netnomad312
Forum Regular
Posts: 882
Registered: 12-02 |
Did anyone miss me? No, probably not...
Anyway... as some of you may recall, I released a six-level wad LAST spring (spring of 2003) that was a demo of my megawad, Tower of WAR. It was, looking back on it, pretty noobish (although "not bad for a first attempt," as so many newbie-wads are). I'm here to tell you that after two years of working (off and on) on this wad, I'm finally done with the mapping of it. All 32 levels mapped out, monsters placed, etc... it's more or less done.
So now I'm looking for beta testers. I've got a few already, of course, from my clan on Doom Connector who have provided info, suggestions, and just time playtesting it so far (thanks go out to any of you who may be reading). However... one who seeks opinions only from their friends can't ever get objectivity. This, I believe, was the folley of DRE (in terms of the final product - to my knowledge, only Rampage's friends beta-tested the project). And I know many, if not all of the hard-hitters hang around here... those who know what makes a good impression in /newstuff. So here I am, looking for a few of you to give me an objective opinion on this wad.
The wad is, I hope, vanilla doom compatible. See, I haven't tested the wad out in vanilla for awhile - I started it before I even knew about source ports and I had Doom95, but now I've used ZDoom for all the testing. The wad does include a MAPINFO lump for ZDoom, which gives level name text, par times, and story text in between each level. As the demo wad had, this wad has new sprites, including a green key (in place of yellow). A Dehacked patch provides the appropriate messages for this, and a few other things... and it also changes the stats for the one new monster in the wad: the WAR Soldier. This is basically the "zombie marine" sprite-set that, IIRC, later made it into the ZDoom Monster Resource Wad... it replaces the SS Nazi. One comment in that week's /newstuff was that, what the hell are Nazis doing in a wad like this? Actually, I couldn't agree more, so I figured I'd replace them with something that could be more useful.
In the original review of the demo wad, Ultimate DooMer made two major comments: that the wad was small, and that it was easy. The first one I kinda shrugged off, because it is a megawad after all and the first few levels are supposed to be short. The later levels are bigger - map28, Reactor is the biggest level I've made to date with over 750 sectors and 8000 lines. I've tried to make the wad considerably harder, too... not HR/AV/later-levels-of-scythe hard, you understand (because I really hate those kinds of levels)... but hard enough to give the average player a challenge without resorting to UV and fast monsters (and I realize that a good portion of you can be considered "above average..." at least based on the reviews/comments of wads like HR, AV and Scythe). The other thing I did was to use more tricks; I gained an appreciation of the vanilla-style tricks one can do with the Doom engine, and I've used a lot of dummy sector effects, including laser bars, appearing radiation pits and 3D bridges (map28 focuses a lot on the bridges). I hope it all turns out well (although some ports will not like the effects... GL ports especially).
There are still a few things that I need to sort out before posting the beta... but I'll probably upload a page for it on Monday night. My question here is, who would like to test it? Thing is, I want to upload this wad to /newstuff on January 1st, making it a solid two years of work. So that's about 12 days from when I hope to post it - I hope that's long enough for you guys to play it (me, too... while I've played some of the levels, I've not played the wad all the way through yet). I'm also having some trouble with the content - I replaced the Commander Keen with a dummy sprite to create a "power cell," but I can't draw to save my life, so it sucks. Badly. I can't write music, either, and so several of the levels have no music in them yet. I'm badly in need of some suggestions, and I was hoping whoever tests it could help me out. Anyway, thanks for looking... and of course for the answers to all my stupid editing questions. :D
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The Net Nomad
Current Project: "Tower of WAR" - Help beta-test!
My site for Doom wads and other miscellaneous crap:
http://netnomad312.tripod.com/
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12-19-04 07:10 
