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joepallai

Plutonia 2 developement sketches

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Hello,
Not sure if this should go into this forum or Editing; but I've started scanning my old map sketches and progress printouts that I'd work off of, from when I mapped for Plutonia 2. Hopefully someone finds it interesting. Joe

 

Plutonia2 Crew.jpg

Plutonia2 Map 27 (revised) Notes.jpg

Plut2-27 (pre-SE corner).jpg

Plut2-27 (60% Complete).jpg

P2-27a (Midway through renovation).jpg

P2-27 (Midway through renovation).jpg

P2-27 (earlier to Midway in renovation).jpg

P2-27 (75% Complete).jpg

Edited by joepallai : had to reupload images

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Wheee, Aztecorum. One of the biggest standouts in the set -- I immediately recognized it from the first printout, and its slot placement (MAP23) still weirds me out because I swear I remember it being earlier in the wad. I have such distinct memories of it.

You should make more maps, by the way. :P

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Thanks for the kind words, Xaser! It's funny that you remember this level being earlier; as it was originally slated for Map 27 until roughly 6 months before release. (I still think of it as being on map 27 after all that time).

I do have 3 maps leftover from various projects that I am slowly reworking/restoring. They're low priority at the moment unfortunately.

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Guest

Props to anyone involved in PL2. It is one of those great mapsets that keeps turning up in my Doom 'playlist'.

Map 23 was a great map too. I remember it being one of the toughest in the set too, especially from a pistol start. One of the neat things about that map was the fact that you could access virtually every weapon pretty near the start of the level, but it avoided feeling like you had just thrown a pile of pickups near the P1 start. Great design and sense of space; even in DoomBuilder this map has an elegant look to it.

Thanks for posting.

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Great post! Never printed a map and drawn on it, seems to be a nice method. I remember some people in the team weren't hot with the first versions of the map, but I always feeled it had a little requiem-ish feeling I loved.

Speaking of that, I guess I have lost the sketches of my maps for pl2 :/

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Always interesting to see how people work. My own stuff looks so different. Truly makes you think.

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Regarding the initial weapon layout; that came about as a means for me to survive the initial few moments during playtesting. :p I initially wanted to recreate the sense of fear I felt in E1M8 with hidden Barrons crying out in a dark forboding place, then I wanted near-instant chaos to be added to the map with the teleporting monsters and the insta-rising floor once the player left the start location. The goal was to apply maximum pressure to a player and have them carve out a sense of safety. During the redo of the map, I added/changed the western wall to drop down; making a bad situation even worse. The plasma rifle to the west was added to give the player a chance for a heavy weapon at a high risk; and the secret plasma rifle was added for a lower risk chance for a heavy weapon. The rocket launcher is sort of a trap (I like using RL's as traps) but it also benifits the player, as they will often be nearly empty of ammo in the start area without it.

My initial inspiration for this map came from Plutonia Map02; it has this awesome decending trap that I was wanting to recreate. Also some of my favorite maps use BSTONE so I just went with it. (The texture is great in almost any light setting; it works well with wood and metal textures; you can use it for medival or for hellish maps--it's just a great texture).

K!r4 !!! It's been awhile. Yeah, they liked the map as a map but it wasn't Plutonia-ish enough; so I shelved my ego (that took some work) and stripped it to just the initial areas that did work.
Regarding drawing off of a printed map; I use Wadauthor (since it was the only thing I could get to work) and fell in love with the Print feature it has. It lets me work off what I already have done in a map at the same scale as what is current (unlike a raw sketch).

To any Plutonia 2 Mappers: feel free to add your sketches here if they are still available.

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So you were one of the mappers for Plutonia 2? That's really cool, and these sketches are cool as well!

I also thought Plutonia 2 was pretty cool as well.

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Whatever happened to the Malde/Johnsen/Spencer maps?

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Processingcontrol said:

Whatever happened to the Malde/Johnsen/Spencer maps?


Alien Vendetta; though one of the Spencer maps might have been used in Hellcore instead (can't remember).

Edit: Spencer's maps could have also been used in Dark Arena, I remember that he ended up getting four maps into that project.

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Awesome! I'm thinking of creating a thread for this kind of stuff, it's really interesting to see how people plan out their maps.

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Another trivia you may find interesting: HR2 map17 was originally for Pl2 when the old team worked on the megawad. Apart from the different texturing it was pretty much the same map.

It didn't fit well the Plutonia style and was perhaps a bit too cramped.

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joepallai said:

Edit: Spencer's maps could have also been used in Dark Arena, I remember that he ended up getting four maps into that project.


What`s this?

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Dark Arena was a FPS for the GameBoy Advance. The Creative Director scouted Doomworld for mappers and the following people made maps for the project:
Richard Wiles, Anthony Soto, Brad Spencer, Jonas Feragen, Jacob Kruse, Paul Schmitz, Richard Whittall, and myself(Joe Pallai)

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linguica said at YouTube:
it's a Doom clone in the most literal sense. All the weapons, enemies, textures, etc have exact counterparts in Doom. You can rip the levels out of this game and play them in Doom and they work perfectly. And I don't just mean that you can theoretically do that, I mean you can actually literally do it.


I'd be curious how to actually do it, since it doesn't seem like the ROM contains a plain old dump of the game data (no recognizable WAD structures). It must be compressed somehow I guess.

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Wow I don't remember being involved in Plutonia2 aside from randomly picking a wad to beta test during one of my semester breaks. It was Aztecorum too, and probably the best of the set (though I have not played through all the maps...)!

Ergh, Dark Arena. Yeah that's no clone, that is Doom and I don't think they licensed it or anything - at least, I dont remember seeing any acknowledgement to id in the manual or elsewhere (which you do see in... every licensed id engine game I know of). Wiles threatening them (as the only local Brit, and hell probably the only one of us over 20) was my favorite part of the whole experience.

Back to topic though **

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Thanks for showing us the cool sketches Joe.

Off topic: Hers's an old thread about Dark Arena in case anyone's curious.

Also I use to own that game on the GBA :)

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This is most likely the last sketch I have left from the project (unless there's more in a box I don't know about).

This is about 90% complete and is right before I handed the map off to Gusta for finishing touches. He really made the map shine with his expertise at the higher difficulty levels. I also liked his logic in moving the yellow key and in making the southern bridge worth visiting.

 

P2-27 (90% Complete).jpg

Edited by joepallai : had to reupload images

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Good to see the development of this map, which was probably my favourite of the bunch -- amazing stuff.

Looks like the expansive outdoor area with the Cyberdemon wasn't added (or was very threadbare at the least) until the later stages; I loved that area.

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I thought for certain that I had lost this one:

This is my original version of Aztecorum at roughly 95% completion. It was quite different then: narrow tunnels, a huge outdoor area in the NE corner (I'm reusing that for my current project); a nice courtyard area over looking the SE corner (another section that I'm reusing), and the descending floor trap that was inspired by Plutonia's Map02 (this was in the eastern part of the east/west hall after the start room).

 

Plut2-27 Original Version 95% Complete.jpg

Edited by joepallai : had to reupload images

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Now I'm curious, what is the design process that you're showing us here? I've never used WAD Author but it appears you can do your own printouts of the maps?

It looks as though you're printing out an unfinished map, and then adding on to it with a pen, correct? And then I guess just going back to WAD Author to add on you're drawn areas? That seems pretty cool as I'm trying to do as much mapping away from the computer as possible. A conflict I have sometimes is that I find it a little difficult to get the dimensions of a room right. Sometimes a drawing of a room that looks like it's gonna be an awesome battle turns out too small or too big in practice. Maybe having finished sections of the map already printed out will help me get the scale correctly when drawing new rooms.

Marnetmar: if you do go on to make a thread like you describe, I've got a whole corkboard loaded with map drawings posted up that I could scan. I've also got various techniques for drawing maps on paper that I could describe.

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40oz you are absolutely correct on my process. I would print out the map or area I was working on and take the printout to work off of before I tried it in the editor. Usually I did this because I could only work on my map during my lunch break, and I had no access to a computer during my lunch; so I started using printouts to be more productive once I was at home. I find the benifits to be you can plan rooms in scale, you can see flow issues easily, and you can write down any random thoughts or ideas next to the area that you are talking about. The biggest negative is the cost of ink and that it doesn't save you any time really. (or it doesn't for me as I usually get caught up with the details within a room/area)

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That would be a good idea to spend your breaks doing this! You can draw out with a pen/pencil what could take hours in the editor bring it home then know exactly what you want to do.

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Found this one while looking for an insurance policy. It's roughly at the 50% completion stage and shows some ideas I was working through before I went in a different direction.

plut22750completeunused.jpgThanks again for all the positive feedback from these.

Plut2-27 (50%complete unused ideas).jpg

Edited by joepallai : had to reupload images

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Welcome back, thanks for the update. And speaking of updates...

joepallai said:

I do have 3 maps leftover from various projects that I am slowly reworking/restoring. They're low priority at the moment unfortunately.

Have you gotten any further with these? It's easy enough to rip the early Plutonia 2 alphas and betas from Metabolist's site where they're still sitting around after all these years, but it'd be nice to have an official release. Your map 15 is pretty cool albeit not at all Plutonian.

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Urban Space Cowboy said:

Welcome back, thanks for the update. And speaking of updates...
Have you gotten any further with these? It's easy enough to rip the early Plutonia 2 alphas and betas from Metabolist's site where they're still sitting around after all these years, but it'd be nice to have an official release. Your map 15 is pretty cool albeit not at all Plutonian.


Thanks for the interest UrbanSC; currently I am reworking Map15 to become E4M1 of an E4 inspired episode. It's an excuse for me to finally work with that sky and wrap up the 3-4 maps I had started for other projects but had to drop out of. I plan on using the following maps/partial maps to complete this:

E4M1: map15 that I made for Plutonia2
E4M2: probably a large section of Map15
E4M3: either Plutonia2-Map27 scraps or original
E4M4: reworked Map06 from Hellcore
E4M5: E4M5 from 2002ado (never finished)
E4M6: E4M6 from 200ADO modified
E4M7: Plut2-27 scraps (NE corner)
E4M8: New
E4M9: New or maybe Crossfire reworked

Current progress would be around 10 - 15 % overall.

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Urban Space Cowboy said:

It's easy enough to rip the early Plutonia 2 alphas and betas from Metabolist's site where they're still sitting around after all these years

Hey, thank you for this info! :)

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