ivymagnapinna

Flamey? Scorchy? they're simple and kinda silly but then again so is the name "Pinky"...

Sunlust map26, specifically the final fight which I repeatedly beat my head against til it got concussed. It's actually kind of incredible how inevitably you get swarmed and beaten to death there if you didn't save enough cells, which I did not. Somehow got past it using mostly rockets and doing so felt like breaking through my skill ceiling.

I love this map! I'm a huge fan of intentional, focused texturing and you did a great job of that here, and there's some insanely good lighting and geometry to match. (I especially love the floor patterns and how the switches are labelled.) I'd say you're in the same league as your inspiration when it comes to usage of stock Doom 2 assets. Combat and layout is solid too, having to juggle AV sightlines with big walls of enemies you're ill-equipped to kill was fun and also reminds me of how lunchlunch does things. Overall really great work for a first published map. Excited to see what you'll make in the future and happy belated birthday!

Thank you! I love TEKWALL4 and BRICK10 so much I had to use em twice with different colors lol

Worked out 3 texture palettes for a 10x10 project-style mapset i intend to make eventually. Mostly stock with some 32in24-15-tex stuff for a little extra freedom (including the many "essential" textures.)

I'm still a bit of a developing mapper, but there's a few things I've established that I really like/want to to put in my maps (now that I've seriously worked on a Doom 2 set I intend to release) and see in other maps: - Very focused visuals, like having a texture palette that only uses like one or two main colours and makes most of the level look muted (rock, bricks, metal, etc) with bright highlights (lights, liquids, sky, etc) to tie it together - Fights that get a lot out of small spaces or enemy counts, and in general are kinda "stylized" and maybe need some figuring out instead of just being able to run-n-gun your way through everything - Reusing spaces for multiple fights, like having new things with monsters in them open up in places you were before as things progress - Being able to kinda climb all over a level to explore it, as in, if you think you could jump to somewhere you probably can - Optional content that rewards going out of your way to find it (like, being allowed to do a fight the "hard way" right away but able to better equip yourself for it and do it the "easy way" if you explore a bit, so you can put more thought into routing like that) - Levels that don't feel super lengthy - Levels that feel good to just exist in when the action's died down - I find myself using turret/pillar enemies pretty often - Green slime. Pipedark also

Really good map! I like how it encourages you to be a bit methodical especially at the start and the combination of cramped slaughter and lots of recovery items plays out very nicely. Also super clean and pretty for the limitation it's in.

Seems like a cool project, sign me up for an unspecified map slot. (I'm thinking 10-20 would be preferable but I can be moved around based on what others pick.)

This wad's on idgames now!!! Download link has been updated.

Crumpets map03 has just 36-37 monsters depending on the skill level, on top of being very physically small, but it really stuck in my memory I think because of that. Very compact and tightly built.

This is an incredible mapset! I can't get over how clean and smooth almost everything about these maps feel - the geometry, texturing, pacing of the fights, palette, music, all of it. Some seriously clever premises for some of these fights too, the forced rocket usage in situations where you'd love not to in Phobia probably stuck out to me the most. I've really got to play more of your work now.

started on a set of somewhat short and tough maps I'm calling Stone Flower. 01-03 of likely 5, they're pretty green and brown.

Damn, this set burned me badly. I didn't have it in me to beat either of Mocha's maps on my initial playthrough, MAP02 made me bring the difficulty down to HNTR real quick and its second fight still made me throw in the towel, it'd be arrogant to call it impossible but I still can't fathom how what I saw of that map on UV is at all beatable lol. (Keep in mind that I am an easily frustrated person and the combination of rocket launcher and restrictive-as-hell spaces probably brought that out more than is reasonable.) Most of MAP04 felt a bit more doable actually, I kinda liked strategizing with the green slime and other area denial stuff, but it had me scraping by and I was worn-out enough by the end that I just had to quit there as well. I enojyed Steph's maps a lot more (and actually beat them both), they felt a lot less exacting and grindy and I found MAP05's nonstop frantic scrambling around the most fun out of anything here. Overall I can't be mad at this set, it is really creative and I do really like the visuals and soundtrack picks and of course the cute moth, but I'm sad I'm not more in the target audience here. Then again this is also a chance for me to improve at the game so I'll take another shot at all these maps (and hopefully finish Mocha's) on HNTR sometime soon. Glad I played it!

oh hey really cool to see a project by you two! just leaving this here so I'll remind myself to actually try it out soon, I'll be sure to post my thoughts on it afterwards

I think @DreadWanderer already put basically the same response I would, but I do wanna say that I read the criticism and I pretty much agree with your assessment, at least based on how the fight played out for you yourself. If and when I do slaughter stuff again I definitely won't make something so one-note, and it'll be with access to the whole Doom 2 enemy roster as well which as you said is a lot better for this sort of thing.

Thanks a bunch for the feedback! A few things: - There is actually a checkpoint for the E1M3 platforming in the form of one of the secrets, but I guess I can't expect the player to always find it lol - Thanks for the doomcute bulldozer appreciation, I was quite proud of it. - The early switch press in E1M5 wasn't intentional originally, but I think it works fine as a speedrun thing and skipping the yellow key only really skips one room so I'm fine with it now that I've found out. - The low-health exit in E1M7 is intentional, I kind of wanted to do a death exit but wasn't really sure how that's done in limit-removing UDoom and I liked the impression entering the next map with low health gave it anyway. - The Baron fight (it's 256 of em by the way) in E1M8 seems to be pretty divisive among people, but I think you're the first person who's commented who engaged with it in the way I was imagining at first, where you'd initially see it as trivial BFG spam but get surprised by how easy it is to get overwhelmed by the wall of meat. It's a bit gratifying to see that pay off but given how a lot of people found it too absurd I probably won't do a similar fight in the future. Glad you liked it!

The early plasma being easy to miss in E1M5 is intentional haha, good thing it doesn't really mess with the ammo balance though as I was worried about that. E1M6 was meant to encourage being played fast like that, I thought it was at its most fun that way. The fallback in difficulty/intensity towards the end with E1M7 was intentional, but I can see why people wouldn't enjoy it very much esp when paired with the last map, I think in E1M6 I had exhausted my good ideas for big fights so I fell back on a simpler map. I've said this before in the thread but my intent with the final fight was for it to be absurd and not necessarily fun (or at least, that was my excuse for running out of good fight ideas), I agree there were some simple ways I could have made it more fun but I don't think I'll change it in the future. I'll admit I can't think of much more to respond with and sound original in this thread but I'm really glad you liked a lot of my visuals/execution and fight design, I feel a lot more confident now in my ability to make high-action stuff like in M4 and M6 now that I've had the experience of a bigger mapper giving good feedback on it, can't thank you enough for your comments.

Wow, really cool to see you give my wad a playthrough, I'm glad you like it so far! Honestly I'm really happy to have any kinda criticism/feedback from an accomplished mapper so I hope you have more to say about the rest of the episode once you've gone through it. Thank you very much for the comment about the texturing, I was pretty proud of myself for being able to do what I did staying within IWAD textures. Makes me very happy that the wad stuck with you that much.

I haven't commented on most of them but thank you very much for doing all these playthroughs! It gets the maps some extra attention and they're a good way for me to show off my work to my friends who don't play doom :)

Glad you enjoyed it! I also find it kinda funny that we both used Plasma and a Snaxolotl track as music in our sets that released on the same day lol

Just beat this set tonight, it's wonderful. I've played very few maps of MAP03's weight class before so beating it felt like a real accomplishment. It was quite the long and stressful experience for me though, just because I'm not really into the Sunder-y genre of mapping, so even though it's certainly the most impressive of the 3 I doubt I'll revisit it. I think my favourite has got to be MAP02. It's got a funky layout and holds a lot of fights that really draw out the "combat puzzle" elements the best, and they lead to a lot of really tense moments when they tighten up on space and Archvile sightlines, but the map as a whole doesn't feel like a stressful ordeal. I think it's the amount of recovery items you placed, I never felt like I was going to the next fight with completely unreasonable health and ammo so it all felt chunked up enough to feel doable. (alternatively, I might just be better at doom than I think.) It's got the perfect midi too, it keeps you driven forward, on edge, and in awe of the sheer foreignness of this place all at the same time. (I was wondering if you could link where you found it uploaded/avaliable for download?) Overall I'm coming out of this wanting to test myself on more of this style of map, so thanks for that!

Thank you for your comments, very glad you enjoyed this wad so much! I know the FDAs are mandatory but I appreciate your recording them anyway. I actually tried to fix the E1M5 switch press in my April 13th update, but seems like it's still totally doable haha. Your point about speedrunners potentially liking it is valid and I'm not too bothered by there being sequence-breaks in my stuff, so I might just leave it in. As to not repeat what I've said in the thread already too much, the E1M8 fight was a bit of burnout mapping and not my best work, but I'm glad you liked the level overall anyways. Responding to this as well, I've realized at this point I probably hide secrets a bit too well and think more in terms of how smart it feels to put them together than how satisfying it is to find them. Ofc everyone's ability with secret-hunting will be different and some people seem to have liked them in this set, but I think I should be more fair with them in the future.

Thank you very much for the feedback/demo recordings! There's actually a trail of gore leading from the crusher in that room in E1M3 to the secret wall, people seemed to notice that hint even less than the little offset though. I do agree the final fight isn't particularly fun, it was half my attempt at a "weird"/intentionally grindy encounter and half me just running out of ideas at that point, and you were correct to say I wasn't too motivated at the time (and as you can guess from that end text I didn't mean for it to be taken it too seriously either.) And those issues in E1M5 and E1M6 I actually had no idea about, thanks for bringing them up. I might make another slightly fixed version (esp since I wanna get the wad on idgames sometime), but for stuff like the E1M8 fight I'd feel better about just leaving an imperfect project be and moving on to other stuff, most likely on a smaller scale. Glad you liked it!

This was a fun little map to boot up this evening. The lighting and architecture are clean and satisfying and the combat is easy to breeze through but definitely not lifeless, especially with all the moving bits of geometry that can catch you off-guard. Great stuff!

Thanks for letting me know about that. I'm aware about what that bug is (only because I watch decino lol) and I'm not really sure how I'd go about preventing it without sacrificing what I want for that map, but if it doesn't happen often I might just leave it be and update the text file sometime to include it under known bugs.