Sheer Poison

Here's a three-key odyssey map which you can beat without finding any keys or even really going outside. For Ultimate Doom! as always the song is the main attraction and the level is just a descent into absurd madness.

Lemme know if you find anything game-breaking, or if you're one of the six people on the planet who enjoy this sort of map. I don't really care about texture displacements or making the secrets easier to find, lol... I appreciate ultra-playtesting in community projects but this is not a community project.

download

so er did anyone try the level?
i'd certainly watch a bunch of confused person RTAs

FDA - Excellent opening with the player being made to manipulate monster movement and conserve ammo (and barrels!)... but I got stuck after falling into a red key-locked pit and had to bail out. It wouldn't be the first time I've failed to notice something obvious, though; did my brain fail me? I'll record a second go of it when I get the opportunity.

The music is neat by the way - a bit funny, even, when it shifts into a kind of astral funk piece toward the end. Cool clarient!

ah, drat, thanks for the FDA, i feel a little guilty that you fell in a pit after six minutes of careful play and then followed it up by removing the suicide barrels from a safe distance :D you had the gist of the level by that point, just needed to find one more eye switch!

(that little room is for unlocking the extended level if you happen to find the secret red skull key)

FDA (PrBoom-plus -complevel 3). Too slaughterish and anti-combat (instead of pro-combat) for my tastes, but the layout and visuals were good up to great. I liked the double-level computer structure with 2 floor lamps on top. The player can jump into the place behind the red skull bar from upstairs and get stuck in there, that's where I died on my last attempt. The computer map closet can apparently be closed by the lost soul when it flies out, forbidding you to access the computer map anymore.
EDIT: The song was good. :)

thanks for trying anyway :D The computer map cupboard is a one-time thing, it's possible that it closes before you get in there. that's intentional but I forget why. getting stuck in the red room/pit is also deliberate so I can make a highlight reel of people falling in and thne quitting

the occasional bump because I find it incredibly hard to convince people to play my stuff >:3 please consider sinking a little time into this, I put in lots myself!

I played this map a few days ago, but i didn't really know what to say. Its not very enjoyable for me to have a map full of monsters and nothing to shoot them with, but I get the feeling it is exactly how you want it to be, so any criticism is a bit pointless.

The music is great though. I think I recorded a demo on my other computer, I'll try and remember to dig it out tomorrow.

As promised, here's the FDA
http://www.mediafire.com/download/sbxlb5z4quaxe43/shpo-mouldy.lmp

Music was cacophony, there were no weapons and the monsters began hugging me in 15 seconds. I see what you mean by "I find it incredibly hard to convince people to play my stuff" and I think you'll find it even harder in the future. Good luck!

mouldy said:

As promised, here's the FDA
http://www.mediafire.com/download/sbxlb5z4quaxe43/shpo-mouldy.lmp

thank you for the very long demo! I feel bad about you not being able to get back to ground level - it needs a teleporter like the other side has...

I giggled when you activated that secret switch, assuming it wouldn't do anything and then looked confused when it went clunk >:) but it's not the only one on the level...

glad you persevered - the idea really is to clear up more of the imps on the ground floor with the barrels, since it's at the beginning of the level and you can afford to die a few times to experimentation (unless you're Memfis in which case you instantly fly into a rage) :D

edit: ah, watched further and you find all five! I was baffled at that point why you hadn't just gone to the exit, haha, but I appreciate that the level logic might be a little nonsensical. thanks again for playing

yakfak said:

edit: ah, watched further and you find all five! I was baffled at that point why you hadn't just gone to the exit, haha, but I appreciate that the level logic might be a little nonsensical. thanks again for playing

I didn't even realise those eye switches were for the exit, to be honest i didnt know what those switches were for, I just pressed them and hoped for the best. I thought the red bar switches might be for the exit, but only when i got them all and opened the exit door did I notice the eye-textures above it. The general texture usage is kind of messy so I must have assumed they were decorative and ignored them.

Zan-zan-zawa-veia maps are not something released every day, so this definitely goes on the must-play list for me. I might even do an FDA, too. In time. Good things are always worth waiting a bit for, aren't they? ;) I do hope it's better than the feedback you've been getting so far.

You are not being quite fair to Memfis, BTW. He is not that easily discouraged — and has 3000+ FDAs to prove that. You were recalling recently getting slaughtered on MAP05 of Armadosia; well, he stuck with that map for over 80 minutes and persevered through seven deaths to a happy conclusion. Not something you would expect of a habitual rage-quitter, is it? And he was the first to leave a nice review on the /idgames db for your first release (Meep Keep 1), which — let's face it — is your best-rounded piece of work to date. The one that followed (Hexasketch) was rather ... well, the less said about it, the better. :P And Sminky2 ... damn, even months later I cannot decide if it's a stroke of genius or the best mindfuck this side of Phobos. It will probably never be possible for me to talk about that WAD objectively since the music track seduced me so thoroughly I played without -nomusic for the first time since, like, the 90s.

I can easily believe you when you say you put a lot of time in your latest map; but the real question is "do you put nearly as much love into map design as you do in your music?" Sminky2 balanced the two quite precariously, but now you seem to veer alarmingly deep into the mapping-for-lulz territory.

Oh well, however this turns out I know I'll always have a collection of premium ZZZV trax to fall back on to.

heya, Never_Again, I hope you find something to enjoy if you do delve into the level. Anyway, this is similar to sminky2 in terms of there being multiple exits and three-quarters of the map being secret, but it has received a lot more attention in terms of balance, plus supplies are available without the need to locate secrets. also there's lots of fun jumps to make and I think the level might actually be max-able in a linear path!

true I wasn't fair to Memfis but he did describe my tune as "cacophony" so I decided one sudden blast of meanness paid for the other. sorry dude!

OK, let's not blow this out of all proportion, shall we? I'm sure he meant no meanness and I sure didn't read any into your reply. Of course, I cannot really speak for Memfis but IMO he has quite a decent taste in music, so him calling a ZZZV tune "cacophony" could mean that either he's immune/allergic to the aanaaanaaanaaana brand of magic or that the level did succeed in ticking him off a bit, after all. :>

yakfak said:

Anyway, this is similar to sminky2

Stop right there! Have you even an inkling of what kind of expectations you are setting?

Oh, and

Memfis said:

Music was cacophony, there were no weapons and the monsters began hugging me in 15 seconds.

Well, the solution is obvious: hug them back! :D

this was very cool. I think "metaphysical", which you mentioned in the .txt, is right on the nose. The player starts out in the midst of a nightmare that is difficult to navigate; repeated deaths will equal a recurring nightmare. If you can soldier through and navigate quasi-Deimos, which if you are intent on some peace may require some methodical pistol action, you get a brief breath of reality and then the quarantine chamber. at least, that's what happened to me my first time around. at the very least, i learned that you are not afraid to kick me out of the level before I'd seen everything, and that I wouldn't want to come back unless I had the blue key in hand.

the outdoor area is also neat, but unless i'm missing something, if you fail to access the first blur sphere pillar (from within the shotgun guy alcove that overlooks the spiral rock staircase to the north), you are essentially locked into the recurring nightmare ending in the quarantine chamber (BUT IT WAS ALL JUST A DREAM). if there IS a way to get back to the western terrace, I'd like to know. anyway, the whole harried by imp fireballs and Cyberdemon rockets thing is a nice bit of pressure as you explore. the semicircle tower complex with the BFG, like some other moments in the level (like the blue gradient wall in the techbase nightmare), felt very Jim Flynn-ish.

the true ending has a bunch of cool cinematic moments, from the rock wall lowering and revealing the marble temple to the staircase that lights up as you make your way to the... pillar person. the big brawl is tedious given the sheer number of Spiderdemons on the opposite end and the two-plus-two-equals-three thing you have to do to get the lift all the way up. I was thinking i could just step my way up the bamboo poles to the exit, but I think that the fourth one is a bit too high to do at anything other than a run, though you can stop and step your way up from there.

thank you for giving me a precious puzzle level to wrap my brain around. also, dig the music.

hot damn :D really glad you checked this level out, and stuck with it. Yes, I think that if you miss the leap to the teleporter alcove you've locked yourself out from finding the secret exit, I'm not sure why I thought that was a good idea. also that lift you gradually raise should really start about half-way up. luckily the Spiderdemons do get crushed to death while you're faffing around in the final room - I made that stepping stones movement puzzle a bit annoying so that it feels like more of an accomplishment if you actually do it in one big dash but I'm questioning that judgment too, lol.

frankly I think the level is also too hard in terms of endurance - the first chamber packed full of demons is perfect to me, or would be perfect if there was a teleporter on the south side which put you back in the middle without you having to barge your way through a horde of demons and imps far below you, but beyond that point there's too many ways to make a mistake, only really feels comfortable on HNTR, which then robs you of the Cyberdemon experience. I suppose a superhuman UV-Max demo of this map will never appear without a lot of tweaking which is why I withheld uploading it to idgames. Thanks for bumping the thread too because it made me think about this map again! \o/

a little late, but review is finally up, thank you for this again!

Man, I love your music! For me, the best rendition of this in particular was with the Airfont 340 soundfont (a340.sf2), that have a great piano sound. By the way, do you have any album or music project around?

About the map, I found it a little tiresome (because of ammo-starvation) and I haven't finished it yet, but I will try again after a while.

hey thanks very much
check this strange space for a few more midi tunes... if you liked this one I recommend scrolling all the way to the bottom and grabbing EVENK.MID :D

don't worry about the level, it is a seriously hard to acquire taste

bumping, I accidentally won a Cacoward with this monstrosity so I've uploaded it to the /idgames/ archive - here it is, flame to your heart's content :D

At first I didn't like this, but after I cleared the first areas with all the barrels and I have ventured into the more puzzle-stuff this became quite enjoyable. The music is very fitting for all the madness that goes on. It's really cool that a map like this won a cacoward.