Breach [1.0, now on idgames!]

[Viggles]

Thanks for the detailed notes!

TheOrganGrinder said:
Putting the key in line of sight of the door, and leaving it readily accessible (other than the matter of raising the bridge to it with the provided switch) immediately has me going "this can't be that simple" and puts me on guard for a trap or ambush, which makes the ensuing 'hellucination' less effective - the player knows something is coming.

This was actually the intention, to make the player tense and looking for where the ambush is going to come from. The element of surprise is meant to come from the form the ambush takes: a double bluff with the doors in front opening to reveal empty alcoves while the monsters teleport in behind, only to have the alcoves open when you rush for the SSG.

I don't know quite why it happened, but sectors 325, 326, 328, and 486 did not raise for me during my first playthrough - these are the chaingun sniper areas to the north and south of the yellow door that are supposed to raise up during the player's excursion to grab the yellow key.

This sounds like something prevented the height-locks for those sectors from opening beforehand - I think the linedefs for that are in the hell area so you may have danced around them in there inadvertently. Did the imp cages open? Do you have any special compatibility options turned on?

I found the sectond 'hellucination' sequence, teleporting through a series of cages and telefragging the monsters within, to be more disorienting and confusing rather than atmospheric.

Yeah I agree, I'm not happy with how that area turned out: I got stuck figuring out how to present a hell area that the real world was 'leaking into', and the solution I came up with seems either bewildering or silly - and not very readable.

Linedef 19883, the shootable switch which opens the passage within which the switch itself is contained - it's somewhat easy for a player to send a significant volume of fire in the direction of this switch while fighting the chaingunners in the passage without actually hitting/triggering it, leading the player to assume "I must have hit that at some point during the fight, and the designer wouldn't put a shoot-switch in a position where you're likely to hit it accidentally unless it's part of a trap, therefore it's a press-switch not a shoot-switch," or for a pistol shot aimed at the switch to get caught up on the architecture surrounding it and not actually trigger the switch itself. Maybe consider making the switch larger?

I found the opposite problem in testing: I kept hitting the switch during the fight without noticing I'd done so, and I worry that players may do that and not even realise it opened the door (thus making the presence of the switch more confusing.) I'd actually rather solve this by sinking the button much further into the wall, so it's harder to hit accidentally and clearer to the player that they'll have to shoot it.

[Memfis]

I think "hallucinations" like the ones you attempted work better when you make them more like cinematic sequences... You know, lock a player with impassable lines and just move him towards the area with a Boom scroller, so it feels a little like a camera closing up. Sort of like what Speed of Doom map30 did at the start. It's not ideal but I believe it's more effective than letting the player wander around.

[scifista42]

Memfis said:

I think "hallucinations" like the ones you attempted work better when you make them more like cinematic sequences... You know, lock a player with impassable lines and just move him towards the area with a Boom scroller, so it feels a little like a camera closing up. Sort of like what Speed of Doom map30 did at the start. It's not ideal but I believe it's more effective than letting the player wander around.

I disagree. Taking the player out of control sucks. Modern games are full of that *shit*. In Breach, you're still fully in control of your actions during the entire hallucination, like you would if it was a real hallucination. I see it as right. I liked it. It was only a little weird during the 2nd (outdoor) hallucination, where the player avoided lots of ammo and items during his hallucinating way across that ledge, and then had to go back to actually get the ammo.

[TheOrganGrinder]

Viggles said:
This was actually the intention, to make the player tense and looking for where the ambush is going to come from. The element of surprise is meant to come from the form the ambush takes: a double bluff with the doors in front opening to reveal empty alcoves while the monsters teleport in behind, only to have the alcoves open when you rush for the SSG.

I think the part I'm referring to comes before the double bluff you describe here (which I agree is a clever piece of misdirection and a very nice trap). The sequence of events - transition to Hell > monsters wake up > escape from Hell > monsters follow the player back - is an effective one, because the player gets a spike of adrenaline as they end up in Hell, followed by a moment of relief as they return to the real world just before the monsters teleport after them. It's that initial transition to Hell that I feel is the "something is going to happen" element that telegraphs itself - your double bluff ambush works well coming out of the Hell sequence, and the player should come out of the Hell sequence expecting an ambush, but the transition to Hell itself, before that, might work better as a surprise rather than something the player is set up to anticipate.

This sounds like something prevented the height-locks for those sectors from opening beforehand - I think the linedefs for that are in the hell area so you may have danced around them in there inadvertently. Did the imp cages open? Do you have any special compatibility options turned on?

I actually had to open up Doom Builder to figure out which 'imp cages' you were referring to here - sectors 655 and 5515? If so, those remained closed. It's possible that I avoided the height-lock linedefs in the Hell area (linedefs 3381 and 6668?) but it seems unlikely as those are right in front of the player's teleport exit and even a step or two should have been sufficient to trigger them - I guess the player could avoid them both by immediately strafing left upon exiting the teleport? In terms of compatibility options I generally run in ZDoom's default compatibility mode - I don't know if the last of those options, "use Doom's floor motion behaviour," (currently set to NO) could be the culprit here.

Yeah I agree, I'm not happy with how that area turned out: I got stuck figuring out how to present a hell area that the real world was 'leaking into', and the solution I came up with seems either bewildering or silly - and not very readable.

One thing that somewhat hurts the sense of continuity in that area is the way you've got the player clambering up out of the blood and onto a clean floor a few steps before the corridor disintegrates into Hellish strangeness. It feels like a 'speed bump' in the transition from techbase to Hell, but the player has already taken a leap of faith by jumping down the blood pipe in the preceding section. That reassertion of the techbase reality at the bottom of the pipe makes me look for some way in which the hellish section beyond is connected thematically to the short section of corridor; it might be more effective, instead of having the player ascend to a brief span of clean floor, to instead have that passage descend towards a bloodfall that tumbles endlessly into the void area. I don't know how feasible that would be architecturally, however.

I found the opposite problem in testing: I kept hitting the switch during the fight without noticing I'd done so, and I worry that players may do that and not even realise it opened the door (thus making the presence of the switch more confusing.) I'd actually rather solve this by sinking the button much further into the wall, so it's harder to hit accidentally and clearer to the player that they'll have to shoot it.

That seems a good solution, so long as you have some way of calling additional attention to the further-recessed switch - it's currently small enough that burying it deeper in the wall might make it harder not just to hit accidentally, but to notice in the first place, and that might merit tagging that area as a secret.

[LigH]

A pity it appears to be incompatible with Risen3D 2.2.0-30:

Syntax error in DD_DEFNS lump

I hope Abbs can help explaining the reason.
__

P.S.: I really enjoyed the effect while trying to grab the yellow key. It was like a "vision from hell" (especially having no automap).

[kmxexii]

review is up, thanks for this!

[NinjaLiquidator]

This is really good, its like something straight out Vela Pax. I could just run through it, but I found myself sightseeing all that detail. Good job.

[dobu gabu maru]

Hot damn this was a nice surprise to play through! I haven't seen this much ingenuity with stock textures since mouldy joined us—the floating cages were probably my favorite part, as that was extremely eerie and clever. Really fun level with some surprising constraints on ammo if you don't go secret hunting... I found only 2 secrets and had to routinely swap between my weapons in fear of running dry. I think the gameplay pales in comparison to the stupendous visuals though. Seriously, I was outright flabbergasted by some of the vistas and got hit in the back once or twice just gawking at the scenery. Some of the progression was a tad obscure but I think that's perfectly fine for an exploration-based map, as trying to figure out where to go in this decrepit station is part of the fun. The nightmarish/dream sections are really clever too—had to IDCLIP around to take a better gander at them.

An excellent job well done.

[Dime]

My only complaint is that the map ended.

One of the best maps of 2015.

[Antroid]

Even if I hadn't gotten over my scathing hatred of overdetail, I think this map would've convinced me that overdetail CAN be done right. Not too educated an opinion since I haven't played many overdetailed maps, but this might be the best example of how it should be done. Some parts were a bit silly (like differently-colored metal squares on the floor in that L-shaped corridor near the very beginning), most of it felt very natural, and it made spotting little secret shootable (and useable, I suppose) switches very fun. Seriously, with visuals like these looking for secrets is completely different from how it usually goes.

Played on UV without saves, didn't die, didn't record anything unfortunately since I use zdoom (although with the closest settings to vanilla, I believe). The only thing that soured my experience, and actually did so dramatically was the fact that the hell section on the dam (with the arachnotrons) had an inescapable death pit which I promptly fell into - the one right before the platform with all the square indentations and the switch, I think - and after suffering around 60 damage had to quickly noclip out of. The geometry in those hell sections makes no sense anyway and I think putting an actual do-or-die jump in there, even if it was actually not that hard, is completely unfair. So yeah, booooooo for the inescapable death pit in a place where it feels that there shouldn't be any, yaaaay for everything else.

[Prologue-9]

Dime said:

My only complaint is that the map ended.

Pretty much. The level detail is of course gorgeous, and I definitely felt some of that Prime influence early on. As for the encounters, they were pretty by-the-books, but complimented the scenery well. Can't wait to see what else you have in store!

[Caleb13]

BTW, when Zdoom 2.8pre-1042 starts with this map loaded, it produces a warning:

Script error, "breach.wad:ZMAPINFO" line 11:
Unknown property 'lightmode' found in map definition

[Gez]

Caleb13 said:

BTW, when Zdoom 2.8pre-1042 starts with this map loaded, it produces a warning:

Script error, "breach.wad:ZMAPINFO" line 11:
Unknown property 'lightmode' found in map definition

It's an option for GZDoom, so don't worry about ZDoom not knowing it. As long as it's only a warning and it doesn't prevent from playing, it's alright.

[Chris Hansen]

Ohh wow. What a gem! I'll refrain from repeating all the praise from the previous posts, and just say that, you deserve every single word. What a stunning example of an author's clear vision, obvious talent and massive creativity! Well done, sir!

No bad things then? Well, I would have done a couple of things differently (like some texture alignments here and there), but since I can't design a level like this, I'll just keep my mouth shut. I did notice two (minor) things though:

1) A couple of textures that could need a little attention:


2) The candle looks like it's being reflected in some missing textures or something:


3) Also, LOL at this Manc corpse! It just kept doing this perpetually :)

[ducon]

I often get slipping corpses like this one in PrBoom.

[Gez]

That's a behavior from MBF.

[Viggles]

Damn, this thread got a bunch of activity and I didn't notice o_o And wow, thanks for the love!

I've barely gotten started on the second part of Breach - I've been working on a different map in the meantime which I'll post shortly - so I'll release another beta of the first part this month to fix the remaining issues and probably call it done for the year. I'm not planning on posting it to archives until the second part is ready though.

kmxexii, thanks for the awesome review! It was really gratifying and I'm going to have a hard time living up to that praise. I'm thinking of cutting the secret you mentioned: I agree that it doesn't add anything to the level, and I expect it'll just piss off players hunting for 100%.

Spoiler

Either that or I'll rework it into something larger, but there's already 3 other secrets in the starting area alone.

Antroid: I was concerned about that run-or-die jump, and I plan to rework that bit to put something beneath that you can land on. You're right that it's unfair, I'm not sure what I was thinking there. (Except "fuck doing more of these fiddly flagstone bits")

Chris Hansen: Thanks for the screenshots! I've fixed all of those for the next beta. The manc corpse was pinballing between impassable lines I guess, but I'm not sure why it never ran out of momentum.

[Gez]

Viggles said:

Chris Hansen: Thanks for the screenshots! I've fixed all of those for the next beta. The manc corpse was pinballing between impassable lines I guess, but I'm not sure why it never ran out of momentum.

MBF behavior if you have a setup like this:

¯¯|___|¯¯

The monster is partly on a high floor and partly hovering over a lower floor, and MBF's "torque simulation" physics kick in, giving it horizontal momentum to make it fall entirely on the lower floor. But the monster's momentum makes it climb the higher floor on the other side, where it's stopped by the impassable line. Now you have again a monster that is partly on a high floor and partly above a lower floor, so pseudo torque physics kick in again and the monster does the reverse trip. Repeat ad infinitum.

A good place to have fun with it is when you go to the exit room of MAP22. Kill the chaingunners and watch their corpses dance forever.

This will only happen if you play with MBF rules in a port that implements them, like PrBoom+.

[scifista42]

Gez said:

A good place to have fun with it is when you go to the exit room of MAP22. Kill the chaingunners and watch their corpses dance forever.

Thanks for the tip! It's kinda hilarious glitch. It could be of practical use, even, as an alternative to Boom-style infinite conveyor belt scripts (dead monsters still trigger walkover actions). Unreliable in ports with other than MBF compatibility, though - but even that could be taken advantage of, maybe, somehow.

[baja blast rd.]

You could definitely use a backpack early on. There are like three shellboxes I've encountered but avoided but my shells are nearly at full capacity. (Taking a break from playthrough halfway or so in because I'm lost.)

[Viggles]

I wanted to avoid giving out the backpack altogether, to make my ammo balancing job easier and ensure the player would run low on ammo in the larger encounters and have to switch weapons. That might not be a fun thing to optimise for though.

It sounds like there's still signposting problems in the central chamber beyond the yellow key door, even after

Spoiler

making the pit elevator more eyecatching. I'm not sure what can be done to guide the player over there without scrapping that area altogether... perhaps some sort of intermediate switch trigger from the central platform could modify the elevator pillar in some way.

[Afterglow]

I didn't read the rest of the thread but:



If you're using multiple sectors for a platform trigger, apply lower textures to both sides and make sure there isn't enough space for the player to fall into a hole if one of the sectors doesn't raise. Especially when there are Lost Souls, Pain Elementals, or Cacodemons close by.

Otherwise, awesome map!

[kmxexii]

Viggles said:

kmxexii, thanks for the awesome review! It was really gratifying and I'm going to have a hard time living up to that praise. I'm thinking of cutting the secret you mentioned: I agree that it doesn't add anything to the level, and I expect it'll just piss off players hunting for 100%.

Spoiler

Either that or I'll rework it into something larger, but there's already 3 other secrets in the starting area alone.

if you put it in for a reason, then leave it in for the same reason. to paraphrase Ribbiks, the entertainment of the author trumps the interest of the player

[Viggles]

kmxexii said:

if you put it in for a reason, then leave it in for the same reason. to paraphrase Ribbiks, the entertainment of the author trumps the interest of the player

I'm not sure I agree in the general case: I think as an author it's better to be prepared to kill your babies if something isn't fun. In this particular case, there wasn't any grand idea behind that secret that's worth keeping it for - it was just the very first area of the map I built, back when I was too insecure to throw anything away.

[Demon of the Well]

Hey, really late reply here, but I just played this for the first time after reading about it in the Cacowards, and since it's still technically 'beta' I thought I'd bend your ear for a bit. It truly is a thing of beauty, a testament to how much mileage can be wrung out of the stock assets. Commitment to total-stock resources aside, I do believe the package would benefit from a new music track (thanks for not leaving it as "Running From Evil" nevertheless!) and perhaps a new sky texture, but broadly speaking it's immaculate, very coherent for something with such a wide texture selection and so much finegrain sector detail (really says something you started bumping up against the seg limit in a map as relatively short as this). Most of the 'void' segments looked oddly bright to me, but without some kind of backdrop to throw the actual action 'onstage' into relief I suppose this was really the only way you could do it to maintain playable visibility.

Action went down smooth (played on UV skill). I did not find this to be a difficult map--occasionally the sudden appearance of enemies from multiple directions will more or less guarantee at least some degree of damage, but there's a lot of armor and plenty of health in the map, so any and all mistakes are usually pretty easily glossed over--but the welter of your double/triple 'bluff' traps that mine most major progression points in the second half do a pretty good job of keeping the pace up. That aside, not every WAD ever needs to be balls-hard, and I don't believe that downgrading the current UV skill level so that it's HMP and then stuffing the level with extra hardbodies for UV would really work too well; the map's not cramped as it is but it's also not particularly spacious most of the time, and stuffing corridors full of extra HP generally just bogs down the pace, generally adding labor rather than 'challenge' (that said, extra zombies and imps and stuff that's easy to kill in an eyeblink never hurt). You did express some worry about the map being too easy after watching Memfis' demos....on that point, if you'd like things to be a bit more toothsome, I reckon your best bet is probably to make a few more of the traps a bit harder to run away from scot-free; modern Doomers expect traps anywhere and everywhere--indeed, to some this is actually a point of complaint about current map design (although not one I share myself ;) )--and so it's sometimes useful to ensure that fast reflexes alone won't just let a player put his/her back to wall. For example, in the trap near the blue keycard, the walls on the upper curved walkway all fly open and a bunch of enemies come out, but there's nothing to stop a player from just jumping back down to the floor below, thus handily mitigating all pressure. Make that a less risk-free proposition--say, have some enemies port in down below as well, or make some more pain elementals come out of cubbies in the northerly walls like the one lonesome fellow does shortly beforehand, maybe use revenants instead of HKs up top (their tracking missiles make them more harrying as snipers)--and voila, extra pressure without having to rework your whole combat design, which is generally just fine for this kind of map.

Other than that, as far as balance goes it seems very reasonable, I can see the benefit of having a backpack in the map but also that of not having one (which tends to encourage more equitable weapon usage); if you decide to put one in, I reckon it'd be a good reward for a secret (maybe the dinky little one with the four helmets or whatever it was), mayhap, as opposed to part of the main progression. The free blue armor near the rocket launcher may also be somewhat OP, but again, very minor issue.

The one thing that bugged me most involved segues back OUT of the void/Helltrip sections. Naturally you want the segues into these to be very sudden and disorienting...that's the whole point, I reckon! But I found the sudden segues back out of them into the 'real world' really hard to read (i.e. I thought I'd get back out of the first one upon taking the yellow skull, rather than on getting within a few yards of the yellow skull), and as a result I actually rocketed myself in the face a couple of times, because I started firing at the monsters in the void (i.e. the two arachnatrons at the end of the second segment) while moving forward aggressively, only to hit an invisible teleport line, pop back into the real world mid-trigger-pull, and promptly detonate my rocket against a nearby wall or the like. There is perhaps little that could be done about this other than maybe moving port lines a bit so they're nearer the very end of each 'track', and on point it's probably going to be something a tiny minority of players encounter (not everyone will charge a hellbeast like a fool, after all), but I thought I might as well mention it, regardless.

I didn't have any problems with navigation or signposting, myself; the overall goal of the level (to open the barricade in front of the exit by hitting switches at the end of each fork branching off from the RL/hub room) seemed quite straightforward, and the level loops conveniently back into that hub when each path is complete, so not much worry there.

All in all, it's a cool, evocative level, and a helluva comeback for you. I will certainly look forward to playing part II when it's ready!

Edit: Oh yeah, is that telefrag/cage sequence a Chris Klie reference, by any chance?

[Viggles]

Wow, I'm blown away that Breach ended up with a Cacoward :o And thanks very much for that insightful feedback, Demon of the Well!

I won't rejig the difficulty much for the final version, as UV is still a decent challenge for me at my modest skill level and the spaces aren't big enough to make it busier without making it shittier. But I will revisit that pump-room encounter and try to tighten it up per the suggestions; and I'm still concerned about it being trivial for the player to run away from the rocket launcher encounter and just snipe from the doorway. Maybe a couple of HKs teleporting in below would nip that in the bud. (I made the mistake of testing the encounters how I wanted the player to play them instead of trying to break them; I need more practice at designing encounters and spaces in such a way that the player can't slip the noose.)

Good point that the transitions out of the void sections are jarring and may be dangerous to the player, in particular that one on the slime dam. It's probably too late to fix it - the platform's not wide enough to teleport the player in at a safe distance, and the geometry is too tightly knit to change anything now - but I'll put more thought into such things in future maps. (If I was making a Boom map then I would have done the teleports differently, but I wanted to keep to the vanilla linedef actions.)

The level is around 58000 segs, so I didn't run hard into the limit, but the rest of what I'd planned would have made it twice the size so it made sense to cut it there. (That and the map already felt like a good length; ones that take upwards of an hour to complete feel like a real slog to me.) I wouldn't say that it's as finely detailed as some projects out there but there's a lot of geometry a node builder hates: concentric curves, irregular spiky bits, a lot of overlapping detail, all things that cause a lot of splits across the level.

Pretty sure I've never played any Chris Klie wads - the cage void was more of a Time Bandits ripoff! Could you link me to the wad you're thinking of that has a similar sequence?

[kmxexii]

BF_THUD MAP28, compare to



not a j'accuse, just an interesting parallel

[dobu gabu maru]

I forgot how awesome that red cracking ceiling "animation" is.

[Demon of the Well]

^^Yeah, kmxexii pointed out exactly the sequence from Klie I was thinking of, although I believe I first encountered the map in its 'Io Training Camp' iteration from his part of the Lost Episodes (a strange book/disk commercial expansion published by Sybex back in the 90s), rather than in BF THUD! (both WADs containing most or all of his earlier CHRISK series).

I like the little crater the player finds himself standing in at the end of the Breach version after fragging the Baron, very 'practical FX', that.

[kmxexii]

Demon of the Well said:

^^Yeah, kmxexii pointed out exactly the sequence from Klie I was thinking of, although I believe I first encountered the map in its 'Io Training Camp' iteration from his part of the Lost Episodes (a strange book/disk commercial expansion published by Sybex back in the 90s), rather than in BF THUD! (both WADs containing most or all of his earlier CHRISK series).

I like the little crater the player finds himself standing in at the end of the Breach version after fragging the Baron, very 'practical FX', that.

yeah, it was undoubtedly for the original Doom, but if Klie ever released a "freeware" OG Doom version, it hasn't survived. that particular scene IS from JPTR_V40, actually.