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A2Rob

Running Late (Now on idgames)

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Small, 5 level mini wad I've been working on since late October of last year. Levels are short and action packed. Story and level list at the bottom of this post.

After spending most of the year on single mapping projects, I decided to try my hand at building a small, continuous wad.

Levels were designed for pistol start.

Utilizes mostly vanilla Doom textures, with a few new graphics here and there.

All maps were built in Boom format using GZDoomBuilder.

Runs in GZDoom, ZDoom, PRBoom+ and GLBoom+ (May not run in Zandronum).

Pls no bully (feedback much appreciated).

*Screenshots*

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===========================================================================

*DOWNLOAD LINK*
idgames database : https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/p-r/runlate

Doomworld : 



===========================================================================
*Story*

You are a security guard, stationed at a remote UAC facility. You show up to your shift one evening only to discover the entire base has been overrun by demons.

*Levels List*

Map01 - Green Shift
:Music - "Mega Man 8 Stage Select Remix"

Map02 - The Crate Temple
:Music - "Astral Dreadnought" by Jimmy

Map03 - Clocking Out
:Music - "Sigma Fortress A" from Mega Man X

Map04 - Full Lot
:Music - "Pissed Office Box" by Lee Jackson

Map05 - The Big Promotion
:Music - "Adversary Within" by Jimmy

Edited by A2Rob

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Kinda fun, looks like something made in 2008 or so. The gameplay was obviously dynamic but the whole "do something important -> get ambushed + monsters repopulate previous areas" got old after a while. I'm sure you can come up with more interesting scenarios if you think harder. Also, obvious borrowings from Scythe 2 and Vanguard cheapen the quality of your work. If you're going to copy someone, usually you need to do it better than the original, otherwise your stuff will look second-rate and you probably don't want that. You've got some technical skills but it would help if you applied them in more creative ways. Or maybe that's the kind of maps you enjoy the most and you're happy to imitate them, which is fine.

Some problems:
http://i.imgur.com/vInJT7V.png - you could probably make these things have the same floor flat.
http://i.imgur.com/rqNzVfl.png - same as above.
http://i.imgur.com/n6eWVDa.png - yeah, in prboom-plus it's a bad idea to put monster spawner in slots other than 30...

Oh, and here are the demos of my playthrough.

edit: forgot to say, some monsters get stuck on edges when pushed a little: http://i.imgur.com/ZWp1UBW.png This is a very annoying "feature" of Boom that prboom-plus recreates faithfully.

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Memfis said:

Kinda fun, looks like something made in 2008 or so. The gameplay was obviously dynamic but the whole "do something important -> get ambushed + monsters repopulate previous areas" got old after a while. I'm sure you can come up with more interesting scenarios if you think harder. Also, obvious borrowings from Scythe 2 and Vanguard cheapen the quality of your work. If you're going to copy someone, usually you need to do it better than the original, otherwise your stuff will look second-rate and you probably don't want that. You've got some technical skills but it would help if you applied them in more creative ways. Or maybe that's the kind of maps you enjoy the most and you're happy to imitate them, which is fine.


Thanks for the feedback and demos. Yeah, I ended up doing a lot of the same encounters throughout the wad. Not the best with encounter variety, something I hope to fix in the future. Guess I took a little too much inspiration from other wads as well, specially the marine enemy, though part of that was just me wanting to learn how to use WhackEd4.

Memfis said:

yeah, in prboom-plus it's a bad idea to put monster spawner in slots other than 30...

Oh, so that's why the cubes didn't fully go down.

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Here's a quick UV-max for map03. It does some things better than its mother, Vanguard map07, in a maxrun context (less infighting!) but that switch sequence at the end is a massive buzzkill. :P The switches are tiny as hell (annoying in maxruns) + hard to spot (I spent probably a whole minute wondering how to leave in my first casual playthrough, from finding the four switches, finding the little switch it opened up, and then figuring out that it opened up that door) + entirely unnecessary (the map is relatively low pressure, why try so so hard to keep the player from leaving). Two more clearly placed switches that release a voodoo doll that keeps the exit area open or something would be preferable. I feel like the action is much less viscerally satisfying overall than vg07, because of the more cramped scale, which both makes the monsters a bit less threatening and makes it harder for the player to simply hold down fire for the whole map, and because of the absence of vg07's fodder monsters earlier in the proceedings.

On the mapset as a whole, I agree with Memfis on his points, but I personally see this as better than a cheap knockoff. The palette changes impart a lot of character, and the design has a different flavor (I prefer the looks here to much of S2 and Vanguard, to be perfectly honest -- they feel more fresh to me -- but the gameplay design as you mentioned could be improved in places).

I'd love to see you contribute a map to Cereal Killer. Your style has kinship with Crunchynut44's, although a lot more grounded in discrete rooms, as opposed to his multi-tiered open areas.

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rdwpa said:

Here's a quick UV-max for map03. It does some things better than its mother, Vanguard map07, in a maxrun context (less infighting!) but that switch sequence at the end is a massive buzzkill. :P The switches are tiny as hell (annoying in maxruns) + hard to spot (I spent probably a whole minute wondering how to leave in my first casual playthrough, from finding the four switches, finding the little switch it opened up, and then figuring out that it opened up that door) + entirely unnecessary (the map is relatively low pressure, why try so so hard to keep the player from leaving). Two more clearly placed switches that release a voodoo doll that keeps the exit area open or something would be preferable. I feel like the action is much less viscerally satisfying overall than vg07, because of the more cramped scale, which both makes the monsters a bit less threatening and makes it harder for the player to simply hold down fire for the whole map, and because of the absence of vg07's fodder monsters earlier in the proceedings.


That was kinda the purpose, to keep the player from easily leaving. Not the best idea in hindsight; next time I make a map like that I'll ease up on the switch blocks. I had difficulty gauging the map spatially , so that's why it ended up being a bit cramped.

Thanks for the reply and demo. I'll also try and hop on that mapping project between now and when I start my next project.

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Gave this a casual continuous UV playthrough this evening. The maps look good and i thought it was generally fun to play regardless of anything else, although it felt like map03 was a very sudden difficulty ramp, which took me by surprise. An hour or so well spent - thanks for posting!

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map04 is probably my favorite map in the set, a good amount of combat variety on offering here. But the ending is a big letdown, imo, for a variety of reasons:

- The imps in the building wake up if you shoot while waiting for the lift. They block you and you have to tediously clean them up. Needs sound block lines or deaf flags.

- The only way back down from the building is a small lift, which makes it unfeasible to leave anything behind at this point. This is kind of bad because:

- The player has to take a lift up to that tower to get the red key. Ideally this waiting time would be used to kill a baron or something left behind, but leaving any monsters behind in this part is very risky because they can make it very annoying (or even outright impossible) to get back down thanks to infinite height and all.

- I don't really understand the next part. There is another lift, but this time it's guarded by revenants who have no tactical purpose other than making it annoying to ride the lift up while they are still alive, lest risk some infinitely tall punches. They also can't be efficiently killed with the 100 cellpack that is provided, given the distance along the Y-axis (rockets are faster).

I think the cell/health placement can also be improved in this part. The two bulk cells in the yard are great, but then there are 220 more cells, much of which can't be used so efficiently. One is useful for a fast vile kill but far from mandatory for that, and one or two are useful for the manc/HK room, but the closet encounter on the south side of the building is a lot more suited to RL use. That leaves anywhere from two to four BFG shots that aren't really going to be used for anything satisfying or important. I'd rather have many of those cells available earlier on in the map, where it might be more fun for the horde-based stuff and the crate area with the blue key. The secret soulsphere also appears too late to be of much use; the most dangerous part of this area is the entry to the yard, where there is a lot of potential hitscanner attrition, followed by a ride up the lift and a few fights with plasma marines, which can punish a misstep in a heartbeat.

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I assumed map05 was a broken IoS map so I hadn't played it until now. It's mostly functional, however (there is also an exit switch right at the start, not sure what that is about).

This is actually my favorite map of the set. Turns out to be pretty dangerous played at a fast pace (casual max here), because of the hitscannners and plasma marines. Those plasma marines are the most deadly individual monster in the set, and fun to fight. It's like deathmatch in a way.

I think the way to make boss spawners work on non-map30 slots is to have the monsters warp into an offmap sector with a scrolling floor, and then teleport from there into the actual map.

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Thanks for the replies rdwpa, glad you had fun with the set.

rdwpa said:

(there is also an exit switch right at the start, not sure what that is about).

I copy/pasted that beginning area from the exit in Map04. Guess I forgot to edit the exit switch out, oops.

As for the revanant lift at the end of Map04, there was originally going to be a cyber-demon that would teleport into that area, but I found that he could get right in front of the lift to the switch building if the player was too slow, and monster block lines would interfere with the opening encounter to that area. I was going to have him spawn on the exit lift instead, but found that he kept hitting the edge of the platform, making him really easy to kill with little resistance, so I ended up just replacing him with the revanants.

Looking back at it now, I wish I had just cut out the switch building entirely.

Cool demo btw, I never thought to activate all the enemies at once like that.

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Figured I'd finally get this up on idgames. Changed a few things in maps 3, 4, and 5 based on feedback from this thread. Map 3's switch buggery was minimized, and map 5's final encounter was fixed to work better in PrBoom.

 

Now to move on to other projects. 

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Gonna try it later, though, it looks like my kinda mapset.  I've been underwhelmed by the popular stuff released this year except for Counterattack and Water Spirit.  Those were friggin' great.

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18 hours ago, Killer5 said:

Hey man. I played through Running Late on stream. This mapset rocks. Thanks for making it. This thread needs to be bumped =).

 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/144466175

Thanks Killer5! Glad you liked these maps. Had fun watching your livestream of them.

Missed the non-secret BFG on map 4 :)

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Sorry for necroing this thread but I wanted to share my UV max playthrough. I've been on a roll with A2Rob's work and what better place to start with than this one? Anyway here it is:
 

 

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