eater29

Hell yeah! I remember having fun mapping for this. Happy to finally see it released. BTW, my name in the credits map is misspelled is "eater25" :P

From what I can remember, the only balance changes made to the map were fixes to cheese strats and making it harder to brute-force all the arachnos in the bonus fight. So the release version is ironically harder :P

Following others who have written notes about their own maps, I figured I'd chip in and talk a little about map20's development. Some time ago, I wanted to make a map in the style of Magnolia map03 in terms of a large, nonlinear layout and a secret hunt. The MIDI was also chosen at the start of development I started work on it somewhere in January, hoping to make it a solo release or a potential submission to Hardfest 3 (don't ask), but I didn't get far (I wasn't confident in making nonlinear progression at the time) and left it on the backburner while I worked on other stuff. Taviow told me a slot had opened up in D2ICO, so I took the slot and decided to use this old map as a starting point. This was the map on the day it was plucked for the project: Quite early on, I had come up with the main progression of the map - Fight through the buildings for at least 3 of the keys, then grab the yellow skull key and exit. I started by blocking out some random shapes as buildings and connecting them via the outdoors areas. After which, I fiddled around with the things that had been drawn, then filled in the buildings with random shapes or some fight ideas that were in my head at the time. By the end of the first week I had a mostly complete layout. On the visual side of things, it turns out my usual way of detailing (stairbuilder spam, nonsensical but cool-looking lighting gradients, weird glowing lights) works pretty well in a "speedmapping" style, since I wanted to finish detailing it in a week so I could complete it within the deadline. I also started making houses and placing windows everywhere in an attempt to look like a lived-in city. All in all I'm quite happy with how it looks, and doubly happy that it's under the sidedef limit for something of this scale. About the gameplay/other notes: This plays almost nothing like the actual Magnolia map03 and is closer (combat wise) to my usual setpiece encounter combat style. I wanted to keep most of the combat indoors as I thought that having monsters sprinkled around everywhere would be annoying. Once you grabbed the BFG, I wanted to flood the entire map with monsters, but the verticality and amount of winding paths across would have made it play terribly since you would be able to camp a ledge or corner. By this point the deadline was too close to try implementing anything super complex to make it play nicely, so I settled for the cross fight at the place where you get the BFG. Admittedly some of the hyper-cramped setups are quite rough, though I've tried to tweak around with the difficulties to make this play less stressful while not taking away too much from the encounter's original form on UV. Hopefully they're still fun! The secret fight was another concept that I'd wanted to make for quite a while, though the rather extreme nature of the fight pushed it into becoming an optional area to reward the player for getting all six keys. I had realised about this time that I never really used arachnos and spiderdemons that much in my map (mostly because they're too big a lot of the time) so I was hoping to make some use out of them in this map. The secret fight and finale are the products of these attempts. Kudos to taviow for testing this map when I sent it to him at like 1am in my timezone. He found quite a lot of silly bugs and things I missed in the map before I submitted it. I quite enjoyed making this map as rough as the combat is. I definitely want to try making more large-scale, non-linear maps like this in the future, but not at such a speed ever again. Footnote: I was recently made aware of the giant softlock pit in the middle of the map as well as a few other visual issues. They have since been fixed and should be in the next RC whenever that gets released. Sorry about that!

I think it’s possible to do something like silent teleporter into a teleport closet -> regular teleporter into the map. It’s a bit of an over-engineered solution to minor problem, but it should address it.

Amazing stuff, man. You've really stepped up from ITYSM (which I already enjoyed quite a lot) especially in the layout and interconnectivity of these new maps (and in such a short time!). The visuals in particular stand out as especially gorgeous this time around, same with the combat here, which feels right at home for me on UV. This made my evening, thanks for making them :) Some bugs and comments:

mmmm food

That's one way (or you could just break stuff by exploiting the SSG's vertical spread). You could also use freelook and infinite vertical splash range to kill monsters in pop-up pits before they get triggered.

Hi! Hopefully the wait was worth it. I hope you like secrets :]

From what I know, I think GZ has a setting called “disable MBF21 features” (so like player blocking lines, instakill sectors etc.) that’s turned on by default. So by default GZ disables the stuff that makes MBF21 maps function properly.

Hihi, new update! check the OP for changelog and RC2. Thanks to everyone who's played so far and given feedback! Hah, it's nice to hear you're still enjoying it even with iddqd :) Ryiron and Sleepyvelvet, dw is not letting me quote your posts for some reason but I'll take a look at the demos in my free time. Thanks for playing so far! There's no backpack in 03 :P Yeah I quite like the safety nets too, it's just that some of these powerups do get carried over if you ration them in a certain way, which wasn't really intended. There are some fights where you'll have a megasphere left over for the next fight which might not even give you more than 100 health.

Thanks for playing! Glad you had fun :) About the feedback: 02 opening fight: Hitting the switches at the end of both baron-imp closets instakills the cyber. Admittedly this isn't really telegraphed well. 06 secret fight: hmm yeah this one's a little disappointing I suppose. When designing the secret fight route it was more of a "the reward is the journey" kind of adventure. The megasphere is definitely overkill though. Finding the yellow key: Map07's fights were originally a lot harder to the point where I wasn't really having much fun with them (I'd consider myself a rather average slaughter player), so some of them are a bit easy to those who can stomach more crazy stuff (in the current version). Watching Vile's stream however made me realise quite a few fights across the whole wad definitely didn't need megaspheres or that much health, so I'll push an RC2 eventually to re-tune some of the health balancing in those fights.

Hidden away on an alien moon, a colossal demonic machine threatens to steal the power of your home planet's star. Firefly is a set of 7 (+1 end map) MBF21-compatible (-cl21) maps centered around difficult, chaotic slaughter combat. They're orange. IMPORTANT STUFF iwad: Doom II Format: MBF21 (-Cl 21) Takes up maps 01-08 though 08 is an ending map. 1000Hp Siege Cow (Yellow wiring) replaces the Spiderdemon No Coop or DM support Jumping and crouching have been disabled, freelook is ok but can break some insta-pop pits and other stuff Difficulties implemented - The set has been balanced and tested around UV being the "intended" difficulty, but later maps can get quite abusive. If you're having serious trouble, please drop the difficulty down a notch. I've tried to make the lower difficulties still fun without being so stressful of an experience for those less acquainted to slaughter. Maps 01-06 can be maxed in under a half hour, Map07 can take over an hour to beat Tested in dsda-doom 0.27.0+ and GZDoom 4.10.0 Download: RC2 Hi again :] You might have seen one of the many screenshots I've been posting in doomworld and various discords, and I'm happy to finally release this wad. I wanted to experiment with more combat setups and other stuff I like (Chaotic setups, BFG-heavy combat, pushing through hordes of monsters) and so this wad's progression is very lock-in/setpiece heavy for most of the maps. The maps start off with vaguely micro-slaughter/combat puzzle stuff with a couple dips into larger monster brawls, while map07 goes fully off the deep end into macroslaughter goodness. I also tried to give these maps a sense of continuity, with most maps ending with a hint to the next map. All maps are meant to be played from pistol start but only map06 enforces this. There's probably a bunch of stuff that I missed while making the set. If you have any bugs or feedback, put it in the thread! Credits: Changelog: RC2: More screens: OLD VERSIONS: RC1 (demos by Maribo, Ryiron, SleepyVelvet)

6/7 maps (mostly) done now...

I've been having a blast playing through these! I've currently finished maps 01-04 + 31. I quite like the crusher gimmick throughout the 03, and 31 might be one of my favourites this year. A couple issues with map02 though: Thanks for making these, I'll be sure to finish playing the rest of them soon :)

Off the top of my head, my favourites are 11, 18 and 20. Map11 in particular stands out in particular for me as the first Sunder map with a real sense of enormity. It's not the biggest map in the set, but it feels huge. Giant stacks of cubes ascending into the ceiling, endlessly repeating lavafalls and pillars, and that droning Metroid Fusion midi that reverberates through the superstructure you're crawling through. I also genuinely love grinding away at the massive walls of meat the map throws at you. I find it quite relaxing to just hold the mouse button and hear stuff die (probably also why I enjoy the 300 hell knight wave in map10). Same with the extremely long platforming section like halfway through. I'll sometimes boot up the map in -nomo and just do the platforming since I can just think about other things while I hop from platform to platform with the midi in the background. I love this map to death.

The wad is all textures, no levels. who knows if I could revisit those in the far future :)

picked up UDB somewhere in late 2022 (while I was halfway through sunlust) and had a cool idea for some cramped rocket launcher fight. I went as far as drawing a rectangle and a small cubby for a secret bfg, couldn't find out how to make a door and gave up. A couple weeks later I tried remaking the level with a higher level of detail, but I couldn't get the opening hallway to look any good and then lost steam. I also made some techbase map thing around november of that year but ran into the same "detailing block" problem of the previous map. At least that one has found a new home in a community project. Having actually finished playing sunlust in december 2022, I felt I had a better sense of making a map look good and tried to make a small set of maps using only black and white textures which I threw together on GIMP. I felt quite happy with how they looked, but they still played terribly and I eventually lost motivation to continue them (I must have also not known about all the tools what would have made building the maps easier). RIP 11/12/2022 - 13/3/2023. If anyone wants to mess with these textures, be my guest: monochrometex.zip

Thanks for the detailed review, @quakis! That was a fun read. I'm glad you enjoyed the BFG cyber fight, since that was one of the fights I was less confident in when I released the level. I agree the finale (and the secret fight, if you found that) is probably not for everyone, but thanks for getting through it anyways :) About the vile turret fight: I have no idea why I balanced it that way on HMP. On both UV and HNTR there's a megasphere which allows you to tank more vile blasts if need be, but at the time I must have thought that changing a couple barons in UV to hell knights justified bumping the megasphere down to a soulsphere. Seeing how much people struggled with the fight, I probably would have left the megasphere there. I could have sworn I put some monster blocking lines around the vile turrets to stop them from falling off, but after looking at it in the editor I apparently didn't. Oh well. Once again, thanks for reviewing Mudman! Happy to hear you liked it.

vanity_m26v2.zip Had some free time and decided to fix up some stuff. Nerfed the yellow key fight (it still requires a similar strategy but it's less difficult to pull off now) and tried to make the secrets more obvious. I did some small changes to texturing that hopefully make some areas stand out a little more + added beachthunder's exit suggestion.

The space-faring trashcan aficionado p.s. would you happen to be a fellow destruction trailblazer enjoyer?

Heh, thanks for confirming my suspicions about that fight's difficulty. I'll probably nerf it a little bit to keep its difficulty at least somewhat in line with the rest of the map by shimmying an archvile a little bit and removing a couple imps. The sector 11 special is just a failsafe in case the player somehow skips the exit linedef. Your exit idea sounds nice however, so I'll probably do that. Thanks for the demo and nice words :) I liked your approach to the yellow key fight, which is usually what I do as well with clearing out and holding the area near the yellow key. I find that to be the most consistent way to survive the fight. You had the right idea with the torch secret, but I guess the thing it reveals needs to be signposted better. The other secrets are about as obscure and just provide a few extra goodies, so you're not missing out.

bumpity bump here's my map vanity_m26.zip Screenies:

When in doubt: -stairbuilder spam and liquid ceilings -light gradients -squiggly lines on the floor -marking out important switches with a SHAWN texture on the side -shootable switch secrets -letting a player see at least some parts of a fight behind some 242 sectors -imp floods, pinkies leading a teleport ambush, caco swarms to end off a map -ultra-cramped spaces with all of that -revenant, cyberdemon and archvile spam