Blank Space

Felt like making a map this week. -complevel 9.

Current version:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/aw5s52a4512411f/blankspace_v2.wad

Previous version(s), for watching demos recorded with them:

- UV is mean, but manageable (or easy for some ;) when you know what to do.
- HMP is like UV but less dickish.
- HNTR is leisurely projectile hell (projectile heck), some pressure here and there.

Credit to Ribbiks/Danne for some of the textures used.

Feedback/FDAs/etc. appreciated.

i really like the texture style!

Heyyyy fun stuff. You're one of the rare few authors that just seems to know exactly what he's doing when he maps, so there's no pointers or advice or anything to give out after I play. What I will say though is that certain enemy you used for the final encounter was obnoxious as all hell, and that encounter was a vicious difficulty spike in the map. I think every other encounter provides you with ways to survive it (the start isn't so bad as long as you play methodically), but I got shit on a good +20 times at that encounter before things finally played out well.

Good visuals, as per usual... seems floating light platforms are all the rage now :P

Bah, could have mentioned that there are affrits, I wouldn't have downloaded then. xd Don't like 'em.

kuchitsu said:

Bah, could have mentioned that there are affrits, I wouldn't have downloaded then. xd Don't like 'em.

If anything, this is more of an incentive for me to download. Will try later when I get home, the screenshots are intriguing.

I love blank space/void maps in Doom. :D Gonna try this.

afrit / 10

fda of a thousand sorrows: https://www.mediafire.com/?77ult67ppbtv7ae

how do I, that one manc?

Have a 22 minute FDA (=

Nifty texture scheme, it's rare to see crimson and charred black fused together well, combined with the grey overcast the screenshots actually reminded me of Hatred heh, an excellent song choice as always - Resurgence - MAP26 - The Library :D

The map was relentless and intense, a typical trademark from your rdwpa speed maps, with no time to rest and being constantly on the move. I like these arena, gauntlet style scenarios which test your reflexes and ability to time your movement correctly in close quarters in conjunction with requiring foresight of monster movement behaviour.

The supply ratio felt adequete, although for the inner area I feel it was ideal if not a necessity to carry over the rockets from the HK/Soulsphere zerg rush by choosing not to kill them all, as the lack of immediate rockets down below makes clearing out enough Mancs and HKs/Revs before the Afrits arrive far more challenging then it should be, placing rockets as opposed to medicore bullets in the Mancubie alcoves would be far more appealing.

I'm glad you decided to reduce the health of the Afrits in contrast to their DVII/Scythe II counter parts as you tossed a dozen into an enclosed space, as a result they die more easily and ease the intensity of having to dodge their plethora of crimson destruction before an inevitable hit lands.

I can relate to Getsu's concerns about the finale given most players would not have the coordination and reflexes to dodge such a brutal and unforgiving armada given the absence of cover, surprisingly I got it on my second arrival there after a cheeky initial failure where I tried to lower both sets of switches and see if I could survive ;)

My experience mainly consisted of getting my initial bearings with the layout and traps then just not screwing up the encounters so I feel the difficulty is fair over all, but what requires amending is the lack of rocket ammo in the inner sanctum trap and perhaps an alteration to the finale for less skilled players. Also kudos for not using a single AV or Cyb as that would have been very cruel.

jesus christ 1.5b views...

unfortunately not the map, yet ;)

Here is a lazy skill 3 fda. Didn't exit. The map certainly deserved more of an effort, but I ran out of time and I don't know how to make a demo with saves. :(

I didn't have any specific complaints until I watched Ribbiks's demo: the mancubus turrets are pretty infuriating to clean up. ;)

I also enjoyed Krypto's demo.

Really dig the color scheme and music.

^ That's Taylor Swift? Huh....not quite the mental image I had of her.

....Uh, anyway, skill 4 FDA for you. I used saves, but against all odds somehow ended up not needing them. Between that and a certain BFG secret in map 14 of JPCP, I reckon my devil's luck is all spent for the month, so I suppose I should stick with the much-vaunted "IWAD class" difficulty from here on out.

Re: the doling out of rockets that Krypto mentioned, I think the balance works out okay as is, provided you don't try to get too comfortable by killing all of the restocking turretubbies before pressing onwards or the like. That said, if you are going to stick with teasing the player with bullets in what he referred to as the 'inner sanctum' area, be a sport and at least hand (and I do mean hand) the player a chaingun before then, yeah? The other issue with the replenishing turrets is that while it's apparently smarter to ignore them, doing so puts you at a slight handicap in the later marquee fight (though it worked out pretty well for me), in addition to possible explosive deficit in the sanctum fight. Perhaps this is all well and good from a tactical/planning perspective, but in practice killing the replenishing turret staffers until they run dry just isn't going to be fun any way you slice it, so I reckon you'd do just as well without, or perhaps by having more than two turrets to start (but with only one monster apiece).

Thought the afrits were fine, I don't think I've seen this specific variant before. Making them less tanky along with endowing them with an attack that causes them to hold still for a time was very wise, simply because if they were to get pushed away from the island in the last fight while still alive (like THAT fucking cacodemon) the situation would quickly become patently unmanageable/aggravating. Do the two switch-keyed waves there always come in the order I saw them, or is each tied to a particular switch?

Even though I found/cleared the (largely inconsequential) secret, one monster still got lost somewhere, from using IDDT on the demo playback it looked like a skellie or summat who showed up late to the party for the sanctum fight, or maybe a critter who got pushed off the landing in the rocket-lanes fight which precedes it.

Edit: Ah, nevermind, I think it was a hell knight from the lanes fight. Didn't realize there was a failsafe way for them to access the sanctum if ditched earlier on.

Ty all.

Yeah dobu, the afrits' occasional screen-filling spam can be quite intense. A few of my testing deaths ended in seconds of laughter due to how crazy it got. Ty for that compliment. Made me genuinely happy. :)

Ribbiks: the one troll manc can be gotten rid of comfortably from the secret (which is the purpose of the secret as much as the backpack). I also love when I learn unexpected cool things about my maps from demos: i.e., that it's possible to rocket the turrets all the way over from the short circular hub.

Re Krypto: Yeah the rocket balance in that encounter is tricky: the encounter will easily develop to one or more extremes, quickly becoming a massive clusterfuck if you get there without many rockets, but becoming quite easy and low-pressure if you can clear out the mancs quickly. That actually happened in DotW's demo. In the next (probably final) version, I'm probably going to have the walls lower much more rapidly but also hand out more plasma cells, probably moving them from the final area so that the afrit wave is only BFG-spammable if you save cells for it. Funny you mention AVs: earlier iterations had a single one (since replaced by a few afrits), but I got rid of it not only because one of the earlier aims was to make a map without an AV -- for once :D -- but also because the reveal ends up being massive horseshit when you don't know it's coming unless you breeze though the earlier stages, and I wanted to avoid that because I just complained about an unfair AV reveal in another map. :)

DotW: Seems like you stumbled across literally the lowest-pressure route + ammo-usage plan, and didn't really have as much fun unfortunately. Yeah I'll add a chaingun to that route (via chaingunners, probably ;)) The manc turrets replenish quite efficiently (lots of duplicate teleport lines) and only once. The two final encounters are tethered to their respective keys. My preferred approach (and a surprisingly survivable one, even being the way I one-shotted the level shortly before posting it) is to set everything loose at once. The encounters were designed in a bit of a jigsaw way such that they interact in the player's favor (HKs/pinkies work as meatshields for the afrits/chaingunners, everything infights, you get the BFG and can spam to clear space when needed, and a number of other things). As mentioned I'll tweak the cell balance a tiny bit so that you can't as easily low-pressure BFG spam the afrits if you go red -> black in a methodical way. The afrit mass has also been increased to 1000 (same as the baron) instead of the "original" 400.

I also do not believe for a second that you didn't know what Taylor Swift looks like.

Benjogami: Ty. If you use -complevel 9 (doesn't work with -complevel 2 -- probably works with 11 and a few others but I haven't tried it), you can save at any point while recording a demo. After dying (or manually quitting), I simply relaunch the game with the same command line, same -record "demo file name", and it ends up sending me to the latest save point instead of starting at the beginning and overwriting the demo. That actually surprised me the first time.

Looks really neat, as usual!

Are you ever planning to upload your levels to /idgames, or are you waiting to make some kind of compilation? Or do you have your own site that has downloads of everything you've done? It's kind of hard to keep track of your levels across all of these individual beta threads.

Version two: http://www.mediafire.com/download/aw5s52a4512411f/blankspace_v2.wad

Changes:

- On UV, an extra green armor, a couple of medkits, and some extra rocket ammo replaces the PR+cells in the inner sanctum fight. Cell balance is a lot stingier, leaving room for two BFG shots in the whole map. Setting everything loose at once in the final fight is still (!) very viable, however.

- The regenerating manc turrets are now skippable, if you want to roll that way. I bet you can guess what happens if you skip them. :)

- HMP has a bit more health. HNTR/HMP no longer have that teleporter-blocking hell knight.

- You get an extra soulsphere in the last pair of battles if you release the afrit wave first or set everything loose (close to) simultaneously. This is a bit inelegant aesthetically (hey, random soulsphere out of nowhere by a means that isn't telegraphed in any way), but I like how it benefits the balance.

Not Jabba said:

Looks really neat, as usual!

Are you ever planning to upload your levels to /idgames, or are you waiting to make some kind of compilation? Or do you have your own site that has downloads of everything you've done? It's kind of hard to keep track of your levels across all of these individual beta threads.

Thanks. Yeah, I'll probably compile them for /idgames at some point, and I'll organize a Google doc or something for dl links (as well as a all-in-one dl link) later this week.

rdwpa said:

I'll probably compile them for /idgames at some point

One .wad file with all your maps sounds like a fabulous thing.

dobu gabu maru said:

One .wad file with all your maps sounds like a fabulous thing.

Agreed!

Hi rdwpa, your maps are really cool, including this one. Here's a playthrough/fda with saves on HMP if you want to watch, for v2, if not that's fine.

https://www.doomworld.com/vb/attachment.php?postid=1611986

I'm another Afrit-hater but it didn't bother me too much on HMP, which is to say I died plenty from other things anyhow. Also the void platforms were really disorienting to me in this map, as cool as they looked.

Would love to see you make a very large map sometime. Anyhow this was fun, good job.

edit: BTW your replacement graphic for the black keycard is the keycard+skullkey graphic, and not just the keycard.

Finally had a chance to play this last night; that was a fun, pretty map rdwpa! I'd send you my FDA but it's just a bunch of frustrating deaths while inebriated. Still, got home from the bar, popped this map in and had a good time :)

I always like the monster placement in your maps; one of the few mappers where every monster seems to have a purpose, which I like. I liked the use of the afrits, too.

I liked every encounter in this map, could go on about all of them: the depth of the second-to-last encounter, the barons/manc encounter beginning it, the sneaky shotgunners in the beginning and the manc in the building that seemed to like to sneak out; he surprised me one time when he didn't see me, heh.

Fun map man; I look forward to your next one, or the possible culmination of a megawad *crosses fingers*