Once and Forever (single map wad)

[UmiLobJoc]

this isn't my first map, but it is my first time posting one publicly, so sorry if i'm doing anything wrong.

 

IWAD: Plutonia

Map slot: 21

Tested with: Odamex and DSDA-Doom

Requires: Any limit removing sourceport

File size: 3.6MB

 

i'd say it's around the later half of plutonia's difficulty, and is around 30-50 minutes long.

 

this is my 6th map i've finished so far, and 2nd midi i've finished, so all feedback, positive and negative is helpful and appreciated.

 

DOWNLOAD

 

 

Edited May 18, 2024 by UmiLobJoc
map had major issue, replaced with newer version

[BerserkerNoir]

Is this beatable on Pistol Start?
Or you need collected weapons?

[UmiLobJoc]

it is beatable pistol starting, that's the only way i tested it.

 

[Zesiir]

It's very hard, ammo is scarce but you can manage if you are careful. I had to stop though because the music was too repetitive.

 

I'll give it a shot without music later.

 

For now I'm very impressed with the level design though, it's varied and interesting to look at.

 

First door on the left has a pegged texture.

[UmiLobJoc]

5 hours ago, Zesiir said:

It's very hard, ammo is scarce but you can manage if you are careful. I had to stop though because the music was too repetitive.

 

I'll give it a shot without music later.

 

For now I'm very impressed with the level design though, it's varied and interesting to look at.

 

First door on the left has a pegged texture.

thank you very much for playing and for the feedback, i hope you'll enjoy the rest of it when you get around to it.

 

also, the door track was unpegged originally, but for some reason, the revenants kept getting stuck on it until i repegged it.

[Zesiir]

There we go, I finished it. And it's a long map which no doubt took a lot of time to get right, so I'll start off with the positives.

 

The map is beautifully made. Tons of height differences, varying environments to keep the player engaged, and it really nails the hellish architecture.

At times it felt claustrophobic in places, but never constricting. Other times when the map dared to open up it still felt engaging to explore and fight

in the surroundings.

 

Gameplay flow is very tight, and that's mostly good. Combat encounters are often the tougher variety of monsters such as Revenants, and a quite

liberal use of Archviles to surprise the player. Already from the get-go you're faced with hard monsters almost immediately, and the map shows it's

difficulty curve right away. I really enjoyed the teleport trickery to catch me off-guard. This is a hard map, but if you have that mentality

going in and expecting a challenge, you'll get your money's worth. You'll want to find the SSG, it'll help a ton.

 

I only found one secret out of 9, I really searched but could not find any of the typical telltale hints typical of Doom secrets. So that's a bit cryptic.

Perhaps it would have been easier if I had found more, but that's fine.

 

There's not really much to complain about. The music gets a bit repetitive after a while. Health is very sparsely placed throughout the level, though I

did play on UV so if that affects it I recommend playing on lower difficulties. Some 2D props can get in the way when fighting.

I also noticed that some walls lower very slowly, which interrupted gameplay a bit.

 

I suspect I may have ran into a bug in this room;

 

Spoiler

 

There were four switches to press to lower walls in order to progress. Each wall lowering took exceedingly long, this is often the case

when one wants the player to fight monsters in waves. But in this case, no monsters spawned at all in the room. So it was just a lot

of waiting...

 

 

 

Other than that, not much to complain about. This is a solid map. Big, and hard as nails, and it will probably kick your ass. But it looks great, and

plays great. And it feels like a lot of passion has gone into making it. Would gladly play more in the future.

[UmiLobJoc]

2 hours ago, Zesiir said:

There we go, I finished it. And it's a long map which no doubt took a lot of time to get right, so I'll start off with the positives.

 

The map is beautifully made. Tons of height differences, varying environments to keep the player engaged, and it really nails the hellish architecture.

At times it felt claustrophobic in places, but never constricting. Other times when the map dared to open up it still felt engaging to explore and fight

in the surroundings.

 

Gameplay flow is very tight, and that's mostly good. Combat encounters are often the tougher variety of monsters such as Revenants, and a quite

liberal use of Archviles to surprise the player. Already from the get-go you're faced with hard monsters almost immediately, and the map shows it's

difficulty curve right away. I really enjoyed the teleport trickery to catch me off-guard. This is a hard map, but if you have that mentality

going in and expecting a challenge, you'll get your money's worth. You'll want to find the SSG, it'll help a ton.

 

I only found one secret out of 9, I really searched but could not find any of the typical telltale hints typical of Doom secrets. So that's a bit cryptic.

Perhaps it would have been easier if I had found more, but that's fine.

 

There's not really much to complain about. The music gets a bit repetitive after a while. Health is very sparsely placed throughout the level, though I

did play on UV so if that affects it I recommend playing on lower difficulties. Some 2D props can get in the way when fighting.

I also noticed that some walls lower very slowly, which interrupted gameplay a bit.

 

I suspect I may have ran into a bug in this room;

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

There were four switches to press to lower walls in order to progress. Each wall lowering took exceedingly long, this is often the case

when one wants the player to fight monsters in waves. But in this case, no monsters spawned at all in the room. So it was just a lot

of waiting...

 

 

 

Other than that, not much to complain about. This is a solid map. Big, and hard as nails, and it will probably kick your ass. But it looks great, and

plays great. And it feels like a lot of passion has gone into making it. Would gladly play more in the future.

that certainly is a bug, i somehow accidentally deleted the linedef that allowed the ambushing monsters to be awaken by gunfire. i've replaced the wad with a version that fixes that in the download link, so all ambushes and teleporting monsters should properly work now. i tested it right before sending it, so it mustve been a last minute hit of the delete key.

 

once again, your feedback is very much appreciated, i wasn't expecting to get a response so fast, let alone one that's so nice, i'll certainly be posting more maps in the future.

 

the secrets were meant to be a bit tougher to find since they're so rewarding, although they weren't intended to cryptic, so in future maps i'll make them stand out a bit more. 

 

thank you very much for playing, and i'm glad you enjoyed it.

 

[sidestepper]

This map is a toughie - I went into it blind, UV, hadn't even read these comments yet - just your description then downloaded it. From the sounds of it, mostly agree. It's got great architecture and nails the hell vibe. The tight areas are also fun, but it did become almost expected that anything I did, there's probably something behind me as well. I only found, 2 I think? of the secrets. My only complaint is the ammo starving: I get rockets and cells way before I get the weapons, however that may have been intentional, and once I found the launcher, and then the plasma and BFG, I knew you were about to unleash some nasty, although it did leave me wondering for a while, if perhaps the only way to get those weapons was through the secrets I couldn't find yet. By the very end, I literally just ran out of ammo and made a dash for the exit. Wish I could have spent some time checking out the last chamber, it looked pretty neat - like the rest of the map.

 

Wanted to go ahead and comment here - great job! Although for anyone else, be ready for a longer experience and A LOT of rippin' n tearin'. On that note, would have loved to get a berserk sphere mid game. I have a video of the playthrough, and I'm so mad, it cropped the right side for some reason. I think it's because I changed resolution since my last recording and never adjusted OBS. It's a big video though, so not uploaded yet. I'll edit this comment with it once I can.

 

EDIT ~~~

Was out to dinner and stuff, but here is the playthrough. I apologize again for not checking my OBS in advance to fix the cropping issue. I even considered re-recording, but the whole point was that I had not played it through yet:

 

 

Edited May 18, 2024 by sidestepper

[LadyMistDragon]

It's funny to me how at least 2 of the hardest secrets to find are hiding in plain sight. It's an interesting bookend to be low on ammo in both the start and the end, with the middle being somewhat better in that regard, even if most non Super-Shotgun weapons are withheld to quite a bit.

 

 

 

[plums]

Oof, what a long map! Fun though. I did see some comments about low ammo before I started, and found the early berserk, so I played conservatively with ammo through the whole thing and didn't have any issues.

 

You mentioned you made a MIDI but it seems like there's no replacement music, did you forget to include it? It's doubly a shame because the music track of that map in Plutonia gets old very quickly, fortunately there's always IDMUS.

 

I liked the AV setups, especially the first one. Though the one with 3 in the cramped redrock corridor was a bit grindy just because of all the spectres.

 

The big multi-stage arena went a lot easier that I expected, but it was kind of a nice breather and change of pace from the rest of the map. With ambushes at every step through the rest of it, it starts to get a bit predictable, though since you can't tell beforehand what is going to teleport out of nowhere at you, it's still tense.

 

The only part I didn't like was a whole bunch of mancs that teleport in, one at a time, in an area near the yellow key -- it just seemed like a boring ammo tax. That's not bad for a map that runs an hour though.

 

-dsdadoom FDA with saves, if you want to watch it. Let me know if you need help playing it.

https://user.fm/files/v2-3cd49cb40116da20b4f29f3b07d9b8ed/onceaf-plums.zip

Edited May 18, 2024 by plums

[UmiLobJoc]

15 minutes ago, plums said:

Oof, what a long map! Fun though. I did see some comments about low ammo before I started, and found the early berserk, so I played conservatively with ammo through the whole thing and didn't have any issues.

 

You mentioned you made a MIDI but it seems like there's no replacement music, did you forget to include it? It's doubly a shame because the music track of that map in Plutonia gets old very quickly, fortunately there's always IDMUS.

 

I liked the AV setups, especially the first one. Though the one with 3 in the cramped redrock corridor was a bit grindy just because of all the spectres.

 

The big multi-stage arena went a lot easier that I expected, but it was kind of a nice breather and change of pace from the rest of the map. With ambushes at every step through the rest of it, it starts to get a bit predictable, though since you can't tell beforehand what is going to teleport out of nowhere at you, it's still tense.

 

The only part I didn't like was a whole bunch of mancs that teleport in, one at a time, in an area near the yellow key -- it just seemed like a boring ammo tax. That's not bad for a map that runs an hour though.

 

-dsdadoom FDA with saves, if you want to watch it. Let me know if you need help playing it.

https://user.fm/files/v2-3cd49cb40116da20b4f29f3b07d9b8ed/onceaf-plums.zip

thank you for the feedback and for going out of your way to record it, i'll watch the video after i wake up tomorrow.

 

i've readded the midi now. earlier, i replaced the file to fix a glitch and i had removed the midi to replace it with an updated version, but forgot to actually add that updated midi.

 

the redrock corridor and mancubi spawn trap you mentioned are definitely weak points in my opinion, they were originally added to sort of induce dread, with the archviles closing in and the mancubi that slowly drain your ammo, though in practice it's pretty situational depending on your ammo when you reach those areas.

 

i'm glad you enjoyed it though, i was pretty nervous about uploading it, so it's nice to see it's getting positive reception.

 

[UmiLobJoc]

3 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

It's funny to me how at least 2 of the hardest secrets to find are hiding in plain sight. It's an interesting bookend to be low on ammo in both the start and the end, with the middle being somewhat better in that regard, even if most non Super-Shotgun weapons are withheld to quite a bit.

 

 

 

i watched all of this earlier, but i wasn't able to reply because of the daily limit. thanks for this though, it was so cool to see my map being played by someone other than myself, it felt pretty surreal in a good way.

 

and thank you for playing of course, i wasn't really expecting to get more than maybe one person playing it, especially not the day i uploaded it.

[UmiLobJoc]

8 hours ago, sidestepper said:

This map is a toughie - I went into it blind, UV, hadn't even read these comments yet - just your description then downloaded it. From the sounds of it, mostly agree. It's got great architecture and nails the hell vibe. The tight areas are also fun, but it did become almost expected that anything I did, there's probably something behind me as well. I only found, 2 I think? of the secrets. My only complaint is the ammo starving: I get rockets and cells way before I get the weapons, however that may have been intentional, and once I found the launcher, and then the plasma and BFG, I knew you were about to unleash some nasty, although it did leave me wondering for a while, if perhaps the only way to get those weapons was through the secrets I couldn't find yet. By the very end, I literally just ran out of ammo and made a dash for the exit. Wish I could have spent some time checking out the last chamber, it looked pretty neat - like the rest of the map.

 

Wanted to go ahead and comment here - great job! Although for anyone else, be ready for a longer experience and A LOT of rippin' n tearin'. On that note, would have loved to get a berserk sphere mid game. I have a video of the playthrough, and I'm so mad, it cropped the right side for some reason. I think it's because I changed resolution since my last recording and never adjusted OBS. It's a big video though, so not uploaded yet. I'll edit this comment with it once I can.

can't wait to watch the video, even if it's torn in half.

 

thank you for playing and for the feedback (i really need a larger vocabulary), it makes me very happy just to see people playing it, especially since everyone seems to at least think it's good.

 

in terms of the early cells and rockets, the intention of those was to sort of reward the player for sticking around areas and going out of their way to collect them, so in a way it was meant to incentivize killing all or most of the enemies in the room, as that'd make it easier to pick everything up, which could be useful later.

 

i'm very glad you enjoyed the map, i wasn't too sure about it's quality going into posting it, but i'm much more confident about my abilities now.

[plums]

22 hours ago, UmiLobJoc said:

i've readded the midi now. earlier, i replaced the file to fix a glitch and i had removed the midi to replace it with an updated version, but forgot to actually add that updated midi.

Oh that's a definite improvement over the default music for that mapslot of Plutonia. It's somewhat repetitive, but I don't really mean that as a criticism, rather I think it's probably a benefit for a map that long as it can fade into the background a bit.

 

22 hours ago, UmiLobJoc said:

the redrock corridor and mancubi spawn trap you mentioned are definitely weak points in my opinion, they were originally added to sort of induce dread, with the archviles closing in and the mancubi that slowly drain your ammo, though in practice it's pretty situational depending on your ammo when you reach those areas. 

I don't think the redrock corridor was that bad, it just seemed a little clumsy for lack of a better word. I guess if you had low ammo there, and didn't get the berserk, it might be a challenge of sorts. As for the mancs I think that kind of setup is fine if there is at least some danger of getting hit; the way it was, there was really no danger as long as you had enough ammo to pay the toll to go on. You don't need to change either of these things here though, just stuff to keep in mind for the next one.

 

Don't be shy about posting more!

[UmiLobJoc]

On 5/17/2024 at 4:31 PM, sidestepper said:

This map is a toughie - I went into it blind, UV, hadn't even read these comments yet - just your description then downloaded it. From the sounds of it, mostly agree. It's got great architecture and nails the hell vibe. The tight areas are also fun, but it did become almost expected that anything I did, there's probably something behind me as well. I only found, 2 I think? of the secrets. My only complaint is the ammo starving: I get rockets and cells way before I get the weapons, however that may have been intentional, and once I found the launcher, and then the plasma and BFG, I knew you were about to unleash some nasty, although it did leave me wondering for a while, if perhaps the only way to get those weapons was through the secrets I couldn't find yet. By the very end, I literally just ran out of ammo and made a dash for the exit. Wish I could have spent some time checking out the last chamber, it looked pretty neat - like the rest of the map.

 

Wanted to go ahead and comment here - great job! Although for anyone else, be ready for a longer experience and A LOT of rippin' n tearin'. On that note, would have loved to get a berserk sphere mid game. I have a video of the playthrough, and I'm so mad, it cropped the right side for some reason. I think it's because I changed resolution since my last recording and never adjusted OBS. It's a big video though, so not uploaded yet. I'll edit this comment with it once I can.

 

EDIT ~~~

Was out to dinner and stuff, but here is the playthrough. I apologize again for not checking my OBS in advance to fix the cropping issue. I even considered re-recording, but the whole point was that I had not played it through yet:

 

 

i watched the whole video earlier, great work finishing it and thanks for going out of your way to record it, it's super cool to me to see how people react to certain things. i never really had anyone play test it fully, and that was an issue with such an ambush heavy map, so it's great to really see how the ambushes are dealt with for future maps. also, don't worry about the obs thing, i honestly didn't even notice until the intermission screen, other than the lack of hud.

[UmiLobJoc]

1 hour ago, plums said:

Oh that's a definite improvement over the default music for that mapslot of Plutonia. It's somewhat repetitive, but I don't really mean that as a criticism, rather I think it's probably a benefit for a map that long as it can fade into the background a bit.

 

I don't think the redrock corridor was that bad, it just seemed a little clumsy for lack of a better word. I guess if you had low ammo there, and didn't get the berserk, it might be a challenge of sorts. As for the mancs I think that kind of setup is fine if there is at least some danger of getting hit; the way it was, there was really no danger as long as you had enough ammo to pay the toll to go on. You don't need to change either of these things here though, just stuff to keep in mind for the next one.

 

Don't be shy about posting more!

i'm glad that the midi is better now, and thanks for pointing it out, that has to be like the worst midi to listen to for a 50+ minute map (other than maybe countdown to death)

 

i will keep those in mind, thank you for the feedback, it's very helpful.

 

also, i'm making an episode 1 replacement of doom 1, named internal conflict, i'll probably post the first map i finish making, and then post the whole thing when they're all finished.

 

and finally, i just got done watching your demo 10 minutes ago. as for the others who recorded, thank you for recording your playthrough, not only is it cool to see others playing my map, but all of them will be helpful for future maps when placing secrets, ambushes, etc.