Elf Gets Pissed - a new heretic episode! (Release!)

It's been a minute since I last posted a thread here about a release, the last time was Double Impact I think?!? This time it's my solo effort for Heretic, a replacement for Episode 1: ELF GETS PISSED. Been a few years in the making now so I'm glad to finally finish it. Enjoy this new episode all 5 Heretic fans out there!!!!

UPDATE 11/30/15: New version! The episode now has E1M9 and the secret weapon, among other minor changes. I guess this could be considered a release candidate, there's only a few minor things I'd want to add at this point. The URL at the bottom has been updated.

UPDATE 12/08/15: Elf Gets Pissed officially released!

THE STORY SO FAR...
These Lowbrow Eldritch Degenerates have hassled you for the last time, now you're 10,000 blood thristy elves packed into one mad elf.

Port Required: ZDoom
Maps: 9
Difficulties: Yes
Coop: Yes

DOWNLOABERING

WHOOPS anyone who downloaded should prolly re-downloab if they wanted animated fire textures, cause I done fuckin goofed.

on the plus side, now you can map again for a superior game rottking!

Will DL and play this one.

Dime said:

on the plus side, now you can map again for a superior game rottking!

Oh you mean Rage? It's nice we finally get some actual mods for that.

Oh hey, it's this mapset! Nice work tying up those loose ends. A few of the levels still have that cool, Sandy-esque "I'll sell my gimmick and go home" shtick, which I think is a pretty exciting angle to take when so much of Heretic's gameplay potential remains unexplored. You get to have fun toying around with different item and weapon combos right from the word go (mummy roasting, yeah!!), and it actually feels like I'm playing a different game instead of some reskinned Doom made by a group of guys who don't want to step outside of their comfort zone.

Are you not looking for any new music to go with this thing?

I haven't decided on the music yet, although I'm leaning more towards using Heretic's default songs. Heretic's music is really nice and moody, it's hard to find quality songs that provide the same feel. Also Alfonzo, you'll notice I moved the E1M2 in the build you played to E1M6, cause I went to play through the wad a few days ago and I thought to myself "why in the hell is this map e1m2". Thus it became E1M6.

Those screenies look pretty cool! Love me some Heretic.

Hmm, another Heretic mapset nearing release? Yes, please! However, there are some issues I noticed while playing on UV in Zdoom 2.8pre-1805:

-E1M1: there was some ambient (?) whining noise which was really weird.

-E1M2: not a bug, but those 6 deadly crushers were annoying beyond belief. In the end, I just used crouching to avoid them.

-E1M4: sector 168 isn't high enough, the player can't walk through and grab the secret phoenix rod.

-E1M5: er... are the lava spawners in the starting room really necessary?

-E1M6: UWG (thing 225) is stuck while his pillar (sector 307) is up.

-E1M7: once the player rises the 3 pillars, there is no way out of lava pit in sector 207. Also, the fiery path (sector 332) was pure luckfest. Combined with the general lack of health on the map, it became another tiresome exercise.

On a side note, the first two maps were really tight on ammo, I had to use all "tricks" I knew to conserve it. But the ammo was quite plentiful in all other maps. Generally, the maps were well designed and played just fine, except some parts I listed above. Also, it's a damn shame there is no secret level even though E1M4 has exit for it. Do you plan to add it?

Just a question. IS your screen resolution 300x200 to have those small screenshots?

Gustavo6046 said:

Just a question. IS your screen resolution 300x200 to have those small screenshots?

Click on the pictures to open the fullsize versions.

Caleb13 said:

Hmm, another Heretic mapset nearing release? Yes, please! However, there are some issues I noticed while playing on UV in Zdoom 2.8pre-1805:

-E1M1: there was some ambient (?) whining noise which was really weird.

HAK HAK DRAKKHEN

Caleb13 said:

-E1M2: not a bug, but those 6 deadly crushers were annoying beyond belief. In the end, I just used crouching to avoid them.

They are pretty tricky, but there's a way to consistently get by them without getting squished. I'll probably leave them as-is unless I get massive complaints or something haha

Caleb13 said:

-E1M4: sector 168 isn't high enough, the player can't walk through and grab the secret phoenix rod.

Ooh boy, glad you caught that one cause I sure didn't. I lowered that entire section a while back and I forgot to check that secret.

Caleb13 said:

-E1M5: er... are the lava spawners in the starting room really necessary?

Haha fair enough, I was thinking those lava shooters might be overkill. I'll just change them to multiplayer only and let the coopers suffer!! Or maybe just take them out entirely WHO KNOWS

Caleb13 said:

-E1M6: UWG (thing 225) is stuck while his pillar (sector 307) is up.

He can still attack from there so that's intended.

Caleb13 said:

-E1M7: once the player rises the 3 pillars, there is no way out of lava pit in sector 207. Also, the fiery path (sector 332) was pure luckfest. Combined with the general lack of health on the map, it became another tiresome exercise.

Yeah I should probably put a teleporter at the bottom of that lava pit. As for the clusterfuck fireball area, I can usually make it through there without too much trouble, but I might consider pulling some of them back from the path.

Caleb13 said:

On a side note, the first two maps were really tight on ammo, I had to use all "tricks" I knew to conserve it. But the ammo was quite plentiful in all other maps. Generally, the maps were well designed and played just fine, except some parts I listed above. Also, it's a damn shame there is no secret level even though E1M4 has exit for it. Do you plan to add it?

There was a problem with excessive ammo before, so I kinda went ham making sure the ammo count stayed low throughout the episode. I may or may not add a tiny bit more to those early maps. Glad you enjoyed the maps and took the time to go through them! E1M9 does exist and is about 95% done, so I could put it in another beta version a bit later.

I don't really play Heretic this much, but I might give the mapset a try later. ;)
Everyone happy!

Any rottking map will be gud

RottKing said:

(POSSIBLY WORKING TITLE)

Bad For Your Elf

This sounds promising. Might have to play this sometime next month, time permitting. It'd be nice to play a Heretic wad for a change.

Gez said:

Bad For Your Elf

Check Your Elf Before You Wreck Your Elf

(Looks cool, Heretic is a game I usually need a good excuse to play, and this is the best I've seen in a while.)

Demon of the Well said:

Check Your Elf Before You Wreck Your Elf

(Looks cool, Heretic is a game I usually need a good excuse to play, and this is the best I've seen in a while.)

Something I'm curious about, and you might probably know the answer to, is what a "Sunlust of Heretic" might seem like, in terms of combat scenarios. There are typical ideas that pop up in claustrophobic set-piece-heavy maps and in slaughter maps that characterize those authors' outputs. Tropes, you could call them. I'm wondering what the Heretic version would resemble, or if it's even suited for that tough gauntlet-style approach.

Voltcom9 said:

Elf Gets Pissed... that's the single best name of a Heretic Wad I've ever heard.

What about The History of Fruit?

Gez said:

What about The History of Fruit?

Only if you are talking about the fruit in the Bible, the one that was biten by Eva.

(Braun)

Try to post less dumb things.

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/heretic/Ports/hfruit_h

You don't taste jokes btw!
All I was trying to do was to make this thread a little happier.

Gustavo6046 said:

You don't taste jokes btw!

Or your joke was bad.

Please tell me that you will include a dancing Paul Gascoigne in an elf suit as an enemy. Could have his greeting sound as Why Ayyy along with his death animation featuring Vinnie Jones.

I'd be more partial to Obama's elf, personally.

Help your elfish

Treat Yo Elf

rdwpa said:

Something I'm curious about, and you might probably know the answer to, is what a "Sunlust of Heretic" might seem like, in terms of combat scenarios. There are typical ideas that pop up in claustrophobic set-piece-heavy maps and in slaughter maps that characterize those authors' outputs. Tropes, you could call them. I'm wondering what the Heretic version would resemble, or if it's even suited for that tough gauntlet-style approach.

Get DOWN With Yo Bad Elf

I don't believe the type of close-range, high-precision setpiece scenario that dominates much of Sunlust (or your own maps, for that matter) is something that Heretic can comfortably support. Well, I'm sure there are ways to do it, of course...I guess what I mean is that I doubt the Heretic bestiary, which is closer in character to that of Doom than Doom II (minus hitscanners, even), and the Heretic armory, which has a troublesome tendency towards slowballing for practically every (non-tomed) weapon, can offer anywhere near the depth or variety in highly choreographed action that Doom II can. Very few of the Heretic monsters are threatening in small numbers outside of the most singularly extreme claustrophobia/austerity scenarios; save for a handful of more obvious angles (e.g. multi-Maulotaur matchbox, etc.), I reckon the problem one will run into is that Heretic's weak/slow/inefficient normal weapons won't be enough to handily mitigate larger numbers of non-boss monsters in small puzzle-box scenarios, and on the other hand supplying the player with Tomes and other artifacts will tend to render the monsters underpowered in those same environs. Always glad to be proven wrong, of course....

What Heretic IS pretty good at, IMO, is big scrappy running battles or largescale arena setups with hordes, where the challenge in the encounter lies more in crowd and resource management and such than in microsecond-precise movement choreography (e.g. the sort of large encounters that show up now and again in a few of Dannebubinga's maps in Sunlust). That style of battle seems to come much more naturally to the game's balance and sense of physics (gotta love hurling corpses around with time bombs and such), and plays better with those unique features that set Heretic apart from Doom (and Hexen, for that matter)--Tomes of Power, monsters that have partial or total immunity to certain attacks, the possibility of temporary flight, etc.

One Weird Trick Heretics Hate: you know how in Doom, if you put a large mob of imps somewhere, only the imp in front can threaten the player because if the ones in the back try to throw fireballs, they'll be stopped by colliding with the imps in front.

Well Heretic has ghost monsters, and Heretic also has projectiles that go through ghost monsters, and Heretic has ghost monsters who throw projectiles that go through ghost monsters. Put a mob of ghost warriors, and they'll throw bloody axes through their friends, no problem. Then you can even give them a meat shield of ghost golems.

Heretic can easily be more chaotic than Doom: the iron liches have three completely different attacks, there's no visual distinction between shooting gargoyles and charging gargoyles, you can have non-monster hazards like the little volcanoes, there are pod spawners that basically provide infinite explosive barrels, you can have wind effects that will deflect certain types of projectiles... All these things can make combat encounters very unpredictable, both for the player who has a harder time ascertaining the situation, and for the mapper too, since the player can use powerups or not, some powerups can be randomly dropped by monsters (e.g., a disciple dropping a Tome of Power), ammo dropped by monsters is random as well, heck there's even an entire weapon that is random in whether it'll be available or not.

On the other hand, Heretic is uniquely suited for puzzles, even in vanilla. Consider the potential of pods (you can push them around, you can walk on because Heretic doesn't have infinitely-tall collision boxes, they can be teleported, and they can telefrag), inventory items, current and wind sectors. There's a lot of potential in all these things. The secret level in ROP 2015 is a good example of the fiendish puzzles you can create.

I am all 5 of those Heretic fans.