antares031

If a mapset is like a main dish, a gameplay mod is like a sauce. I wouldn't pour a buldak sauce on a frosty chocolate milkshake.

Ancient Aliens MAP18. Bonus point for the rotating pyramidion hologram.

MyHouse.pk3 has 164,452 linedefs, with 298,798 sidedefs. It's no wonder why it takes so long to load that cute little simple house.

A couple of texture issues to point out. The second one appears, when the blinking light goes dark in software mode. Check the coordinates on the top-left of each screenshot. It feels like lots of places were designed as secret areas, especially the one with a plasma magnum. Kinda strange that all of those areas are not tagged as secrets, and just worked as optional areas. Regardless, it was a pretty good survival horror wad, with a couple of surprising moments.

It's actually an intended short-cut to reach the level's super secret spot (the one with 100 health bonuses and more). Grabbing a BFG from the another secret area is a bonus reward, if you couldn't find the secret teleporter around the yellow skull key before.

The only one complain I have about this wad is that the default HUD numbers are difficult to read, since their color makes them blended with the HUD panel. Probably giving more contrast to the HUD numbers would be nice. This a really interesting mapset with Doomcute™ grade thing decorations and effects, thanks for making this one!

ദ്ദി(˶0 x 0˶ ദ്ദി)

UniDoom3 MAP04, sector + midtex combined. Ghoul's Forest 3, sloped sectors + midtex vines. Going Down MAP25, a sector art.

James Webb Space Telescope, the best desktop wallpaper creator in the universe.

Well, looks like we already have one cacoward winner this year. The screenshots look so adorable and beautiful. Kudos for making the sequel MBF-compatible.

Temeraire was planned as a sequel to Frimaire from the start, so it was intentional to have some simiarilities between those two levels. I'm quoting my own writing from the last month's DWMC for more explanations:

Just having a good time with my bone buddy.

Here's an example of a doom level with more than 1 billion kill count. You should be able to beat this level within around one hour, while your kill count should be able to exceed one billion. Complevel 11, DSDADoom or Eternity Engine recommended. Doesn't work with GZDoom yet. May not work properly with other source ports, such as Helion. DO NOT RUN THE LEVEL on either medium or easy difficulty. Download the WAD: tea_time.zip

To me, Doom is undoubtedly the best video game ever created. But this doesn't mean that Doom is the only video game I play. There are many video games with different styles and different genres, and some of them are even way better than Doom in some aspects. One of video games I really enjoyed is "Hollow Knight" by Team Cherry. It's my all-time #3 favorite, and the best indie game I've ever played. There are so many features that makes HK so interesting and so memorable, but one thing that HK inspired me with Doom modding is the design of boss battles. If you played MAP24 and found every secret area, you may noticed that one of secret areas provided an opportunity to eliminate a group of veilimps and an arch-vile, waiting to bring more chaos to the blue skull key fight. This part was inspired by HK's Watcher Knights boss fight; If you find a secret near the boss arena, you can knock out one of six Watcher Knights before the actual fight begins, making the boss fight slightly easier than usual. Among the 47 bosses, Nightmare King Grimm is my favorite boss fight in Hollow Knight. NKG is extremely-fast and deadly, teleporting around the entire arena with various attack patterns, and it's really difficult to beat him during the blind playthrough. But once you learn how to deal with his attack patterns, the boss is surprisingly easy to defeat next time, while it's still really fun to fight against him. His attack patterns are fast, but they're quite fair. Each pattern gives you a brief moment to recongnize his next movement, so you can dodge his patterns with proper movement. The boss fight is so fun and engaging that I even made my personal challenge by removing the protagonist's appearance, and it's still possible to defeat the boss without getting hit. While I was making the final boss of Struggle, I spent almost every available code pointer frames with various custom monsters (remember, you can only apply code pointers to designated frames in vanilla dehacked) when I reached MAP30. Not just code pointer frames, I was running out of normal frames as well. So it's inevitable to design a final boss with a cheap spammy attack pattern, which usually requires less frames, rather than a fair & sophisticated pattern. In retrospect, it would've been much better to design the final level as a giant climactic slaughtermap, like MAP30 of Scythe 2, instead of trying to make a final boss with severely limited resources. The final boss of Eviternity had way more resources to play with, but I think I made a same mistake by adding another unstoppable spammy attack pattern during the 2nd phase. Sure, it's cost-effective in dehacked's perspective; just put one projectile attack code pointer frame, and give it A_xxxReFire with another frame. But it made the final boss quite unfair, making the boss fight weak and annoying. After I grabbed MBF21, I decided not to design a final boss with the same mistake. The premise of the final boss was inspired by NKG; multiple attack patterns, but not annoying to deal with. And I decided to give the final boss three phases. The first phase was designed as an introduction to let the player know about the new final boss; it has multiple attack patterns, and it shoots various projectile attacks with different gimmicks. Each fireball has a common gimmick, derived from Astral Mancubus' purple fireball; bounce one time to track the target. Red fireball has a small blast damage effect, like a mini rocket, and you can recognize it with its explosion sound effect. Green fireball is basically a buffed version with faster speed and higher damage, which is an ideal projectile to counter the player, hidden behind a solid pillar, while they're trying to hide from arch-vile's flame attack. Blue fireball is a tricky one. It bounces not just once, but three times. So in close range, strafing just once wouldn't enough to dodge those blue fireballs. The blue energy bolt attack pattern is nothing special, and it's just a buffed version of Astral Arachnotron's attack pattern. The first phase was designed in August 2023, with a simple concept level of MAP30. As a placeholder, I quoted the sprites I made for the final boss of Antaresian Legacy (not to confuse with the megawad Struggle. this was a boom-compatible mapset, and eventually cancelled). Soon after the first phase, the second phase was designed. For the second phase, I tried something a little bit different than a projectile attack pattern. By combining dehacked's A_LineEffect and a voodoo doll script, I could let the final boss change the geometry and effect of the arena during the fight. I thought that putting pitfalls with damaging floor for a brief moment would be a nice addition to the final boss, giving a dynamic change to the arena's geometry. To make the pattern less annoying, I gave a visual indication with two-stages-drop method, and set a pretty short duration to the pitfall. I also put sound effects for the pitfall pattern and the arch-vile attack pattern, to help the player with auditory indications. Lastly, I decided to release some astral cacodemons after the first phase, and nightmare cacodemons after the second phase, working as intermissions between the phases. For the final phase, I decided to put some special features to surprise the players. I let the final boss teleport around the arena like a veilimp, inspired by NKG's movement pattern. After I put some buffed patterns from the previous phases, I decided to add an attack pattern with a BFG shot, since I asked myself "What about let the monster fire the BFG, instead of the player?". The pattern is actually not that lethal, if you know how BFG works. But it's good enough to surprise the player with loud and familiar BFG sound from the monster. And for the last pattern, I decided to put an unique pattern with Afriest Turrets from Struggle, as a small reference to the final boss from the past. It may look like that it's conflicting with the rule I set earlier; no cheap spammy pattern. But I tried to make it doesn't feel like spammy, by keeping the duration short enough. With the completion of the final phase, the concept level of MAP30 was finished, and ready for the actual final level of Eviternity 2. After this, I moved on to finish MAP24. Meanwhile, for the actual MAP30, Dragonfly constructed the boss arena, based on the designs from the concept level. There's one major change with the arena, though. Instead of advancing to the next arena for the next phase, the whole boss fight would occur in one playground. After Dragonfly applied the changing skybox, I added some visual effects to decorate the later phases, like adding waterfalls with corruption, infecting nearby walls, and a weather effect with falling sparkling static chips, also infecting pillars in the arena. I also designed every custom texture for MAP30 to polish the level visually. Some of them were designed to mark the cardinal directions with unique symbols (they're actually highly distorted korean words of North, South, East, and West), which didn't work really well. But I decided to leave it for decorations. For the sprite images, just like Archangelus from Eviternity, Clay once again did an amazing job with creating the 3D model of the final boss. And then created all the necessary 2D sprites with that model. The sprites with colored-eyes are really good addition to the final boss. Like Astral Mancubus and Overlord, it gave a visual indication of the boss' attack patterns. After all the necessary sprites are finished, I decided to put one last feature to the final boss. Instead of using A_Mushroom code pointer, I used a bunch of custom projectiles with different A_SpawnObject code pointer to simulate "spiral explosion" effect. And then I quoted the explosion effect from MAP24, edited it out as a golden variant. For the background music, Tristan wrote yet another epic boss fight music, and recorded it as OGG format. Just in case, but for those who inspected dehacked code or decorate code of the final boss, I picked the word "Eviternatus" as a development codename, with my own phonetic codes of A, B, C. Eviternity also used various development codenames, like "Chaos Demon", "Super Bruiser", and "Captain Chaingunner". And they still exist inside of the dehacked code. It was really fun to design the final boss of Eviternity 2, with the brand-new powerful MBF21. Not just the final boss, but it was really interesting to create various MBF21 actors, like falling leaves and custom monsters. If I'm going to make the next personal project, I'll definitely use MBF21 to create more custom elements with my preferences. And maybe even a bunch of custom bosses, and a boss rush as the final level. Thanks for playing Eviternity 2, and I hope you guys enjoyed this sequel.