Maskim Xul - what the heck what is this doing on the front page

[Obsidian]

Well well well, what do we have here...

 

 

Maskim Xul is a project I started around mid-2014 and in its 3-year lifespan has been the most erratic and peculiar wad I've ever worked on thus far. The project was my attempt to accomplish 2 things:

 

-Create a decently large map as opposed to the small ones I'm accustomed to.

 

-Satisfy my incorrigible fetish for bookshelf textures. Mmmm, books....

 

Only time will tell if I've succeeded. The wad is for Boom format and utilizes a rather large amount of DeHackEd, as well as a ZDoom-exclusive OGG for the main attraction (courtesy of Eris Falling and his extremely well honed composing skills). Expect new textures, new enemies and even some new weapons to aid you in the combat. But most of all, expect the unexpected...

 

Which would then make it not unexpected anymore....so if it's expected, then what would be unexpected...hrm...

 

Anyway, despite the hideously long build time this is still very much a beta release: MAP02 isn't completely balanced and MAP03 is still in development (you won't find it in here, in case you're curious). As of yet I still need some TITLEPIC and INTERPIC art, along with the other trappings that go along with them. There's also no MP or DM catering and no difficulty settings either: all things considered, I'm lucky enough to have finished making the map and I ain't gonna push it. It's been tested in PrBoom+ and ZDoom for bugs, but there's always a chance that something's fallen through the cracks during development. Development has finally finished! This'll hit the archives in about 24 hours a week, barring calamity.

 

Annd....I think that's about it. I'd recommend you save just before you exit the map: I'm hoping expecting to have this finalized and on the archives by the middle of November and when MAP03 hits....well, I'm just as excited as you. FUCKING PSYCHE, FINISHED 3 DAYS BEFORE THE CACOWARDS Heh.

 

Holy shart, it's a link.

Holy Shart 2: Electric Boogaloo!

Holy Shart 3: The Awakening of the Revenge of the Vengeance of the Resurrection.

 

THE FINAL RELEASE CANDIDATE

 

...well, almost.

 

MOTHER FUCKING ARCHIVE LINK

 

oops its an update

 

DONE!

 

Enjoy!

Edited October 17, 2018 by Obsidian
Final release, bitches!

[Obsidian]

Oh yes, and lest I forget: screenshots!

[Alfonzo]

Congratulations on getting this out there, Sid. Seeing established level designs buck their own trends is always exciting... although I notice that the bookshelves, right angles and menacing gloom have survived the expansion.

 

My heart isn't ready for more skinnyman puzzles.

[Obsidian]

4 minutes ago, Alfonzo said:

My heart isn't ready for more skinnyman puzzles.

 

Haha, I'd like to hope that this is a tad less cryptic. I actually made Skinnyman as a break from this and the ideas in that don't crop up in here. I won't lie though, I wanna do more with the bouncing keys...

[Magnusblitz]

Oh man, this is really cool. Dripping with atmosphere and I love the MIDI. Good use of some Heretic/Hexen resources too, those always make me happy.

 

Only about 1/5th through (at least according to monster count), have the red and yellow skull keys sofar. Damn you for releasing this right before my bedtime!

 

Comments so far:

Took me waaaaay too long to figure out the bell bit... I thought hitting it once like Hexen would do it, thinking it might open something somewhere else. Maybe could use a bit less HP to break?

 

Why is the symbol for the shotgun a weird red orb thing?

 

Couple bits that might throw people off (the gate where the red key starts, the yellow skulls by the AVs being a "release" instead of a required switch, etc...) but so far the only thing that got me was the bell. Helps to be a born lever-puller I suppose...

[Obsidian]

Cheers for the feedback mang, glad to see you're having a ball. :)

 

3 minutes ago, Magnusblitz said:

Took me waaaaay too long to figure out the bell bit... I thought hitting it once like Hexen would do it, thinking it might open something somewhere else. Maybe could use a bit less HP to break?

That's fair enough, I can do that. I'd forgotten that Hexen did that, so I can understand why that'd befuddle some players.

 

8 minutes ago, Magnusblitz said:

Why is the symbol for the shotgun a weird red orb thing?

 

Hm? If you're referring to ingame then I think there's a problem. If you're looking in an editor though, it's because I've had to do a decent bit of swapping around to get things working correctly.

 

Hopefully those don't dent your experience too much. :)

 

[tourniquet]

Grats on the release.

 

Spoiler

Ammo distribution is a lot better now, still not perfect especially if you play rather careless and don't provoke as much infighting as i did during playtesting but definitely a improvement.

 

Really like the changes to the secret Grimoire fight, perhaps a tad too much meat overall but others might disagree.

 

Occasioanlly the Jack in the box simply vanished without going off, never encountered that in earlier playthroughs.

 

Edited October 31, 2017 by tourniquet

[Obsidian]

14 minutes ago, tourniquet said:

Occasioanlly the Jack in the box simply vanished without going off, never encountered that in earlier playthroughs.

 

Hmm...I know there's an error with the jackbomb not detonating if the player dies. Never did find out what caused it. I take it this happened while you were still alive though?

[tourniquet]

Yeah was still alive, i was dropping 3 of them in row and 2 just vanished. Just did another quick test with the same result sometimes it works and sometimes they just disappear. Perhaps it has something to do with dropping multiple.

[Obsidian]

Seems I'll need to run some tests. Thanks for letting me know.

[Obsidian]

Well I'll be darned...seems I have something to add to the bugs section, urgh. Cheers for finding that man: dunno why it happens or what I can do about it, but hopefully it doesn't come up too much for other players.

[pavera]

Looks sweet! This might even pull me away from Wolfenstein tonight. Great stuff.

[bioshockfan90]

It's wild stuff. Died to one of the revenant demon-clones. I was gonna show you my recording, but it took me 9 minutes to figure out a certain bell puzzle, if you can even call it that. Anyway, it's really good. I'll finish it off hopefully tonight, give it another go. 

[Magnusblitz]

10 hours ago, Obsidian said:

Hm? If you're referring to ingame then I think there's a problem. If you're looking in an editor though, it's because I've had to do a decent bit of swapping around to get things working correctly.

 

Screenshot here. Talking about the lower right, just above the ammo counts. Fist and pistol icon are fine, but shotgun is a red orb. It probably only shows up in ZDoom's alt HUD, so it might be due to moving things around as you said.

 

EDIT: After getting some more weapons, a lot of the little icons are mixed up, so yeah, likely due to things being switched around.

 

Edited October 31, 2017 by Magnusblitz

[Ribbiks]

hi. this is really cool! Lots of clever ideas, and a nice attention to environmental detail that gives the impression of exploring an actual "place." Absolutely love the rotatey-hallway puzzle area btw, very striking. Also I had a similar issue with the jack in the box not doing anything half of the time (was playing in prb+2.5.1.4 cl9, if that helps at all).

 

really enjoying the amount of puzzly/weird doom stuff there is to play recently :)

[Fonze]

Big props on putting this out; I hope to play this some time soon!

[SiFi270]

I'm currently very stuck in this room, and I'm wondering if this is because I need to shoot something, which may not be possible with only Jackbombs. Am I trapped forever, or is there something I'm missing?

[tourniquet]

You need to kill the 2 Revenants in order to progress. I'm afraid you're stuck.

Edited October 31, 2017 by tourniquet

[SiFi270]

Kids, remember to use multiple save files and not overwrite the same one over and over. D:

[Obsidian]

Hm, seems the ammo balance isn't quite perfect yet. I do see that you kind of stockpiled the jackbombs as opposed to utilizing them though, so perhaps that's where the problem lies.

[Obsidian]

4 hours ago, Magnusblitz said:

 

Screenshot here. Talking about the lower right, just above the ammo counts. Fist and pistol icon are fine, but shotgun is a red orb. It probably only shows up in ZDoom's alt HUD, so it might be due to moving things around as you said.

 

EDIT: After getting some more weapons, a lot of the little icons are mixed up, so yeah, likely due to things being switched around.

 

 

...Huh, interesting! As you can probably guess I only ever play with the traditional HUD, so this never occurred to me at all. I'll pop it in the bugs section.

[Magnusblitz]

Alright, finally finished playing this. Can't give a total runtime unfortunately but definitely at least a couple hours. I think I finished at around 5 or 6 secrets (including the Grimoire fight, fun!).

 

I will say that the ammo balance seemed alright (meager, but enough to kill stuff) for a while, but then the balance took a nose dive and I started running out. I wanted to keep playing, so I just started giving myself bullets or shells whenever I ran out. I thought it would only be a box or two at first, but by the end it was quite a bit. There were a few areas in general that seemed oddly devoid of ammo. I almost wonder if there's a bug with it teleporting in sometimes - I think you're supposed to get two JITB pickups for the final battle, but I swear that on one try I only got one (unfortunately I saved over so can't confirm).

 

 

Places I ran out of ammo:

First was the fight behind the yellow door, the large area where you first get the shotgun and the first JITB. I admittedly used/wasted them on the cacolich and other enemies in the area, so didn't use on the big imp horde around the corner (which would've been much more efficient). I ended up giving myself one box of 20 shells and one box of 50 bullets here.

I almost ran out of ammo on the first satyr/heresy lord, same area as SiFi270. I did have enough to kill the revenants though, ended up using JITB to kill the heresy lord. Thankfully the next area had some ammo.

Had to give myself a shellbox for the second shoggoth (for the rotating area behind the blue crystal door). These guys by far seemed the biggest ammo sink, I do wonder if perhaps I was wasting ammo by not consistently shooting the right spot or something. There was no ammo provided after this fight and I used the rest of my bullets on the lost souls guarding the red gem vault. So I gave myself another 40 shells for the three AVs in the area (and the crap they resurrected).

Grabbing the torch and opening up the nearby secret left me with no shells, no bullets, and 9 rockets (didn't really have any JITB to use on the satyr horde, which would've been the most efficient given how slow they are). Skipped the two cacoliches on the way to the blur door. Used the rockets on the hell knights, found some ammo, but still needed another 20 shells for the next vile, and then another shellbox for the one in the pinkie demon pit - I had about 10 shells and 2 JITB going in and it was just not happening. The AV takes about 8 shells, in a vacuum, so add in pinkies getting rezzed and I needed the ammo (JITB are useless on such a fast moving enemy).

The shoggoth by the yellow gem required more ammo. And the last battle wasn't gonna happen either, ended up just jumping in the portal after a number of attempts.
 

 

 

So yeah, it could use a lot more ammo IMO, but still really enjoyable map. Looking forward to the finished product.

Edited November 1, 2017 by Magnusblitz

[SuperCupcakeTactics]

This was awesome! It pulled me in and kept me invested all the way. You won't get any new balance advice from me though because I cheat with health and such all the time but I loved it! I patiently await the conclusion :)

Edited November 1, 2017 by SuperCupcakeTactics

[Obsidian]

OP has been updated with a new release candidate! This one adds more ammunition (cheers to MagnusBlitz for providing detailed feedback) and also adds a few minor fixes suggested by the other feedback I received. Also added another decorative tower because reasons.

[WH-Wilou84]

Some expert DEHACKED trickery on display here. Excellent work :)
Took me more than two hours to beat map 02, with only 4 or 5 secrets remaining. Didn't find weapon 5, which may explain the trouble I had as regards to ammo (I was playing with RC1, on UV, with ZDoom, and got stuck in the same area as SiFi270 and Magnusblitz, as well as against some of the evil mouths here and there). The Grimoire was awesome though. Didn't know you could use health as ammo in DEHACKED, hehe.

Aside from the ammo balance (which you seem to have addressed in RC2), everything was awesome. The atmosphere, new weapons and enemies, even the puzzles... Really cool :)
My favorite moment is probably the rotating area, which can take some time to figure out but is fun and clever.

The engine tricks were also a cool touch - I'm thinking of the sliding doors and laser beams for instance.

Glad you didn't go crazy with the platforming, too.

Thanks for releasing this, and good luck with map 03 !

[Solarn]

I played through this in ZDoom on HMP, and I still feel like ammo balance is off. I tried to be really conservative with my ammo, but thanks to monsters refusing to infight except in the two big horde battles (the grimoire fight and the final setpiece) and shoggoths eating up a ton of bullets/shells, I ran out several times. Like, completely ran out of every ammo. The first was with the satyr/revenant/heresy lord fight before the yellow crystal and the second was with the two revs where the yellow skull used to be.

 

As for the map itself, holy Christ this was amazing. At first I was just "Oh, well, a demonic library, this looks pretty cool, I love this aesthetic", and then there was a room with oozing flesh on the floor and I had to fight a shoggoth, and I was blown away. The atmosphere never stopped being properly oppressive, the areas were all gorgerously designed and the secrets were very clever. Even when pressing a switch or accessing a new area didn't immediately lead to goodies, there was always a sense that this is leading up to something. The three circular rooms with occult symbols on the floor were a good example. Even when I found the skull in the first one and pressed it to see nothing happen, I was convinced that this was a setup for something. When I found the second one, I suspected that there would be more. And when I found the third one, pressed the skull and a portal opened up, I felt a real sense of accomplishment. So yeah, good job on all this. I love it. Except for the ammo shortages, I don't love those.

[Obsidian]

Another update! Mostly tweaks to the ammo balance.

[SleepyVelvet]

i think i will play this when it's on idgames.  There's so much stuff released  in general, lately, that I can't shovel through it fast enough but instead it keeps piling up.

[Obsidian]

Everyone gunning for dat lucrative Halloween release date, at a guess. Fair enough.

[Obsidian]

An update with some bad news: work on the final map is progressing bit by bit, but unfortunately the person I had working on the sprites for the final boss has hit some difficulties and now I need a sprite artist 3 days before the release deadline. If there's anyone who can help me out, please send me a PM or contact me on Discord.

Edited November 13, 2017 by Obsidian