Uhh... here goes... Nightmares of Loki 2

Well, I'm sure I'll catch at least SOME flack for this, but for years I've wanted to make a sequel or redo the first. I have decided to go ahead and do this. A lot of people thought the sounds were awful and the levels were too large with no detail, but did like the hub aspect of this game, and I liked tripping out these textures but would do a much better job this time. I have original soundtrack music from college I didn't get to use on anything other than a couple tracks per 20 on something mediocre. I have never made wads with OTHER PEOPLE and would like to know if anyone at all would be interested in assisting me in either map design, weapon design, enemy mutations, good sound effects, and all they can help with to allow me to make it how it was meant to be. It would be a nightmare of course, spanning one full night if played through. There would be a sequel with the same but enhanced hub concept, a third with an outer map leading to all the inner levels, and finally a fourth with a massive crazy dark (or not) palace for the bastard that envisioned everything to finally be found (or not found). I would need a little story help with this one from a doomer with an imagination to talk to, because I already know my ideas are crazy for what I want it to lead into. I also would love mappers who have played the original to offer advice on what is too much. If I can get just one or two mappers I would be thrilled. I can do mostly everything else though it wouldn't be as good as it could be. If this is a bad idea just let me know and I'll not disgrace the community with such a mod. One thing is certain though, I made some really really good music for it.

Basically I'll need maps that have a lot of puzzles but aren't too crazy (like switchhunts, I'm cutting all of those out of the first) and follow the hub concept of having 4-6 parts, all with a baron boss section at the end. You can either have them do one at a time in a linear path and never go back, or hexen-style where one thing leads to the next elsewhere... and the first game is the best example, though everything will need 10x the detail and I can show examples from graph paper soon once I get access to a working scanner.

Edit: I will create an account somewhere to store all of our files and progress, somewhere where storage is available but not deleting.

Also: TONS of coloring and lighting effects geared around making it tripped out and scary. TONS <- those faces on E3M1 are a good example of vanilla style. I want to figure out all there is to know with light and color scripting and come up with some really good effects

OH yeah, edit #86: Every "game" of the four I was overly planning as 20 levels when I should really just do one and see how that goes, all have 20 sublevels and the palace ending is actually a massive one with many wings having sublevel hubs to teleport to.

MY MISSION: to make it good, through help and criticism.

yeah pay no attention to the crazily laid out menu on the left with 7 game ideas for it. I'll probably stick to the first two for now:

http://doom.delehrious.com/loki/

If I were to map, what format do you have in mind? Boom,Zdoom,Limit Removing,etc? I wont mind at all chipping in some maps for you.

Sweet! I've primarily always used Zdoom and will be going through converting my first 20 maps to zdoom or starting fresh, not sure. I do know that if I do this all the line tags will need redone and I'll be in for some work. Each level should probably have some hints with the scripting, since that was a suggestion before (a hint sheet without walkthroughs--I'll just stick it within the game--either through riddles or clues for guesswork)

keep in mind I've done only a few big levels since and probably need some damn discipline myself in making it look beautiful. I haven't done much of anything and do need to get myself into action soon. I would still consider myself an amateur mapper but I'm trying to rise above that. I'm sure others would agree since that's the last thing I put out way back in '99 unless I do something about it.

Sorry, brain is a clusterfuck at the moment and usually is. I'll work at plotting some guidelines out as to which level sets need which overall color themes, etc.

Zdoom will give this some very interesting elements needless to say its acs scripts will be a huge help with loki's surreal theme.

I wanted to use Zdooms UDMF format but if yours are in Hexen format I dont know if the two could work together. Are custom monsters allowed by any chance,for bosses and stuff?

Do you plan to use a certain texture pack? I just need to know certain important things before I can start planning out my mapping approach. :)

custom enemies, custom everything... very appreciated! just need to keep the names and copies of the current enemies and textures and I need to figure out how to add some in. I'll try to do better than just recolors of enemy sprites. No certain texture pack just various free resources manipulated. That's at least what I'm thinking at this very moment. Generally color changes of areas of them. I don't know what UDMF format is, that's how cool I am, if it sounds inviting I can give that a try too. I just really want to play with scripts hardcore.

In the background I always work on this: http://www.delehrious.com/ but I do have all day for the most part since I'm unemployed again. I'll make the best use of this time.

UDMF allows you to adjust textures on the floors and ceilings, it basically lets you play god with anything you touch so scripting will be in your favor. :D I use GZdoom builder for any mapping stuff, not just for GZdoom it supports any other mapping structure as well.

Everything is retardedly easy to use with that map builder.

I'll try it out. I think I had it but it kept giving me some error. As long as ACS is possible I'll be in love because if I remember right it allowed real hires texturing and models.

ACS is very possible. And easy.

oops phone never told me I had a notification email...

so that's two possibly three of us. good so far, good good.

http://www.delehrious.com/doom/loki/devpage/

ok here goes... this has each original map file, the music file, and will soon have more, like detailed text on what I plan to do... this is for the FIRST game remake, which no one has to be part of, it can be my background work. A lot of these levels, follow the leader for example, will need completely redone or take quite a bit of time to redo all the tags, seeing as how the arrow in the middle keeps changing due to what you opened up--and it'll need redone completely. So I may just scrap that level and replace it. Another reason being the inner areas are so small it leaves little room for detail. I've been graphing out new hubs for the entire thing. So far I only have about 5 of them worth keeping. I will restart the texture replacement by giving all the ones I recolored and intend to keep new names. Each level should have its own set of textures for its theme, each set of 5 levels a color theme and not texture theme, and rarely should I share between levels. The color themes are as follows:

NIGHTMARES OF LOKI 1
MAP01-05 Browns Oranges/Gold Yellows Skulls
MAP06-10 Blues Purples Blacks Aliens
MAP11-15 Reds and Blacks
MAP16-20 Oranges Greens, Lots more Spectral Rainbow Arrays

NIGHTMARES OF LOKI 2
MAP21-25 Greens Tropics Tan Sand
MAP26-30 Black Gray Space
MAP31-35 Purples Dark Blues
MAP36-40 Purples Reds Blacks

I'll work on the 16 end texts, 8 for now... every 5 levels, 4 per game... and all they will be are visuals in search of loki and will loosely match reality once the nightmare is over and the player awakes with amnesia, only remembering the nightmares from the night before.

blueinferno776 said:

I wanted to use Zdooms UDMF format but if yours are in Hexen format I dont know if the two could work together.

Why wouldn't they?

Now I see why I didn't use GZDoom, but I fixed it. Compatibility issues with Win8 on my computer for some reason. I love the troubleshoot compatibility option though. works wonders :) I might just start this over or start with 2, I'm having issues getting the line tags for one single teleport to work, having checked all of the possible faults 10x. It just seems like it would be too much work for what it's worth but I could be wrong. I'll just redo the teleporter hubs and keep it in standard DOOM format since the endtexts are all that need changed, and the quality, then LOKI2? All I know is its a sunny ass day and it hasn't been for months so I'm going to go outside and wonder a bit, visit a few friends, leave this dormant for a day.

EDIT: Okay I lied everyone's busy. I'll be visiting with my niece and nephew the genius school kid in the living room with my red graph paper book for some ideas. Might be outside too. I'll still work from time to time, as I need 20 hubs first off possibly. I still need all the level and chapter names and plot. Hell, I need to do a lot of things still! haha

One thing I know that will be an issue is the music. It's all MP3 and there are like 80 in the full game set, 20 per game. Though the levels are going to be shorter, thus the music is around 3-5 minutes when I add ambience to the shorter ones, so...

I'm going to have three or more options for the PK3 or WAD itself...
MP3s Included
No Soundtrack
MIDI Soundtrack <- this one will again be the hexen/strife/other games and picks from various remixes of industrial/metal bands. I may get into trying MIDI myself again, but I'm not sure I have the time to do all that I plan to do (this isn't my only project)

The MP3s are for the most part picked out except for the later games, and available on the previous link to the /devpage

I'll add ambient noise to the beginning and end to be part of the level's theme to some that are shorter, as I said. It should be a fairly simple and quick task to achieve.

MAP01 will start in a large desert scene, Red Rock Canyon, and the linedefs will look similar to how the real place is set up. A diagonal entrance to a wall going down to a cave will lead to the first four-teleport hub that will be made different than the original. This is my first task.

You or I can use foobar 2000 to convert the mp3s to ogg vorbis files with smaller bitrates to get rid of the file size issues. Its free completely.

Can I take a swing at remaking fungus feilds? I did like the original e1m2.

So the first one by chance will still use vanilla dooms format and the second part will use zdooms I assume. I already started a map from scratch for nol2 but not sure where it stands yet. Now the themes you explained gives me a better template to work off of. Zoom supports colored lighting which will be very conveiniant to have for the themes you have there.

Feel free! I had an old screenshot of an old remake that is long gone. I'm actually going to try GZDoom with the older levels, but we should both feel free to completely redo whatever we want. It can be a new level honestly. Fungus Fields will have a lot of frog noises and if I can add a second green swampy demon with frog sounds without the excess nonsense I'll do that. the eyes need to change though. - if you can add merky brown water as part of the level that needs dove down into for something that'd be spectacular. I use sounddogs.com for free sounds but I don't think they are free anymore so I might need to change that. swamp noises here and there, windchimes on an old wooden abandoned house perhaps... maybe that can be in the forest. just do what you want. ponds would be great though.

if I go the UDMF format for NOL1 I will be redoing a lot, just saying. some will even restart from scratch. think of it as a reboot to a wad lol. like another number 1 15 years later to just restart and give up on the last one. all of your own parts and detailed versions of what's been left. less switchhunts unless its a linear thing, more scripting experiments, I'm anxious to see what you can come up with.

RANDOM: to that last texture question I did one NOL2 level start I'm tossing that used HEX2TEX.wad from afterglow. This isn't a necessity since it's trash, but when it got into the level it came to 8 darker rooms with a sky middle, like an outside abandoned hotel-ish... structure. one room had a drop into a square 128 beneath you could barely see that had the switch to open all of the walls. then a bridge was going to build one step at a time rapidly away from the player as it went and a palace/fortress was to be formed on a raised platform out of nowhere piece by piece. That's the kind of stuff I had in mind.

Also.. the hubs shouldn't be directly at the beginning. There should be an area fitting the theme and finding the hub should be the first goal. If you've already started a level don't worry they don't all need to follow this it would just be a cool addition making it more realistic (even though they're a nightmare). -- and with the new setup six separate keys are possible, keycards and skulls. I was thinking of modifying the lockdefs and the stbar/stkeys to share the key icons differently. the 6 colors of the rainbow as keycards, darker of course... and a left and right side split similarly horizontally as it's split vertically. so it'd be like red and orange in the same original box yet they're now two separate boxes. the icon in zdoom that has the skull and keycard of the same color shared I can just modify those and the singles of each to work like this. If I can extract those and they aren't in GZDoom I can just put them there in this mod <- haven't played it enough yet today to know. I literally have a box with a player in it and red rock canyon texture. everything else is on graph paper.

I say it will be best to stay with nol1 already has I dont need you dumping all that work down the drain, going to boom would be easier as an option. Its doom with more features to use. Like requiring a door to use all six keys to open it.

Thanks for giving me freedom to work on this with you.

Oh you're welcome I'm surprised replies even happened out of the near 500 views this thread already got. I do have a red rock canyon simple beginning I could build on... maybe for NOL2 or a new beginning to NOL1 just cause. I had thought about grouping everything together in the end anyways and just working on it all at once, and finding some similar new overall shared style or something for each set of 20 levels. I guess... detailing the shit out of the first one and providing better endtexts, better enemy sprites, better sounds/music, better textures will suffice.

I think UDMF will work for all, as I can do this pretty quickly.

Here's a "for now"...



And another "for now"...



And how the first game starts...



Reason for UDMF: I don't need to change any textures, just change the color of the sector to colorize them. Then darkness to light can effect the enemies as well, who also don't need changed. NEW enemies would be cool, and I'll experiment with those. On the other end of the spectrum, this may get tiring if I have too much color.

Also, Valhaden can't be purple. There are two purples and GZDoom is still using the palette for some reason. I'll try hires experiments but for now, Valhaden, the planet you go to on NOL2... is red

EDIT: That third pic is a scene that will soon have structures like "red rock canyon" in real life Nevada, and parts of ghost towns here and there. Crossing the wooden bridge over the lava should be harder than it is of course, such as it being broken at first and the use of exploration in the town being required.

I just started renevating fungus feilds today. cc4-tex.wad has a lot of snazzy green textures that seems to fleash out its theme quite well, also it has great snow and ice textures for the ice caverns.

Im almost done with the starting hub, once finised I will post the screenshots.

one thing I realized about afterglow textures... we can't use them inside of a pk3 or wad ourselves. The small print is we must tell players where to get the texture packs and not include them with the pack, thus, it'll be more of a process to get all the necessary parts to the game. I was hoping to have 2-3 versions that are all three one downloadable file (maps without music, maps with ogg, maps with midi). my suggestion would be to find similar-looking resources and colorize or hue rotate them in paintshop or photoshop to be a green tint.

I can't wait to see :D I need to redo my hub. too many different colors and squares not enough interesting design

I'm thinking of making a text file/pk3 lump called TXTCREDS or TEXCREDS that lists every new texture and it's source. I'm basically google image searching for free resources then modifying, keeping track of where everything comes from. On the original remake of fungus fields (which before was just some cheezy name that didn't have anything to do with fungus) I had tall mushrooms made with textures, which kind of sucked (toadstools actually) and merky lilly-pad textures for some of the floors. just ideas. make it yours. I'm going to be adding to my main site today and starting a real development site for Loki Games. I may need to change the name Loki since though its just old mythology and nonpatented, it's also part of the popular Avengers (if that's the right one).

EDIT: regarding afterglow... maybe I was wrong? I didn't check the texts but I checked the page and maybe my memory is failing me? haha I don't see it anywhere :D I got the first subpart of map01 and the canyon (well, the outlines) lots of curves. I had fun with curves. most of it has color lighting, which may be too Doom64 but I loved Doom64, so I don't know.

The hub is finished, but with the wii u tablit am I cant post screen shots right now. Im not in reach with my laptop.

Fungus fields is going to have a strong swamp like theme with lots of green textures, vines and some musroom strutctures with a lot of midtexture magic to give them a pseudo 3d look. Not sure how they will turn out to be, if I can make them look natural that would be awsome. Im just using what you have already there and tuning, expanding and overhauling the gameplay.

And dont worry about the colored lighting being too much of 64 there are a lot of doomers out there looking very hard for this kind of stuff ( me being one of them). I knew UDMF would suit your needs.:)

kinda tiny...



stuck it on my website menu for the work in progress

Update: I finished the MAP01 hub, it needs more before it, but does have a lot so far before it... the first alterrealm is also complete, and I've been thinking of replacing the boss battle in the fourth with a fourth alterrealm, and when all four are complete the center leads to the boss realm. just a thought though. this is kinda... the first level lol

I will be honest... it isn't really a hub. I'm researching hubs and exittext to put between 5-level clusters. So really it's like the original without official hubs, but I do want hubs. That would be spectacularly hexen.

I might swap MAP02 and MAP03 since two desert scenes and two nature scenes would go together better than desert, nature, desert, nature

Additionally, I will be honest again... I'm not sure the community would want NOL1 to be similar. So the actual subparts more than likely if not unique should be canned and replaced. MAP01 I have it easy since these three things were *NEW* but I tried to follow a pattern to give it a uniqueness, thus everything was the f-ing same! we should avoid switches as much as possible unless they're nearby what they operate and are rare. That was probably the least liked idea from the first.

Update: Oops re-read what you wrote. hell we can make their original structures if we need, I'm canning map03 though and trying something new. Maybe we just... pull in the map, redo the hub and link up the tags where they were and delete the old hub, then piece by piece rework everything lmao. I did that with glacial caverns I think its still on here. people still hated that one. Basically.. hub idea good, everything else, something new.

I'm tired I'm sorry...

I'm really trying to figure out how to make a real hexen-style hub for each map though, give it a little detailed realm of travels before it, you find it, beat 3-4 little normal levels, your keys are wiped on purpose when you come back but the hub remains untouched, etc. I dunno. I'm off to load up on energy drinks myself.

Here are the screens.

http://i.imgur.com/qhPXiEM.png
http://i.imgur.com/OWPW8zU.png
http://i.imgur.com/0qNird0.png

I basically redid the first room with the four teleports,could use some more decorations. I was going to use sky transfers that boom has to take advantage of the tripped out areas with their atmospheres like red skys for an example.

From swamplike to nightmare surreal parts.

Edit: To have hexen hubs you need to use cluster defs in the mapinfo lumps. Its a mouthfull to explain how it works, heres a link to help you out on how it works.

http://zdoom.org/wiki/MAPINFO/Cluster_definition

Health everywhere... nice touch.

I kind of sort of really like this. I'm uploading mine but it has all the music too. I'll probably split everything up into 20 folders so that I can write a batch file in the end to combine everything and zip it for the final pk3. By going this route level demos can be made with a smaller filesize than the 71MB.

If you feel like downloading it, it's going up. I'll work on a single map version immediately afterwords too. we just have to make sure our texture names don't clash with each other's

http://doom.delehrious.com/loki/devpage/daily_uploads/

hey, if you are familiar with FTP I have unlimited space to host whatever pk3 or wad (or anything else) files you'd like to stick up. I'll just generate a password and PM it to you with your login here as the user if you'd like

ADDED: I uploaded the single map file @ 6MB with three mp3s, the title and intermission included with the level music. I will fill the large boring areas in the beginning with a ghost town and some minimountains that look like red rock canyon (google image search should give you an idea) .. lots of close-up 1px by 1px height/ceiling fun for near-circular pathways. maybe some secrets here and there. I figure attack dogs should start off the canyon in easy mode haha

http://www.delehrious.com/doom/loki/devpage/daily_uploads/MAP01-031915.PK3

I left off at teleport 2. I'll fix it

ADDED2: I'll do the level with its fourth alterrealm in full, then to the boss, then I shall go through each sector one by one and detail the living shit out of every area with maximum possible detail.

Thanks a ton! That was very nice of you. :D First time I ever heard FTP.

In certain games I played had rest stops before or after some heated battles kind of like save rooms in resident evil. That inspired me to do that, there will still be plenty of health outside them so the player does not have to constantly revisit the hub all the time.

This is the detail I meant when I said I was going to detail the shit out of it...


and here's the hub...