[boom] Garden of Plagues

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

• MAP01
• Doom 2 (complevel 9)
• 30 minutes-ish par time
• Mucus Flow-inspired
• Exploration-focused, with multiple paths, oppressive atmosphere
• Designed for punishing UV experience. HMP and HNTR have more forgiveness
• Tested in nugget-doom, dsda-doom, gzdoom
• Special thanks to @SoBad, @Portponky and @Biodegradable for testing. And @Snaxalotl for the haunting Abscission midi.

 

Story:

Spoiler

The switch is right there.
I turn back one more time, empty gaze dully sliding over the carnage, and up at the sickly green sky.  Its poisoned clouds hanging low, heavy and tired.  Just like I am.  I know what's gonna happen next.  Pull on the exit switch, and wake up another place entirely.  Wounds sealed, pistol with 50 rounds in hand.  A cycle always starts like this.  No matter if I win or die, winning is just a change of scenery.  How many times have I gone through this?  How long?  Hahaha... time itself has been consumed.  Along with everything else.  Reality has broken down in the digestive tract of the unfathomable.  Broken down into pocket dimensions without meaning, linked by a feeble thread of continuity.  
I gaze into the sickly sky, and it gazes back at me.  "I hate them," it seems to say.  "I hate Mondays." 

 

Screenshots:

Spoiler

 

Download:

Spoiler

RC4: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qZT0en5D3zgEEpf8porVhHLZjL0WlYuA

(wad + textfile)

 

Good luck, have fun, Sneezy :)

 

idgames update: There's no idgames upload because I forgot I used some Plutonia textures from 32in24-15. I may get back to re-texturing it with textures idgames allows for but don't keep your hopes up.

Edited November 5, 2023 by Sneezy McGlassFace
no idgames

[Maribo]

Incredible slaughter-influenced Mucus Flow descendant, one of my favorite maps I've played all year. The deep water bit is honestly straight up terrifying with the way that the lighting affects it, it's like falling directly into an underground cave filled with polluted tech-base runoff water-waste.

Full casual FDA, -dsdademo, plays back in v0.26.2 - gop-maribo.zip

 

Minor suggestions:

Spoiler

- It'd be nice if the infinitely reviving turret arachnos + vile got telefragged by voodoo dolls or a bunch of barrels, you could disguise the kill count bump by making it happen during the BFG finale. It's possible this happens but I skipped some linedef that triggers it, I didn't check in UDB.

- Because of elastic collision and general doom collision funkiness, it might be a bit nice if the ledge-walking secret was a bit wider. Getting onto it is already basically doing a glide, and getting around the corner is a bit.... jerky.

[Jacek Nowak (jacnowak)]

I played it on HNTR. It was still difficult for me but not to the point of being frustrating - I enjoyed the ride despite dying quite often. Most of the time there was a generous supply of ammo, health and armor even for a poor player like me so the biggest problem was navigating hordes of monsters :) At the beginning it was quite confusing to see hell knights and arachnotrons armed with just a pistol but I actually like the idea that you need to figure out where weapons are under this pressure and I like the fact that there are multiple paths. I need to get better at hard maps :) The intermission screen said it took me 29 minutes to beat the map (with saves and reloading it took 45 minutes total). I recorded a video of my playthrough. It's not the greatest of videos but may be useful to see how a shitty player approaches your map :)

 

 

Overall really great stuff!

[ryiron]

Very fun! Here's an extremely sloppy dsda-demo: gop-ryiron.zip. I'd played through this in pieces already, so I sort of knew where I was going (though I forgot about the backpack). Bit low on time currently, so I didn't go for all kills or secret hunting.

 

One issue I found in my first attempt was that depending on which path you take you can end up low on resources. I'd run straight through to the ssg fight, then to the fight with the four mancubi on ledges. So when I got to the revenant corridor (the one with the two mancubi to the side) I didn't have a rocket launcher, and barely any shotgun shells left. Maybe have additional weapon pickups like a rocket launcher in that corridor. Otherwise I really like the freedom to choose which path to take.

[LadyMistDragon]

It was pretty good! I didn't play too much of it since I ended up picking the wrong path and not getting the rocket launcher, but all the boxes seem to have been checked!

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

Thank you all for playing, and your feedback!

Thank you @Maribo and @ryiron for the demos, unfortunately I can't seem to get them to play at the moment. Issues updating dsda but I'll get to them asap, don't worry about it.

@jacnowak I'm very glad you persevered, even though the map is tough. Your video was very helpful.

 

I have now released an updated version RC3, changelog:

Spoiler

- brightened lift to RL, and made the switch blink
- replaced 2 combat armours with health, in the sewer and next to the pop-up baron in narrow corridor
- widened a ledge to the secret to be less jank

- added crusher switch to "disable" the sniper arachnos
- sprinkled some extra health vials around
- added a shotgunner in stairway area
- unmark monsters in RL area to ambush
- added health and ammo to RL area
- fixed texture in slime basement stage 1
- added co-op starts

 

If you have more reports, I'm all ears.

[suzerduzer]

Definitely one of my favorite maps of the year so far, amazing work. I really enjoyed the fight around the SSG, there's plenty of ammo and health but something about it still made me feel very on edge. Great choice of midi as well, very sinister.
 

Spoiler

This hallway in particular is very creepy to me, I'm not sure why.

 

Edited September 24, 2023 by suzerduzer

[DeafPixel]

"Mucus-Flow inspired"
That's all I need to see, truly
(Although the screenshots look more specifically like the early Speed of Doom levels to me)

[DeafPixel]

On 9/21/2023 at 9:39 PM, ryiron said:

Very fun! Here's an extremely sloppy dsda-demo: gop-ryiron.zip. I'd played through this in pieces already, so I sort of knew where I was going (though I forgot about the backpack). Bit low on time currently, so I didn't go for all kills or secret hunting.

 

One issue I found in my first attempt was that depending on which path you take you can end up low on resources. I'd run straight through to the ssg fight, then to the fight with the four mancubi on ledges. So when I got to the revenant corridor (the one with the two mancubi to the side) I didn't have a rocket launcher, and barely any shotgun shells left. Maybe have additional weapon pickups like a rocket launcher in that corridor. Otherwise I really like the freedom to choose which path to take.

I had this exact same issue, the multiple path thing is nice but the map feels completely not designed to be at that section without the rocket launcher

[DoomBerry]

Wow, that was pretty intense. Awesome fights and nice puzzle mazes. Great use of archvilles.

 

Played in gzdoom on UV with maybe 5 saves, perfect difficulty level for me.

[DeafPixel]

Now that I've played this through, I have some critiques

1. Aesthetics are on point, might be my favourite part of the map

2. The difficulty balancing is all over the place. SSG fight felt the hardest (slightly easier with rocket launcher) and the final fight was really easy. (Kind of anticlimactic too, feels out of nowhere).

 

3. Combat is mixed. My favourite fight was the stairway fight, but theres also 2 or 3 fights that are just mowing down revenants in a corridor that I don't really understand.

4. Is 100% kills possible? Archviles seem to respawn arachnotrons at the start. It was unclear if they ever died
 

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

1 hour ago, DeafPixel said:

1. Aesthetics are on point, might be my favourite part of the map

Thanks

1 hour ago, DeafPixel said:

2. The difficulty balancing is all over the place. SSG fight felt the hardest (slightly easier with rocket launcher) and the final fight was really easy. (Kind of anticlimactic too, feels out of nowhere). 

The final area is a little victory lap to blow off steam.

1 hour ago, DeafPixel said:

3. Combat is mixed. My favourite fight was the stairway fight, but theres also 2 or 3 fights that are just mowing down revenants in a corridor that I don't really understand.

That's for people who don't have the practice of dealing with revs without pillars or corners to blow up homers against.
And I don't claim to know how to make great combat, there is a lot to learn.

1 hour ago, DeafPixel said:

4. Is 100% kills possible? Archviles seem to respawn arachnotrons at the start. It was unclear if they ever died

Yes, coming up the lift after archie duo in the little maintenance room reveals a switch that enables crushers.

[Ravendesk]

Cool map, very atmospheric and kinda oppressive without being overly dark. "Mucus-flow inspired" part is definitely there, and I like your take on the theme. Fights were interesting and fair, even if hard to tackle on blind because most of them required a particular strategy.

 

Here is fda with saves on RC3 version (you need dsda-doom 0.26.2 to play to back): gardplag-fda-03-00002.zip 

 

The few issues I had:

1. It's a bit hard to distinguish between midtext slimefalls and actual impassable void and that sometimes leads to you getting shot by things enemies you don't see, maybe it's worth adding some translucency to midtex ones? 

2. I was essentially soflocked in the revenant hallway because I ended up there before I got RL. Had to idclip out of it. Maybe some alternative weapon pickups won't hurt since the map is non-linear. But it's up to whatever your vision is of course. I had suspicions I missed RL even during the fight before that because cleanup was a bit of a drag with just an ssg, but it was already point of no return.

 

A few things I particularly liked:

1. The fact that aforementioned revenant hallway requires a strategy from a certain video about the revenants. Nice touch. (Well, I'm pretty sure it's doable without that strategy, but it works exceptionally well).

2. The deep water (or rather deep mud) section was amazing and caught me off guard.

[Daytime Waitress]

Haven't actually been playing much Doom lately, but a Sneezy map is just what I need to slip back into the groove - really looking forward to cracking this open on the weekend.