mouldy

When i was working on overboard I started making an inflatable banana to replace the chainsaw, but had to give up because I didn't really know what I was doing.

Finally got round to finishing this, great fun from beginning to end. Amazing adventure.

Really been enjoying this. Very fun maps, and the pirate voices crack me up. So many great ideas and funny touches. A worthy sequel I'm up to map 23 and havent seen any errors, apart from one instance of a flaming torch where the flame was a transparent pirate for some reason. It corrected itself when I reloaded the map.

Man, that is amazing. Somehow I never saw this before Not sure whats going on in this thread, but just to confirm what people are saying: the intended way to play going down is however you want to, but i would suggest HMP continuous play with occasional saves. UV is more like end-game content for extra challenge. As far as self-imposed weapon challenges go, you are welcome to try, but each map kind of has its own built-in weapon challenge in the form of pistol start.

This is what i love about the mastermind, the absolute chaos it can cause

The mastermind is an enemy that destroys your health if you walk into its line of sight, but has limited mobility due to its size. As such it is essentially an environmental hazard, which means the environment itself becomes the boss fight. Its strength or weakness is pretty much in the hands of the map maker. That goes for any fight in doom really. The 3d space was pretty revolutionary when doom came out, and using the scenery to your advantage was intended to be a key aspect of the gameplay. What made the mastermind fight in doom 1 so shocking at the time was that suddenly you had no scenery to use, and you needed it. The fact that you can blast it point blank with a bfg feels like a design flaw, and it probably is, but when you first encountered that boss, running right up to it was not an intuitive option.

map 20 switch in nukage pit doesn't work (tag 34)

map 31 yellow key doesnt appear on HMP

Cool. The link I used was from the megawad club thread, i guess it must be an earlier version

Map 8 red key only appears on UV

"Skill" and "talent" is pretty much just doing something a lot. My early doom stuff looks visually ok because I've been doing art since forever, but I'd say the gameplay of all my maps before going down was kind of questionable. That was after I'd already played doom for 20 years, so clearly just playing the game a lot isn't enough either. You have to watch loads of people playing your maps to get an idea of the mistakes you are making. Having an artistic background might help with that process, where you are constantly trying to figure out why everything you do is not as good as you want it to be. Its a shame, but its true - to be any good at creative stuff you have to always feel embarrassed by the stuff you make. Thats why you keep improving. Anyway, the point is: just looking nice isn't really everything when it comes to doom maps. It can sure help - the visuals can be a substantial part of the gameplay after all, providing player motivation and a sense of drama for example - but I often find that if the gameplay is interesting then it helps create an interesting visual style just in the way that it arranges the space and breaks up the symmetry. And players won't often be spending a load of time gawping at the scenery while they are running around shooting stuff. So make a lot of bad maps and get a lot of feedback.

Cool, here's E2M5 again with that fix udino-E2M5-update22-7.zip

Yeah i wanted to lower that wall so you could shoot stuff over it, but it wasn't intended to be passable. I thought of adding midtexture railings but didnt want them getting in the way of the view, might have another look at that though

Thanks for testing and spotting that texture. The teleporters at the start were a convoluted fix for vanilla compatibility - the starting corridor caused visplane overflow when viewed from the other side of the map, so i had to close that area off with a door, but then co-op players would get stuck in there when they respawned, so i added teleports to get out. None of that is necessary without vanilla limits so I just got rid, but I kept the non-functioning teleport pads as scenery.

Here's the updated E2M5. I decided to tidy up the final fight and make the room it happens in a bit bigger so its more rocket friendly and less claustrophobic. This involved shifting all the other rooms a bit so hopefully i didn't break anything in the process. I've tested it in dsda complevel 3. udino-E2M5-update20-7.zip

I'm making a few minor tweaks to E2M5, so if anyone has any problems with that map let me know. Just fixing a problem with infinite height monsters trapping you on the central walkway. Also making the secret exit a little less wall-humpy and removing some vanilla-limit oddities.

You are missing the point by trying to justify it, because the guy you are explaining this to isnt here. He didn't come to the forum to ask how its done, or even to complain about it. He just closed the wad and did something else. That's the reason i'm giving you the benefit of this reaction, because thats genuinely what I would have done if i wasn't involved in this project. Saying its fine because people can work it out ignores the fact that average players don't work things out under stress, and you aren't feeling that stress because you made the map and you know exactly how it works. Lesser doomers deal with big doom problems by dividing them up into smaller problems, and you've created a problem that can't be divided because its a single technical execution with little to no margin for error. So here's one solution you can at least consider, just so we aren't going round in circles forever. Let the player do the switch once without the cyber there, just so they can see what it does and get an idea of what they are meant to do without the threat of instant death over their shoulder. Then once they've had one go on easymode, spawn the cyber guarding the switch. If you want to teach players to bait the cyber rockets before going for the switch then there are probably ways to do that. You could even have a barrier next to the cyber blocking its rockets, giving players a safe spot that encourages them to wait there and time their dash to the switch. There are ways to fix this, you just have to think about it a bit more, and maybe settle for a map that isn't as hard as it possibly could be. This isn't about nerfing shit to the point where your granny could beat it, its about reducing the difficulty spike to match the surrounding maps.

One of the hard lessons I have to keep learning about mapping is that it doesn't matter how easy or obvious the solution seems to me, because people play how they play and if they don't play your way and constantly fail, they aren't going to take the time to figure out the proper strategy or execution, they will just think "this is a bit shit" and go do something else. Maybe thats their problem, or maybe its your problem. Either point of view is valid. But in a community project its also everyone else's problem, so thats something to keep in mind. If your map fails unless the player dances around a cyberdemon in a particular way then you've kind of painted yourself into a corner i guess.

heh, to be honest this wad on HMP feels like my idea of UV, so maybe the doom community has left me behind a bit. I reckon you should get a few more opinions on the matter

Right, finished episode 4. Very cool set of maps. Think my favourite is unruly evil, i love that idea and the music is perfect. They will repent is quite cool too, once you figure it out (which doesnt take long haha). The finale also merits a mention for its crazy dobu designs, though the gameplay gets close to my tolerance for quirkiness at times. The final fight is interesting to say the least. You have to appreciate the cleverness, even when you aren't having fun. Ah yeah, nearly forgot sever the wicked, epic chainsaw map that i wouldn't have fully appreciated without pistol start. The other maps do the job, though I had problems with Against thee wickedly. It involves a lot of lava walking and not enough health to cover it when you are backtracking and trying to figure out where to go. I didn't get the supercharge, i'm assuming thats secret though so I'd still add a bit more health. All in all its a solid, if somewhat esoteric, megawad. My only issues are with E3M6 and E3M8, which were like hitting a wall compared to everything else. E3M6 is just fundamentally fucked for me with all that platforming, but I think it could still use some difficulty balancing - the only difference I could see between HMP and UV was 3 monsters... E3M8 I would just remove the cyber guarding the switch. Overall the difficulty of the whole megawad seemed a bit high. I was playing on HMP so it might just be that people havent toned it down much from UV. Either that or UV is ungodly hard. To be honest though, this is going to be such an aquired taste I don't suppose it matters. Congrats on getting it over the finishing line.

Lol. No, sorry. Did people honestly playtest this map and say thats fine?

What are you meant to do?

Ok, played episode 3 now and I'm having to adjust the way I look at this wad. The first 2 episodes felt like a typical doom type adventure with a few oddities along the way but now its more like a collection of doom experiments, which is probably how I should have viewed the whole thing from the start. This episode is delving head first into marmite territory. I loved Pandemonium, and house of pain was hilarious with its bullshittery. Then there was Mount Erebus which I had to skip because it has the kind of gameplay I can't stand, and Dis seems to have some kind of puzzle which I couldn't figure out so I skipped that as well. I guess there is something for everyone to love and hate. Given how individualistic these maps are, it does make me wonder how much these are intended to be played from pistol start. I've been playing continuous so maybe I've not been experiencing the full pain of the previous episodes...

Just finished episode 2. As hell approaches the maps are getting a bit more weird and mysterious, with the highlight being the fortress of mystery. Ony problems i found were on e2m4 there's a bit where I thought I got softlocked when I telefraged a baron and couldn't get out of the cubby hole he was in. Apparently I had to turn around and shoot a wall to escape which is kind of wtf. Oh and speaking of wtf there is spawning vats, which seems all-round horrible in a weirdly deliberate way. I guess that is in keeping with the "ino" tradition, heh. Other than that its all good. Oh, in tower of babel the cacos can be hard to see without using mouselook, but its not exactly a problem that would keep me awake at night.

just whizzed through the first episode, great stuff. Highlights for me were Central processing for gameplay and Computer Station for insane levels of dobu. It definitely was the right choice to make this project limit removing