Not Jabba

Hey, just finished map 01. This is amazing so far. I actually popped in here because I have the missing music credit for map 01. I was trying to think of where I'd heard it before, and it's actually by an obscure old MIDI composer called Michael Fonos who made a handful of tracks inspired by hypothetical video games or something like that. The track used in map 01 is called "The Ditch, Part 1: Nostalgic." You can find other tracks by him on this page.

I almost forgot to give you a react because I was trying to put my eyeballs back in my head.

I've done some asking around about the EA content. It looks like the full game will be three chapters, and the EA build is just chapter 1. However, I'm told that chapter 1 is basically the "main" campaign and the other two chapters will be more like expansions, and chapter 1 by itself has 30 maps in it. So you can expect it to be something like a full game's worth of content. There's obviously not much data on howlongtobeat.com yet, but someone seems to be saying it's 15 hours for a "Main + Extras" playthrough.

One of my favorite games is Knytt Underground. It's basically a Metroidvania without the item gating or combat -- it just lets you loose in this gigantic underground world and you go wherever you want. Very moody with lots of feels.

It was completed in December, so it's an appropriate mentionation for the current award cycle.

That is too many a number of Revenants.

The simplicity of Doom's monsters is good, but complex monsters can work well as part of larger fight designs too. The Maulotaur from Heretic is a good example. It chooses randomly between three attacks; one is a simple projectile spray, but the other two are more interesting. It has a charge attack where it both attacks you and changes location at the same time, and ground-crawler attack that causes area denial by creating a long, impassable, slow-moving line of damaging fire. It can be an interesting enemy to fight alone, if the space is right for it. It can be much more interesting to fight a few of them at a time, if the space is right for it. But they also can work as a piece of much bigger fights, particularly since the ground crawler can pass up or down ledges and both attacks somewhat help to break up herding/circling dynamics. Compared to the simpler Cyberdemon, it has advantages and disadvantages; it's nowhere near as useful for infighting as the Cyberdemon, and the Cyberdemon's splash damage also creates interesting spatial considerations that the Maulotaur doesn't have. Everything has pros and cons. The Heresiarch individually is too weak to be anything more than a flavor boss, but you could imagine that its big projectile sprays, bouncing homing fireballs, and summoning could be interesting in the context of a larger fight. It's also hard to kill, so a situation where the mapper wants to keep it around for awhile as a key component of a longer endurance battle, and the player gradually whittles down its health while fighting other stuff, makes more sense. A teleporting, summoning D'Sparil could also be interesting as a piece of a bigger battle if it weren't for the fact that it kills all enemies in the map when it dies (this can be interesting too, you're just limited to only using it in the last fight of any map). I don't think I've seen a lot of people mentioning the Arch-Vile here, but it is Doom's most complex monster and one of the best monster designs I've ever encountered. It's not that hard individually, but it can be dangerous if you're not prepared for it, and it adds a lot of complexity to any fight that combines it with any other monsters. If you go much more boss-tier (i.e., more challenging) than that, you're probably working against yourself (if you're trying to use it as a recurring encounter that combines with other monsters). A really powerful boss enemy will quickly wreck every monster in the arena and will become the player's entire focus, or else you'll have to give them so much space that they can basically avoid it. There are ways around that too (resurrection, summoning, advanced homing attacks maybe), but the more individually deadly you make it, the less nicely it's going to play with any other fight dynamics.

I really like that first one with the two parallel sub-themes (the blood/bloody bricks/wires vs. the slime/jade bricks/vines).

Ah, still taking reports? A couple little things: -Map 12 in the crusher sequence, there was a lower wall tex that was bobbing up and down with the crushers, I only saw it when I looked behind me. It looks like it's linedef 1955 -- in the editor, it shows it as being both upper and lower unpegged, whereas it looks like most of the crusher-adjacent lower textures actually aren't unpegged at all. Hope that actually helps! (lol, ninja'd by the above poster) -The night city map (map 22?), the ending was so abrupt that I didn't get to look out and see the view of the lighthouse. Maybe move the exit linedef out somewhere along the boardwalk rather than in the doorway? Anyway, enjoying this a lot! Love the aesthetics and the varied locales.

Interesting -- what are you running them on? I didn't think it was possible to play them anymore, since they're post-DOS but have been deprecated for so long.

One thing I liked about the old Exile trilogy (later adapted into the Avernum series) is how much text it has, both to describe various events you trigger and sights you see and even more importantly for the huge amount of mostly optional dialogue you get when you talk to all the hundreds of characters. I don't know if 100 percent of that is still in the Avernum games, but I assume Spiderweb still can't make an RPG without putting several novels' worth of text into it.

Doom 2 in City Only, map 28: Village and Void

Really neat map, loved the atmosphere and the steady slow burn, and the satisfaction of hunting down all the bits of resources. This is the type of project where untagging secrets is truly useful, since the whole map is an exploration puzzle with lots of different layers of secrets (or layers of "finding things"), and giving the "secret found" feedback on some of it (or worse yet, all of it) would feel dissonant. Plus it just kinda interrupts the "silence," so to speak. I was expecting a bit more to come at me at the end--after I cleared out the initial wave of opposition in the final structure, I switched over to my plasma pistol with all its hoarded ammo for the final wave I was expecting to trigger, only to realize there wasn't much left in the map at all. The current finale does fit the rest of the map, so it's not a critical issue or anything, but it's something to think about--the suspense of the map feels like it's building up to a bit more than what we end up getting.

Wow, this really conclusively solves the Coke/Pepsi debate.