[New HERETIC map] Village of Rotten Bones

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today I present you my first Heretic map: Village of Rotten Bones. 

Are you bold enough to go through the flooded city, murky corridors and basements, forgotten-underground chapels, destroyed churches, graveyards, fiery caves, frozen lakes and other sectors? :)

Yes? Great!

Therefore, please enjoy the map that can be downloaded here:
http://chabowski.eu/DOOM_custom_maps/Village_of_Rotten_Bones/Village_of_Rotten_Bones.zip

BTW: Here's the page when you can find my other creations, such as notorious "Intestinal Clog of The Satan" ;-)
http://chabowski.eu/custom_doom_maps/

Some facts:
- Map is vanilla compatible, yet - if you're observant enough - you may notice some rendering errors due to draw-segs limit being exceeded. I left it there intentionally since it's not particularly dangerous and I already had to severely partition the main city area to avoid visplane overflows...
- Skill levels are fully implemented. The easier the skill the less monsters are lurking in the dark corners and more health & ammo is available. Additionally, on easy skill some weapons are dispatched much earlier
- The map is moderately detailed - I (hopefully) took care about having enough spider's webs, mosses and correct texture alignment

Initially I found vanilla Heretic texture set to be extremely limited, but after all it allows to create some decent, castle like environments.

As usual I will appreciate any comments, videos or demos that will help me with fixing issues, balancing the map and overall - being better mapper :)

I will also post a video once I am able to finish the map in one go.

Finally, some screenies :)

Nice looking heretic map, I'll give this a go!

Always great to see a nice new Heretic map just before the weekend. :)

I'm guessing E1M1 replacement?

That's right.

The map is amazing!! I stopped after killing 1/3 of the enemies (477) i will continue later, awesome design for the exploration and stuff!
Thanks for the map! :D

More Heretic maps is always a good thing.  Couldn't play this yesterday on account of a lingering headache, but I'll play it soon enough.

Just gave it a quick try, until it crashed in Chocolate due to the savegame limit thing. It looked pretty neat so far, lots of monsters without feeling grindy as far as Heretic combat goes. Will keep on playing in ZDoom later (:

Oops, I forgot to mention the savegame limit in the first post. Sorry for that :/

You can still play in Choco (as I do), by disabling this particular limitation in the setup program:

A few tiny things from a skill4 play through.

It might be cool to place some sort of blocked/locked door behind the player start, just to suggest they got there somehow?

It took me a very long time to find the Crossbow. I was half way to the Yellow key before I found it. But that might just be me.

Was linedef 2764 meant to have the monsters can't cross flag?

Sectors 947 and 1151 were chokepoints for the monsters.

The Maulotaurs were very ineffective; maybe some Iron Liches would be better?

The Gargoyles in sector 665 were stuck?

D'sparil was really tacked on to the end of the map.

9 hours ago, Vermil said:

It took me a very long time to find the Crossbow. I was half way to the Yellow key before I found it. But that might just be me.

There is a crossbow in the room most nearby the start, that also leads to the bag of arrows on the cracked wall. 

11 hours ago, mgr_inz_rafal said:

You can still play in Choco (as I do), by disabling this particular limitation in the setup program:

 

image

Thanks, so the map was fun. Killed everything (well, that's impossible to miss because of D'Sparil's death), found 8/11 secrets and, died once because I summoned a clock on my spot by accident, yeah, but a few tense parts too, like the surprise lift with enemies coming from the dark, good use of exploding pods to put the player in risk of dying unexpectedly. Agreed the finale looked out of place, D'Sparil just appears and it's about going back and forth without much to happen, perhaps another enemy combo like teleporting ghosts at the graveyard while lots of disciples/gargoyles at the chamber would have been a cool idea. For the double malotaurs I'd only suggest to lock the player in the area, you can escape at any time, not that I did that. 

@Vermil

Some explanation:

- I set the Linedef 2764 to block monsters because they've been spamming the starting area, making it harder for the player to survive.

- Chokepoints yes, your're right. The first one was introduced due to visplane overflows, but anyway, I could have planned them better

- Gargoyles in 665 are indeed blocked and can only shoot from the distance

Regarding the Maulotaurs and D'Sparil - yes, I am also not fully happy how they worked in the map. Seems that I have much less experience with Heretic bosses than with Cybbie who is almost always a threatning enemy. D'Sparil himself would benefit from some additional monsters appearing here and there, at least on the Hard difficulty. Otherwise I'm not sure, this fight gives me enough trouble the way it is :)

And one more comments about locking the player. I did this a lot in my previous map (especially the ones created with help of ACS scripting) and even here I do it for the final encounter. In Heretic, however, you need to take additional measures to handle the power of "Chaos Device". Basically, either you don't put this artifact on map or you need to force player to teleport back to the locked area. So this time I made a decision that, well, if someone wan't to cheese the battle, let it be.

Thank you very much for the comments!

Really cool map, love seeing more Heretic. Architecture was awesome and so was enemy variety. Some issues I had though- I think you need to work on signposting to the player where the keys are and what path you must take to get them. I often felt like I was running in circles with no clear sense of direction, which is tough on a map this big. I also feel there were a few too many tight corridors and props like barrels and so on in the middle of areas where you might be fighting- it impedes your freedom of movement which makes it tougher to dodge the constant projectiles and forces you to take damage, which reduces the skill factor a little.

14 hours ago, mgr_inz_rafal said:

Regarding the Maulotaurs and D'Sparil - yes, I am also not fully happy how they worked in the map. Seems that I have much less experience with Heretic bosses than with Cybbie who is almost always a threatning enemy. D'Sparil himself would benefit from some additional monsters appearing here and there, at least on the Hard difficulty. Otherwise I'm not sure, this fight gives me enough trouble the way it is :)

The maulotaurs seemed fine imo, by nature most Heretic enemies tend to be less troublesome than Doom ones for multiple reasons, and these guys can be the exception if you exploit their numerous abilities. In the context you used them, which I sensed like "casual mini-bosses", cyberdemons wouldn't be much different. On the other side, the d'sparil fight could use backing enemies on skill 4, if you're ok with that.

14 hours ago, mgr_inz_rafal said:

And one more comments about locking the player. I did this a lot in my previous map (especially the ones created with help of ACS scripting) and even here I do it for the final encounter. In Heretic, however, you need to take additional measures to handle the power of "Chaos Device". Basically, either you don't put this artifact on map or you need to force player to teleport back to the locked area. So this time I made a decision that, well, if someone wan't to cheese the battle, let it be.

That is true, though I never think of chaos devices when I play the game, so that's on me. That raises the question if it's possible to reopen the bars at the finale from the other side, supposing you used a chaos device to backtrack and find secrets. 

Thanks @captain crunchy - very helpful comment.

@galileo31dos01

As soon as you jump out of the chapel the small room (close to the bars) opens that let you teleport back to the arena in case you used the Chaos Device. And the bars themselves raise once you're approaching the exit, just in case you have some time to spare and want to take a stroll around the level.

BTW: For the similar reason I decided not to use Wings of Wrath as these seems able to break the level progression even more drastically.

Cool map! Played it on Smite-Meister difficulty level and beat it in 46 minutes with save states, because I died few times at no-save attempts. Secrets were quite hard(?) and I found only 4/11. Neat map, maybe a bit long for my taste or maybe I played it too carefully, I don't know. No bugs happened when I played it on GZDoom v. 1.8.2.0. I'm sorry if I couldn't give enough feedback yet, I'm a bit tired.

Here's my run made on GZDoom. Surely, I needed save points :) It took me nearly 1h to finish, but at least you can see where all the secrets are.

Once again I must admit that I am unable to create small and compact levels :(

BTW: Did anyone notice "The Runes"? Visible on the video at 32:52 :)