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Angry Saint

Asylum (vanilla Doom 2 map) (released)

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I like what you're doing with these textures. The map has a strong mood and even the default sky texture fits. Maybe traps, especially the ones with monsters teleporting behind you, get old and predictable after a while. Anyway, here is a demo of me playing.

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I actually worked more on the mood (textures, shadows, music choice) than on the gameplay.

I found it funny as you were looking for secrets everywhere but missed the only one.

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I don't normally download single wads but your screenshots were intriguing. I'm glad I did! This was a very good effort, the care in lighting showed, and these textures..I've not seen before, I like them very much. It could use a little more health in a few spots, near the beginning for the hitscanners... maybe a secret stash of ammo? I would like to see a series of these, maybe two more maps? Very nice.

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http://www.mediafire.com/download/3y2tcs0rob7c32y/asylum001_rdwpa_fda.lmp

Nice texturing. A lot of the areas feel really empty but the last trap is surprisingly mean -- luckily the front door was still open. :D

Gameplay suggestions:

- Yeah, I had read previous comments so I knew what sort of teleporter traps to expect (most other traps were anticipated but that's another matter), but it seems like the common trend with those is to make frontal setups more interesting. Other ways to do that are: 1) monster closets that open from behind (even though it's kind of the same principle as a W1 monster teleport line, the difference in presentation adds a lot more variety); 2) turreted/elevated monsters, so that in order to make progress the player actually has to approach things and can't rely on everything to follow him to the bottleneck.

-- The caco fight: one or two cacos should be replaced with PEs, with maybe another two or three cacos each being replaced by a group of lost souls. (PEs + cacos + directly placed lost souls is a cool combo imo, but it seems like PEs + cacos is a lot more common.) It's a basic low-pressure circle-strafe fight as is, which makes the whole mechanism to keep the player in the room (switches, and the pace-slowing HKs at the door) unnecessary. There are much more threatening setups in the map that aren't lock-ins at all, so it felt odd that that one got the no-escape treatment. The rest of the gameplay was reasonably smooth, not too pressuring but never tedious -- this part really stuck out as being much worse than the rest.

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Really nice wad. Loved playing through it. Though some parts feeled a bit empty - decorations (either sector decorations or DECORATE objects) would go a long way here. Overall though, really nice.

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Thank you all for your comments.

@Use3D: the texture set is a one quite raw and, let's say it, ugly, but it really gives you the feeling of a Asylum or some other "sick" place. I've never seen it used in a pwad so I decided to give a possibility to it.

@rdwpa: I played your demo. It is interesting to see where people thinks secrets are placed, and battle tatics. I will update the file in the future following your comments.

@darkhog: yes, some areas are emplty, but I used a lot of sectors for the lighting so I am very often at the vanilla limits, so no way to add sector details. But for sure I can add more decorations...

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Really nice map. Very nice atmosphere and visuals. It actually reminded me of Blood in some ways (which is awesome). The design was really nice, and I like how you revisit areas multiple times with out needing to backtrack.

On the other hand, the difficulty is kind of unbalanced. Most of the traps with Hell knights, Revenants, etc, aren't difficult in the slightest, while encounters with the hitscan enemies, especially the chaingunners, constantly plow away health. The darkness also works to the player's disadvantage in some areas. I think the difficulty/enemy placements are the only thing keeping the level form being great instead of good.

Awesome map nonetheless.

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nxGangrel said:

I think the difficulty/enemy placements are the only thing keeping the level form being great instead of good.


I've always been better at level design than gameplay.

How would you improve the difficulty?

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Sorry for the spontaneous bump.

Angry Saint said:

I've always been better at level design than gameplay.

How would you improve the difficulty?

Personally I'd redo most of the monster placements. I'd make most traps limit movement more, get rid of a lot the chaingunners, and make the fights a little more dynamic (basically adding a different variety of enemies in any given room or area).

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nxGangrel said:

and make the fights a little more dynamic (basically adding a different variety of enemies in any given room or area).


I'm not sure about this last point: I've noticed that players like too much infight. So putting more variety would only result in people doing nothing waiting for monsters to kill each other.

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Angry Saint said:

I'm not sure about this last point: I've noticed that players like too much infight. So putting more variety would only result in people doing nothing waiting for monsters to kill each other.


Assuming you've put enough ammo into the level, waiting for the monsters to kill each other is not the most efficient way to beat them -- and if players choose to rely on infighting instead of being part of the combat, I guess that's their choice. Forcing people to fight one type of monster at a time to stop infighting seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Most players will find dynamic fights more interesting.

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Angry Saint said:

I'm not sure about this last point: I've noticed that players like too much infight. So putting more variety would only result in people doing nothing waiting for monsters to kill each other.


Infighting is generally possible when you have lots of free-roaming mid-tier projectile monsters in low-pressure situations. The most common ways around that are to (1) increase the pressure, (2) use height variation and map geometry (obstacles, damaging floors, even just staging fights in complex multi-room areas) to place certain monsters in ways that make infighting hard to set up, (3) use combinations of monster families that don't really play nice with infighting attempts, (4) make infighting a strategy but not a go-to game-winner.

#1 is basically more monsters, less space. If you threaten the player's space, she has to shoot. It's hard to sit around and wait for infighting when you have to kill something -- anything -- quickly in order to not get swarmed. Teleporter encounters can also fall into this category even when relatively easy: the player can't sit around and wait for infighting when doing so will get him surrounded by a lot of low-tiers.

Groups of diverse species naturally infight when they are all clumped together, so the idea of #2 is to separate them -- ledges, turrets, pits, you name it. Naturally this leads to a bit more geometric complexity, but it's possible even in simple arenas: imagine a couple of mancubi on one 128-high ledge and three hell knights on another, on the other side of a medium-sized room. In this case infighting probably won't even be possible.

Hitscanners, pain elementals, and archviles are probably the first thing to come to mind with #3, but adding them to every fight isn't really a solution unless you're trying to emulate Death-Destiny. The other important observation is that families of low- and mid-tier monsters generally don't mix, as long as the low-tiers exert sufficient pressure. Imagine trying to make a cluster of lost souls fight with a couple of revenants. Yeah, no. A gang of pinkies with some hell knights? Better kill those pinkies and clear some space!

Last but not least, sometimes infighting should be one of the main strategies, as is often the case whenever one or more cybers are around. But it doesn't have to be easy. In a sufficiently big clusterfuck, infighting makes it harder to survive, creating a maze of stray projectiles that requires the player to dodge things and improvise, instead of just relying on the specific sort of movement pattern that typically works with a given group of monsters.

Anyway, it's worth combining all of these methods. #1 and #2 are really a large part of good encounter design in general. The total absence of all of these, but especially #1 and #2, is essentially just a big circle-strafe mosh pit. There also some more niche things, liked timed radsuit use, that can be added to an encounter here or there.

But yeah, low-pressure scenarios where infighting is possible aren't necessarily bad. It allows for some flexibility: if you know the map, are speedrunning it, or if you happen to have a lot of ammo, you can kill everything quickly; if you ran out of ammo at some point or (as in my case) generally FDA more conservatively, you can make things infight and try to hoard up an ammo surplus.

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Was an improvement for sure. I probably wouldn't make the SSG rev encounter a closed-door lock in. I think it's probably correct not to have too many of those per encounter in a level like this, which isn't a gauntlet map. Maybe two or three too many lost souls in the new BK fight, but it's definitely more engaging. The HKs that warp in with the PE don't really do anything -- they could be sergeants or something. PE is a good idea though. Something I forgot to mention originally is that the exit room AV (first one encountered in the playthrough) is mostly just somewhat inconvenient to kill. It might as well be a couple of chaingunners or something like that.

Here's a demo -- don't worry, I play a lot more aggressively in this one. :D

http://www.mediafire.com/download/ug29o7vzi66yaw4/asy002_rdwpa_demo.lmp

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rdwpa said:

Was an improvement for sure. I probably wouldn't make the SSG rev encounter a closed-door lock in. I think it's probably correct not to have too many of those per encounter in a level like this, which isn't a gauntlet map. Maybe two or three too many lost souls in the new BK fight, but it's definitely more engaging. The HKs that warp in with the PE don't really do anything -- they could be sergeants or something. PE is a good idea though. Something I forgot to mention originally is that the exit room AV (first one encountered in the playthrough) is mostly just somewhat inconvenient to kill. It might as well be a couple of chaingunners or something like that.

Here's a demo -- don't worry, I play a lot more aggressively in this one. :D

http://www.mediafire.com/download/ug29o7vzi66yaw4/asy002_rdwpa_demo.lmp


I agree on the AV in the exit room: it is boring to kill.
I didn't like how the trap after the BK door went out: you still had time to escape upstairs, I have to find a way to keep the player in the lower area.

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Here's my gameplay:



Some thoughts of mine:
1. Nice use of textures, remind's me of the "Nut House" from Redneck Rampage
2. A little bit too dark - reminds me of Doom 3 :)
3. Those "teleport behind player" traps... Still give me a lot of fun (and trouble sometimes)

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