies and the weaponry you acquire. It all has a distinct style to it, and I hope when you convert them to your own art rather than rely on Daggerfall that you keep that spirit of consistency. I'm guilty of mashing together assets from different games that some would say clash horribly in my own maps so the fact you stick to Daggerfall mainly was a good choice for the beta.

Also although there's a lot of dungeon environments and caves and such, there's great variety in the spaces therein. It's FUN to explore and that's important in this kind of dungeon crawling game. Which kinda reminds me of that game that was released somewhat recently where your left hand is cut off and you're thrown into a deep deep well, and that's a good thing cos that game was pretty aesthetically cool.

Custom menu screen :D lovely!

 

The Mediocre:

The notes. I'm one of those weirdos who, when playing Doom 3, pick up and read every single entry in the PDA. There's such joy to be found in world building through notes left behind. It really fleshes out the setting, I feel. And I was joyful to find that this is a part of your game as well! Only, sadly, most of the notes are fairly awkward to read, indeed mostly the messages to the guards in the catacombs. Hitting that old-timey half-converted to modern language kind of speech is hard, I know, but I would love to help if you want it. Depending on whether or not you find my English satisfactory of course xD (It's not my first language either).

 

Now for the more impactful of the mediocre: Gameplay.

Sadly the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. I noticed in your planned features list, that weapons will have a secondary attack and I feel that would be a great step towards making combat more interesting. As it stands right now I felt there was only a noticeable difference between the dagger and the mace in terms of damage and attack speed and most of the game is a tiresome slog of holding primary fire. All of the enemies can be beaten btw by connecting a hit and immediately stepping back and then repeat until the enemy dies. The only ones providing any challenge is the humans because they're so blazingly fast they catch you off guard.

So... some suggestions to combat:

 

• Make daggers useless against skeletons by giving them a custom damage type which skeletons are very resistant to.
• Make sword sprite durations shorter to make them faster. Increase their damage slightly.
• Make axes do the most damage out of all the weapons.
• Make maces do the 2nd most damage but also increase their knockback effect significantly. Add a custom blunt damage type that does more dmg to skeletons.

If you look around on the zdoom wiki you can find help to making all of this a reality! :) But these changes, I feel, would add some much needed spice to the general combat loop.

 

The Bad:

The enemies. When I encountered the first gargoyle or lich I was expecting them to shoot at me from afar but that never happened. Instead they also relied on melee like all the other enemies so far. And even worse, ALL of the enemies have the same melee range so you can employ the same strategy for beating all of them. Hitting them once and immediately stepping back. Which makes combat even more tedious when you combine it with the aforementioned points (See above). 

The other thing that's bad about the enemies is they lag around the environments like enemies do. Some of it is in the nature of having 2d sprites in a 3d environment and I understand that, but I think I know what's making it worse. The enemy sprite duration combined with their high speed. Let's take the Skeleton. It's got:

 

Speed 24;

SKEL ABCD 7 A_Chase;
        Loop;

 

For smoother animations that don't result in the enemy zooming around every few blinks I suggest to reduce the duration "7" to 3 or 4 and reducing the speed considerably, down to like 9 or something. That's where regular doom monsters piddle about. That means the engine reads each sprite frame for only 3 or 4 tics instead of 7 and moves them around with a distance of 9 instead of 24 map pixels (I think that's how it works anyway...)

 

Suggestions:

Shorten frame duration for all monsters by half and reduce their speed by 2 thirds or whatever you think is appropriate when testing them again. This will result in smoother and more easy to read movements of enemies, making melee combat less frustrating. 

 

The Neutral:

The easter eggs. How does one rate easter eggs? Well some say they break the immersion and others get a kick out of finding them. I found the black dude's stone head in the catacombs shouting something at me and I found the little green gremlin a-hole behind one of the shrines. They don't do anything for me but they might for someone else. I don't mind easter eggs in games. As long as they are hidden out of the way and the ones I've found were so that's fine.

That pink sbar texture is horrendous, but some might find it fun or fitting. It doesn't tickle my pickle but its a subjective thing so. I CAN say it somewhat clashes with the nitty gritty life-like setting though.

 

So those are my thoughts so far. Please take it with a grain of salt as I have my own preferences in how I want to play and I'm holding your product to higher standards than normal since you want to make money off it (I assume?) by getting it on Steam as a total conversion.

Edited July 15, 2023 by Wo0p

[ThatKidBobo]

On 7/15/2023 at 8:11 AM, Wo0p said:

Uuuuuh looks fancy. Will try it out soon rawr!

 

EDIT

 

Alright. I will be brutally honest and review this as if it was a standalone game because that's what you want to market it as. But with it being clearly stated to be something akin to a beta, I'll try to be lenient in that way with the review. Full disclosure: at the time of this writing I haven't completed the game. I've overcome the first dungeon, the catacombs and got a fair deal into the shrine of... some fellow. The one with the little green asshole (His words) behind the entrance.

 

The Great:

The environments. Masterful execution of sloped terrain within the confinds of the doom engine. Meaning, without editing the engine (I don't think?) there's no way to get rid of the floaty sliding effect felt on sloped terrain. But I didn't see a single seam in the hundreds of slopes throughout and the slopes weren't so great or chaotic as to interfere with the gameplay or lead to "unfair" damage taken in the middle of combat.

Wonderful creepy atmosphere with acccompanying soundtracks that add tension and mystery to the exploration of the large environments. Some of the music reminded me of Diablo 1 with their unintrusive rhythm that, as I said, only heightens the sense of mystery and horror of the setting. Great stuff indeed! So if these are the first music pieces you have composed then pat yourself on the shoulder. That's amazing!

Ok, that was a hodgepodge of music, visuals and vibe all smushed into one category. Sorry, I hope you can extrapolate the individual segments from my rant.

 

The Good:

Consistency in art style. Referring here to the relationship between the enemies and the weaponry you acquire. It all has a distinct style to it, and I hope when you convert them to your own art rather than rely on Daggerfall that you keep that spirit of consistency. I'm guilty of mashing together assets from different games that some would say clash horribly in my own maps so the fact you stick to Daggerfall mainly was a good choice for the beta.

Also although there's a lot of dungeon environments and caves and such, there's great variety in the spaces therein. It's FUN to explore and that's important in this kind of dungeon crawling game. Which kinda reminds me of that game that was released somewhat recently where your left hand is cut off and you're thrown into a deep deep well, and that's a good thing cos that game was pretty aesthetically cool.

Custom menu screen :D lovely!

 

The Mediocre:

The notes. I'm one of those weirdos who, when playing Doom 3, pick up and read every single entry in the PDA. There's such joy to be found in world building through notes left behind. It really fleshes out the setting, I feel. And I was joyful to find that this is a part of your game as well! Only, sadly, most of the notes are fairly awkward to read, indeed mostly the messages to the guards in the catacombs. Hitting that old-timey half-converted to modern language kind of speech is hard, I know, but I would love to help if you want it. Depending on whether or not you find my English satisfactory of course xD (It's not my first language either).

 

Now for the more impactful of the mediocre: Gameplay.

Sadly the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. I noticed in your planned features list, that weapons will have a secondary attack and I feel that would be a great step towards making combat more interesting. As it stands right now I felt there was only a noticeable difference between the dagger and the mace in terms of damage and attack speed and most of the game is a tiresome slog of holding primary fire. All of the enemies can be beaten btw by connecting a hit and immediately stepping back and then repeat until the enemy dies. The only ones providing any challenge is the humans because they're so blazingly fast they catch you off guard.

So... some suggestions to combat:

 

• Make daggers useless against skeletons by giving them a custom damage type which skeletons are very resistant to.
• Make sword sprite durations shorter to make them faster. Increase their damage slightly.
• Make axes do the most damage out of all the weapons.
• Make maces do the 2nd most damage but also increase their knockback effect significantly. Add a custom blunt damage type that does more dmg to skeletons.

If you look around on the zdoom wiki you can find help to making all of this a reality! :) But these changes, I feel, would add some much needed spice to the general combat loop.

 

The Bad:

The enemies. When I encountered the first gargoyle or lich I was expecting them to shoot at me from afar but that never happened. Instead they also relied on melee like all the other enemies so far. And even worse, ALL of the enemies have the same melee range so you can employ the same strategy for beating all of them. Hitting them once and immediately stepping back. Which makes combat even more tedious when you combine it with the aforementioned points (See above). 

The other thing that's bad about the enemies is they lag around the environments like enemies do. Some of it is in the nature of having 2d sprites in a 3d environment and I understand that, but I think I know what's making it worse. The enemy sprite duration combined with their high speed. Let's take the Skeleton. It's got:

 

Speed 24;

SKEL ABCD 7 A_Chase;
        Loop;

 

For smoother animations that don't result in the enemy zooming around every few blinks I suggest to reduce the duration "7" to 3 or 4 and reducing the speed considerably, down to like 9 or something. That's where regular doom monsters piddle about. That means the engine reads each sprite frame for only 3 or 4 tics instead of 7 and moves them around with a distance of 9 instead of 24 map pixels (I think that's how it works anyway...)

 

Suggestions:

Shorten frame duration for all monsters by half and reduce their speed by 2 thirds or whatever you think is appropriate when testing them again. This will result in smoother and more easy to read movements of enemies, making melee combat less frustrating. 

 

The Neutral:

The easter eggs. How does one rate easter eggs? Well some say they break the immersion and others get a kick out of finding them. I found the black dude's stone head in the catacombs shouting something at me and I found the little green gremlin a-hole behind one of the shrines. They don't do anything for me but they might for someone else. I don't mind easter eggs in games. As long as they are hidden out of the way and the ones I've found were so that's fine.

That pink sbar texture is horrendous, but some might find it fun or fitting. It doesn't tickle my pickle but its a subjective thing so. I CAN say it somewhat clashes with the nitty gritty life-like setting though.

 

So those are my thoughts so far. Please take it with a grain of salt as I have my own preferences in how I want to play and I'm holding your product to higher standards than normal since you want to make money off it (I assume?) by getting it on Steam as a total conversion.

You are awesome, this is literally what kind of review I need, thank you so much! I'll try to take as much of this into account as I can.

 

About the monster movements, I didn't really see the cause of that, but didn't also really think it would make much of a problem, so you basically just yold me how to fix it which I'm also very thankfull about.

[Wo0p]

1 hour ago, ThatKidBobo said:

You are awesome, this is literally what kind of review I need, thank you so much! I'll try to take as much of this into account as I can.

 

About the monster movements, I didn't really see the cause of that, but didn't also really think it would make much of a problem, so you basically just yold me how to fix it which I'm also very thankfull about.

 

You're very welcome ^_^ I was kinda worried I was in for a shouting match hahaha but I'm glad to see you're mature about feedback. I -did- play further and found the magical weapons which add a bit of extra variety to the gameplay but not much. Maybe the fire sword could put a lingering burning effect on enemies and the magical mace could stun enemies? Anyway, if I can help further let me know. I've played up to the cave with a lot of fire elementals for now but haven't beaten the big open area yet (which houses a large number of those fire fellows).

[ThatKidBobo]

3 hours ago, Wo0p said:

 

You're very welcome ^_^ I was kinda worried I was in for a shouting match hahaha but I'm glad to see you're mature about feedback. I -did- play further and found the magical weapons which add a bit of extra variety to the gameplay but not much. Maybe the fire sword could put a lingering burning effect on enemies and the magical mace could stun enemies? Anyway, if I can help further let me know. I've played up to the cave with a lot of fire elementals for now but haven't beaten the big open area yet (which houses a large number of those fire fellows).

I was thinking to add cool effects to the last weapons, but I just can't seem to figure out how to do stuff like that. I eventually will though. As you have seen in the readme, I am planning to add secondary attacks, but I can't decide on what kind of things to do with such basic melee weapons. I again really like your suggestions and I'd love to hear if you have any ideas about what kind of secondary would be suitable.

[Wo0p]

30 minutes ago, ThatKidBobo said:

I was thinking to add cool effects to the last weapons, but I just can't seem to figure out how to do stuff like that. I eventually will though. As you have seen in the readme, I am planning to add secondary attacks, but I can't decide on what kind of things to do with such basic melee weapons. I again really like your suggestions and I'd love to hear if you have any ideas about what kind of secondary would be suitable.

 

Hm... I'm still learning all the ins and outs of doom editing so I can't answer everything (Not that I think you expected me to) but hm. I suppose looking at different games around the interwebs which employs melee weapons is a good place to find inspiration but... I'll give it a shot.

 

Dagger:

Chance of a crit with a visible effect to let the player know it has happened. It could be achieved with an A_Jump(*Chance*) state function during the attack state perhaps, where you add an additional custompunch that does additional damage.

 

Sword:

Although carving things in half with a sword is supposedly pretty hard, the swing animation really supports a cleave attack. It could be achieved with an A_Explode state function but you'd have to use custom damage which the player is immune to so the player doesn't harm himself when using it. And of course give the attack a bit extra spice to differentiate it from the regular attack.

 

Axe:

I dont think the axe really needs a secondary attack (If we go with my previous suggestions). You have the dagger for potential large individual dmg, the sword for aoe attacks, the axe doing the most damage consistently (But slowly) and the maul for knockback/stun chance + anti-skeleton. But if you wanted you COULD perhaps give the axe a charge attack that leaps the player forward using A_Recoil(*-value*) so a reverse recoil. It can be achieved in several other ways, I just find this one neat and simple :P (But perhaps too inflexible).

 

Maul:
Secondary could be a stun move that's a bit slower than the usual attack so using the primary still has a place to be employed against skeletons. It could be a very nice counter to the Lich if you give it ranged attacks so you can cancel that out. Since you dont have ranged weapons to deal with Liches, this is the next best thing to beat ranged opponents I suspect, if we disregard general tactics/traps and so forth and focus strictly on mechanics.

[ThatKidBobo]

 Shrine Of Kalgadar has been updated to 1.0.1! This update includes very small fixes to some problems, mainly enemy movement and health balance. Thank you!

Edited August 31, 2023 by ThatKidBobo

[ThatKidBobo]

Shrine Of Kalgadar has been updated to 1.0.2! This update includes edits to the lich sprites and visual improvements in Hargtan (SCAPETST). Thank you!

[ThatKidBobo]

I have made a devlog video to show the upcoming features of version 1.1!

 

[ThatKidBobo]

Shrine Of Kalgadar has been updated to 1.0.3! This update improves a few sprites and sounds, swords are also improved.

[ThatKidBobo]

Shrine Of Kalgadar has been updated to 1.0.4! This update fixes a few problems and improves several areas.

 

A progress video will probably be ready mid-late december.

[ThatKidBobo]

I have made a new progress video! The project is slowly getting more unique, I hope I turn this into an actual good thing!