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esselfortium

[Megawad] Back to Saturn X - April Fools! Real E2 pictures on page 9 :)

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I think all liquid textures on the screens look quite terrible. Especially these green bamboo thingys. What the hell. Also I remember Mechadon posting a screen with some skin textures (similar to SKSNAKE from iwads) and I thought they were really... repulsive. Too realistic maybe.
EDIT: this is a serious post btw

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Switching to Quake makes sense. They could just dump the SLIGE maps and use Oblige instead.

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esselfortium said:

I can't tell who's kidding anymore in this thread, and I have only myself to blame


Time for post hell ?

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Maybe the maps could be recycled for next year's 20th anniversary.

I'm not sure if the maps even exist now that I've read through this though...

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dannebubinga said:

This project is more hyped than the Iphone 4s was. Esselfortium Jobs

Too bad the iPhone 5 will be coming out before this thing will. :(

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Hellbent said:

Too bad the iPhone 5 will be coming out before this thing will. :(

No, it will not. Back to Saturn X will come first.

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Memfis said:

EDIT: this is a serious post btw

lol, and that was the funniest part of your post.

I'm joking, of course, but then again I might not be.

And Back To Saturn X will be on the iPhone 5 after Duke Nuken Forever 2 gets switched to the Quake engine.

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Everyone keeps talking about Back to Saturn X being for all these more intensive engines, but considering the original goal of it being for vanilla Doom, it's obvious they're not going to go up.

Instead they're going to surprise everyone and release it as a mod for Wolfenstein 3D.

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I hope it will be interesting to play in sequence. I want a megawad with progression, not one where all the levels feel the same...

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GameMaker is right out... If it's vanilla, they'd have to use the real Commander Keen engine!

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ComicMischief said:

Will this be available for Sega Megadrive? The controllers are the best for first-people shoostings.


Actually, a source who wishes to remain anonymous informed me that Back to Saturn X was ported to Doom64EX and will be released alongside a fabulous showcase of EX's editing capabilities, a Doom partial conversion heavily inspired by the Metroid Prime series, entitled Doooooooooooooooooooooooomed

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Greetings, traveller.

While the Back to Saturn X team is hard at work on episode 1's forthcoming 1.0 update release, I realized it's been too long since we posted a status update about the second episode, Tower in the Fountain of Sparks.

The second episode is nearing completion, and we've gone through a couple of internal betas. There are a couple of maps still pending revisions and polish, but all maps are accounted for and the episode is more or less in a playable state.

The most common criticism of the first episode was the unapologetically, uncompromisingly techbase theme shared by all of its maps. With Tower in the Fountain of Sparks, we've nipped this issue in the bud completely, taking great care to create a wide variety of distinct environments and settings to explore, and we hope that players will find it consistently engaging to play through.

A picture is worth a million words, as I say, so I've decided to let slip a couple of particularly enticing screenshots from the secret development forum.


E2M6: Slogan Grinder


E2M11: Limited Aerodynamic Fluorescence


E2M18: Blazing Gentleman


E2M23: Runoff Fat From The Skygrill



Enjoy. This should help ease future concerns regarding the level of thematic variety in Back to Saturn X.


edit: lol april fools

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I have to object regarding the orange lights in the first two shots. A nice brown light would fit better thematically and give the player a sense of familiarity within his surroundings.

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Needs some more brown techbases. Not too bad for a team of elitists though.

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Cool, glad to hear it. E2 is actually the part of the BTSX mega-megaWAD that I've been most anticipating, as old shots I've seen from it depict a sort of gothic/stone ruins/catacombs theme, which is right up my alley (although that purple techsky from E3 is also enticing).

I've also tried several of the maps from "Get Out of My Stations" from one of the early betas you posted, and apart from one lone map which didn't feel good somehow, I felt it was generally a lot of fun (I most fondly remember a scenario where arch-viles teleported into a mound of preexisting corpses and started reviving them wholesale). The relative lack of aesthetic variety that I saw didn't seem untoward to me; it was all techbase, yes, but there was a lot of variety within that theme--nukage base, cavern base, base where the real meat of the map is the natural terrain outside of it, etc. The action also seemed pretty varied in pace and style, although none of it was particularly challenging, it did keep my finger on the trigger. I also appreciate the use of revisited 'story maps' to help establish narrative, which is a neat idea that I've only seen a handful of other vanilla-compat WADs use.

Incidentally, I reckon your internal bugtesting has probably already caught this by now, but on map 07, in that setup where you grab a key on an elevated square platform that causes the gate to shut behind you and a spider mastermind to be revealed on the opposite platform, it's possible to grab the key and quickly back out under the gate before it closes. Whether this was an intentional tactical option or not, in the version I played (beta E, I think) it seemed that it was not possible to ever open that gate again. While this doesn't seem to break the map (I haven't managed to do this without actually picking up the key), it does make 100% kills impossible to achieve, since there's that nearby arachnotron closet which only opens when you leap from the platform, and no arch-viles on the map. A small thing, and perhaps not worth the trouble to fix (since a player could still miss those kills even if the gate could be reopened if it never occurs to him/her to leap from the platform), but I figured I'd mention it. Every other technical issue I found (and then some) was already mentioned by others earlier in the thread.

One other thing....you might want to re-alter the palette again. The one from E1 was nice and all, but I think we can all agree it would be even better if it were weighted more towards brown. Sepia-toned, even.

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Demon of the Well said:

One other thing....you might want to re-alter the palette again. The one from E1 was nice and all, but I think we can all agree it would be even better if it were weighted more towards brown. Sepia-toned, even.


Oh don't you worry. To meet demand, all the blue, green and yellow ranges will be brown. Finding Brown Keycards will suck, but we think it helps intensify the experience.

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Csonicgo said:

Oh don't you worry. To meet demand, all the blue, green and yellow ranges will be brown. Finding Brown Keycards will suck, but we think it helps intensify the experience.


Hmm, but won't the red stick out like a sore thumb? That should become a nice beige to tie things together. Then we'd still have gray, a few shades of purple, and maybe some orange to present a symbolically harsh sense of contrast when needed.

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Not Jabba said:

Hmm, but won't the red stick out like a sore thumb? That should become a nice beige to tie things together. Then we'd still have gray, a few shades of purple, and maybe some orange to present a symbolically harsh sense of contrast when needed.


Good idea! Copper, Bronze and Rust keys will add new depth to the game!

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Great news from essel's Toxic Map Dictatorship & Sheeple Emporium. I can't wait!

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Guest

Having played through episode 1, I couldn't help but feel that such an amazing and unique texture set was crying out, nay, deserved, to be part of a total conversion, with all new monsters done from scratch. I know, I know, that is a stupendous amount of work, but an opportunity was missed to do something completely new and unique, rather than what was, in effect, a vanilla megawad with different scenery.

In all truth, looking at those 4 new screens, I almost feel like I am being trolled. I am told that there are 'a wide variety of distinct environments and settings to explore', and yet I see 4 screens that don't seem to differ in any meaningful way from anything I saw in Episode 1. A slightly different shade of brown perhaps?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed BTSX Episode 1, and I will happily play E2 and eventually E3 when they arrive. At the end of the day, E1 was a top quality mapset, and I am in no doubt that E2 and E3 will be more of the same quality. Whether they are more of the same in other ways as well remains to be seen.

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Csonicgo said:

Good idea! Copper, Bronze and Rust keys will add new depth to the game!

Essel must have been corrupted by some outside female influence. Soon the back to Saturn X title will no longer exist. Instead we will get a wad called fifty shades of brown.

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Well, the screens look good, but the fact that those are all different maps kind of puts me off. I hope there is more color variation than those screens show.

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esselfortium said:

forthcoming 1.0 update release


Aw geez, the Wiki..I feel kinda dumb now. Can we have a changelog this time?

Back on topic, I don't see much difference from E1 in those screenshots, although obviously I'll have to wait until I play it. Which hopefully won't be too far away.

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