Going Down

[mouldy]

Cheers folks!

Suitepee said:

Perhaps I'll tackle this sometime when I'm in the mood for a slaughter megawad. And dying a lot, since I'm pretty much expecting each level to be as tricky as your NOVA: The Birth contribution.

In actual fact I don't think any of these maps are as tough as nova 28, though some of them can get a bit hectic. If in doubt, the lower difficulties should make things less painful.

joe-ilya said:

You can get monsters stuck on the soulsphere pillars in MAP15.
How do I exit MAP30?

Soulsphere pillars can indeed be used to trap monsters, looks especially amusing if you catch the mastermind.
You can only leave map30 once you have killed all the monsters ;)

[DeathevokatioN]

Congrats on the release man!

[scifista42]

With saves + loads, I can manage even UV! Well, mouldy, I like how these slaughtermaps don't use just monster hordes and/or chaos (athough both are present in a large amount :P), but also well worked-out map structure and aesthetics that make me stand in awe. It's all so much appealing to me, even though I'm getting my ass kicked heavily and hopelessly.

MAP21 was fun, the kind of slaughtermap which can be enjoyed even by coward players who dislike slaughtermaps (unless they dislike them out of principle). Plenty of opportunities to run to find cover, outmaneuver and manipulate the monsters, no real place to get stuck. Also it looked flawlessly awesome, for an intestine. ;)

MAP22 was like an escalation of your E1+E2 design - semirealistic, brilliantly detailed, interconnected, compact, VERY dynamic, dangerous, unforgiving. You can't feel safe anywhere, specially if you don't know what's going to come. Really nicely done corrupted base.

MAP23 has another elaborate layout, very enjoyable. EXCELLENT detail and texture usage for demon pictures and furniture pieces. Even better hostile atmosphere than before - you can't trust anything, not even pillars you want to hide behind. :P Less hectic gameplay than in MAP22 (less ever-present windows between areas), but I liked it maybe even better. The quest for keys is well done. IMO in the final key lowering sequence, the pillars could have started lowering sooner after each other.

This wad is already legendary, I have no doubt.

[Mechadon]

Awesome! Congrats on the release, this has been probably one of my most anticipated map sets this year :D

I'll add it to the heap of stuff I've got to play...though I might bump it up the list a bit :P

[dannebubinga]

Good job mr.mouldy :) downloading

[Demon of the Well]

Fuck yeah. I've fallen behind on my Dooming this week, but I'm eager to FDA this as soon as I can.

[kmxexii]

woop woop!

glad to see this adventure of architectural insanity finished.

[mouldy]

kmxexii said:

glad to see this adventure of architectural insanity finished.

me too, i only realised the other day that its taken me a whole year..

[kmxexii]

mouldy said:

me too, i only realised the other day that its taken me a whole year..

oh btw apparently some people off-site can't find download links to e1 and e2. im waiting for the super double final kitty city edition personally

[mouldy]

kmxexii said:

oh btw apparently some people off-site can't find download links to e1 and e2. im waiting for the super double final kitty city edition personally

Episodes 1 and 2 refer to the first 20 maps, this is the whole thing all in one wad. I spilt it into "episodes" when I didn't think I might ever finish the whole thing, so it gave me the excuse to release it in chunks. So E1 is maps 1-11, E2 is maps 12-20 and E3 is 21-30. Buts its all just one big adventure really.

I'll upload the final final version to idgames after people have finished reporting problems, hopefully that won't take ages though.

[kmxexii]

mouldy said:

Episodes 1 and 2 refer to the first 20 maps, this is the whole thing all in one wad. I spilt it into "episodes" when I didn't think I might ever finish the whole thing, so it gave me the excuse to release it in chunks. So E1 is maps 1-11, E2 is maps 12-20 and E3 is 21-30. Buts its all just one big adventure really.

I'll upload the final final version to idgames after people have finished reporting problems, hopefully that won't take ages though.

oh i see i / they didnt even check, sorry for hasslin ya

[The_MártonJános]

I'm just astonished how one could bring anything out of stock stuff. Might review map-by-map later, I'm just too tired mentally to make a feedback on all this detail and eye-pleasure.

[Ribbiks]

neat :D Here's some demos: https://www.mediafire.com/?1wnbedinzuv396j

21: cute, gimmicky tyson map (why is map21 always a tyson map?). fun, I love the RK room. extremely intricate fleshy detailing (seems to be your specialty), proving stock textures can still look good. Only complaint is that some of the max-play is a bit tedious (i.e. waiting for HKs/barons to get crushed to death.

22: jesus this map is zany. noisy visuals, monsters everywhere, extreme interconnectivity. all to a whimsically discordant midi. Pretty easy map, well designed though. I love the idea of the map discombobulating and revealing stashes of resources after the BK grab. There are a ton of spots in this map btw where monsters can get stuck over moving ledges and such, some more block-monster lines may be in order.

23: again really cool interconnectivity and six-key exploration stuffs. Took me awhile to find certain crucial switches, but other than that no big complaints. Oh yeah, one thing I'm starting to notice is the extreme amount of repeatable tags that make the floor "clunk" noise when you walk around. It's possible to minimize this by using dummy sectors that offset the noise to elsewhere in the map (effectively making it inaudible) but that can be pretty time consuming.

24: straight-forward slaughtery affair. I found myself with a sizable excess of health/ammo, but I may have gotten lucky with cyb infighting, you should watch my fda and decide for yourself if you think I got off too easy :p I think the switch in the throne room may be too strong of a camping spot.

25: really cool looking environment, but god damn this is the most awkward map I've ever tried to move around in. the fruit scavenger hunting thing is neat, similar to map 23. Neat music and aesthetic, but I didn't have the patience to finish this one.

26: interesting idea. I like the concept of a map that effectively comes apart at the seams unexpectedly. The monotonous bloodfall was kind of eh, made the rocky environment appear fairly disorienting. Not too hard though, so it wasn't much of an issue. The visuals at the end were mind-blowingly cool, it's a shame they flashed by the player in a matter of seconds.

27: again a cool idea. fairly interesting to have a completely open mazey slaughter arena. It seems a bit easy if taken slowly, though most doom things are nowadays. The only enemy placement that seemed egregious to me was the tower of 3 viles, tedious tedious tedious.

28: hurray slaughtermap. The brutality of some of the traps caught me offguard (e.g. I wasn't expecting *quite* that many enemies near the BK switch). Didn't finish this one, but will come back with saves. Deciding the best time to use the invul spheres is pretty crucial I bet.

29: heh. was not expecting the super romero mastermind at all :p. pretty cool finale, very cutesy again.


overall I thought these maps were excellent. Highly difficult, some very cool gimmicky concepts here and there, and a sense of whimsy you don't see much in maps nowadays. Some of the super-awkward terrain can be annoying to move around, but I see you've remedied this in most places with fake floors. The music gets slightly grating the more maps you play sequentially (I started getting a "hammond organ: the wad" vibe towards the end, but its craziness certainly contributes to the chaotic feeling. A++

[plums]

MAP26: some weird visual glitches in GLBoom+, you can see the cacos in the elevators behind the "invisible" walls, with some HOM on the floor. Not sure how it's supposed to look but I imagine that this isn't it. Hard to see from the screenshots, much more glitchy-looking in game.


Also the AV hole in the corner BFG room has HOM, missing textures maybe? If you kill him with splash damage from rockets I think you can get stuck in there, too.


MAP28: can't finish in PrBoom+ because linedef 5711 (fake ceiling and floor) blocks the action for one of the four skull switches. Giving it the PassThru flag might work, otherwise just split that linedef and assign a small bit to be the fake ceiling and floor off to the side.

That's as far as I am, no other major bugs spotted. Will post FDAs soon. Extremely fun and good-looking, no surprise there!

[DeathevokatioN]

mouldy said:

me too, i only realised the other day that its taken me a whole year..

Child's play. ;)

[plums]

Also

Ribbiks said:

Oh yeah, one thing I'm starting to notice is the extreme amount of repeatable tags that make the floor "clunk" noise when you walk around. It's possible to minimize this by using dummy sectors that offset the noise to elsewhere in the map (effectively making it inaudible) but that can be pretty time consuming.

If you do this, there's some option you want to set in ZDoom so that ZDoom's default sound behaviour isn't used, which would nullify this effect. The option in the compatibility settings menu is "Sector sounds use center as source", there's some way to set this in MAPINFO I think though I can't find it right now. I think something like this might work

defaultmap
{
    compat_sectorsounds = 1
}

[plums]

Finsihed the episode on HMP with pistol starts. Unfortunately I did a very dumb thing and overwrote all my FDAs. Currently typing from an old laptop while I see if an undelete tool can recover anything...

Very very great visual layouts and detail, nice fights too although some of them seemed a little less inspired somehow than previous episodes. That might be from playing on HMP, or from being familiar with the style of maps, or something else entirely. I do intend to go back to them on UV, so I'll see if that assessment changes. They also seemed a bit less harsh on HMP than E2. There were still a fair share of interesting situations though so I'm not really complaining.

Some specific comments about maps, in brief:

21: Fun, nice "palette cleanser" gameplay after the rather large-scale hordes from 20. I feel like you could make a whole episode out of flesh textures and still have each of them look fairly distinct.

23: the find-the-keys hunt is cool, I got a bit stuck looking for the one in the bedroom but the automap showed me the way.

25: is this by the same mouldy that despises platforming? Granted it's just on the cusp of counting as platforming at all, still more than I would have expected from you though. A bit strange to see so many new resources (relatively speaking) come up at once here; now that you've got the mudfalls in, you could consider adding them to previous maps if there are any that would benefit.

26: loved it, seems like there's a lot of ways to handle things and the way the whole map just devolves is nice. And the ending, wow! Really nice. All that said I thought the combat was a little simplistic at least on HMP, maybe UV is better. Also when I first saw the level I had this idea that there's really hundreds of elevators across different buildings, all tied down to this main area underground like roots of an upside-down tree or something. Creepy.

29: Nice boss fight, custom monster definitely has Obsidian's name on it but that's OK. I died a lot on this map, far more than any others for some reason. I think I was trying to BFG-rush the Superspider like it was just a normal SMM, that of course does not work out so well. Some cacos in the NE building didn't get released for me. Invisible wall at the start has HOM in GLBoom+. You really don't need to rely on those kinds of tricks with Boom when you can just use linedef 242 to accomplish the same thing.

30: I don't want too say too much, but I did get to the exit. Fun little bonus end map. It was all a dream game... or was it? If you put a switch texture on the TV button (even as an unneeded upper or lower texture) it will make the switch sound when you press it.

Congrats on finishing this! An excellent and very unique wad that everyone should try.


edit: Think those FDAs are gone, too bad.

[Katamori]

"final episode has arrived"? Wait, when did it happen that some people have already wrote review??

Anyway, I guess you know what's coming now mouldy! ;)

[Obsidian]

plums said:

29: Nice boss fight, custom monster definitely has Obsidian's name on it

Actually I originally made something a lot more complex, but mouldy reckoned it diverted the flow of the gameplay too much from the centre. I'm kind of sad that not all my work got used, but that just means I can use it for something else, I guess. :)

[mouldy]

Ribbiks said:

neat :D Here's some demos: https://www.mediafire.com/?1wnbedinzuv396j

Excellent cheers, I'll watch those later. Thanks for the comments too. Agree map25 is very awkward to navigate, which also dictated the kind of fights I could have in there so its a bit design-first-monsters-second. Think I reached a point where I just wanted to do something pretty and fuck anyone who had to use the space (even the monsters have a hard time).

Those clunking walkover lines you mention would probably be too much work to fix now, but there are a few I can think of that could really benefit from fixing in that way, I'll stick that on the list.

[mouldy]

Emergency fix for map28:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/o7zrkzi31vgdfxr/goingdownE3-sept15.zip

This is an important fix for the exit switch, which is unswitchable in prboom (thanks plums). I also fixed a bug where all the monsters were black.

Obsidian said:

Actually I originally made something a lot more complex, but mouldy reckoned it diverted the flow of the gameplay too much from the centre. I'm kind of sad that not all my work got used, but that just means I can use it for something else, I guess. :)

Yeah I have to say a big thanks to Obsidian for helping me with the boss fight, even though I didn't end up using his sprite, the dehacked magic was a great help. Also I should thank my tireless playtester dobu gabu maru who had to suffer endless versions of any maps he didn't like.

Cheers Scifista and Plums for the feedback and bug reports, I expect a lot more mistakes are lurking in there..

[tourniquet]

Some HOM'S on the moving stairs in 21 only visible while they're move up or down.

Currently at 26. From punching through piles of flesh, fighting at bloody bridges up to harvesting meaty fruits, so far this is more than just great.

[joe-ilya]

You can see the default DB2 texture without cheating in MAP28.
(look at the middle magma torch, there's the color of the STARTAN.

[mouldy]

Thanks tourniquet and joe. Christ knows how you spotted that startan on map28, its like a few pixels on my screen at full resolution, good find.

[esselfortium]

Congratulations on getting this released! The pictures I've seen have shown some very striking scenes -- I especially like ZIMMERworld; it's evocative of an overgrown ancient place that hasn't been visited in a very long time. I really enjoyed playing the first two episodes and look forward to playing the rest soon.

[scifista42]

MAP24 - A little more "brute force"-oriented slaughter this time. Challenging and enjoyable anyway. I've got enough time and possibilities to make a strategy, when the enemy forces come in excessive numbers, but only from 2 different directions. Good battle. I ran to the exit without killing all monsters.

MAP25 - Cool and nicely done concept, I also liked all the natural shapes. Amazing visuals, even though those textures themselves are ugly. It seemed like a breather map, compared to the previous maps (easy to avoid enemies and slowly take them down). But I've died numerous times anyway.

MAP26 - The first part! I liked its surreality very very much, the brightness transfer fits there just great. The "change" itself was pretty impressive from a technical standpoint, unfortunately the gameplay itself went down from that moment. I've exited ASAP, once again without killing all monsters. Then, you got me scared - good job on the final sequence! :)

MAP27 - Already too hectic and overcrowded for me. However, I didn't die many times before figuring out how to effectively advance through and exit quickly. No max kills, just be out ASAP. It's a well structured map, though.

MAP28, at first glance, seemed over the top to me. I'll probably have to lower the difficulty now.

[mouldy]

plums said:

If you do this, there's some option you want to set in ZDoom so that ZDoom's default sound behaviour isn't used, which would nullify this effect. The option in the compatibility settings menu is "Sector sounds use center as source", there's some way to set this in MAPINFO I think though I can't find it right now.

I think the main problem is for instant raising/lowering walkovers, which zdoom seems to make silent by default anyway. I don't play on prboom much, but watching Ribbik's demos those clunks really get on my nerves, so I'm definitely going to try and do something about them.

scifista42 said:

MAP28, at first glance, seemed over the top to me. I'll probably have to lower the difficulty now.

Its a busy one alright, though there are a couple of bunkers to hide in when things get too much. I think lower difficuties might have more invuls as well, although if you know what you are doing its probably possible on UV to chain the invuls and run to the exit without killing anything :)

[rampancy]

Going to finish this today hopefully. Just wanted to say I LOL'd hard at the intermission screen and music.

[Katamori]

Let's Play about MAP21 - I would have never missed the chance to do it. :D

[mouldy]

Hey cool, you are doing more videos. Easy setting looks very easy! I did make it very difficult to die on that setting, so you shouldn't get too frustrated (maybe even a little bored? We shall see).

I'm interested in how people find the lower difficulties, very hard for me to judge these things.