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kid marscat

My first vanilla Doom II map, "I. Vista interiora"!

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Hello! This map is intended for a vanilla Doom II megawad I'm working on, but since I've been pretty distracted with professional gamedev and pixel art stuff I just decided to start releasing some of my completed maps from the WAD as stand-alone maps too. This is the very first map I ever made, so I'd really love to hear your feedback and thoughts. I tried to keep a balance between having a strong aesthetic but also worthwhile single player gameplay.

 

Here is the link if you wanna chk it out! There's also screenshots and some general info about the map there too! Enjoy!!

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Hello, I gave your map a go on HMP. It seemed to be well balanced, I like that you have to make quick runs across the lava. Only one problem I came across, you have a medkit in front of a switch, I had to squeeze round the med kit to hit the switch as I didn't want to waste the medkit. The design of the map felt quite open but not too confusing which is good. The music was excellent. I'll give it another go on UV. 

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Really nice map and i would agree with @6DB that it was well balanced. 
Only thing really wrong with it was the doortrak textures sliding with the doors other than that really good

 

Also i would recommend posting the screenshots at the forum as well so it gets peoples attention. 
Most people don't want to click on to other site just to see screenshots, at least that's what i would assume

 

Here is my gameplay video

 

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Beautiful! I'm playing on Chocolate Doom and it looks great on 320x200. UV was a bit too much for me but I had fun on HMP
 

Despite being for Doom 2, gameplay reminds me of Ulimate Doom or even SIGIL. It's slower, methodical and consists mostly of cramped areas - which fits the dark atmosphere pretty well. Visuals are nice with good use of textures and lighting. I like the gimmicks with darkness.
 

Combat and architecture are a bit too basic and doesn't offer any verticality, but again, I think it works with atmospheric maps like this one. The only thing I didn't liked was the obligatory damage sectors, the later one seems to relies on luck to not hurt or kill the player.

Edited by Noiser

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Finished UV, constantly run out of ammo, think I was a bit poor with my shots and exploiting explosive barrels so ammo is probably fine tbh. Died a few times, I suck, normally play on HMP. Noticed you can run past the last enemies and end the level by hitting the switch to end the level, don't know if intentional or not.

 

Tis a good map.

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This is a cool map overall. I like the hellish style and Sigil-like crampedness, since the map is pretty short. If it were longer, the claustrophobia would get to me a bit, but as it is the ratio is fine.

 

The vast majority of the damage I took came from the damaging floors, which seem to be unavoidable regardless of your skill. I'm not huge on forced damage that the player can't do anything about, I was down to 40 HP just from straferunning from one mandatory room to the other. A secret radiation suit or, even better, more rocks for the player to walk on would be a good solution.

 

There was not enough ammo, but there wasn't so little that it was unmanageable. This is one of those maps where every time you need 6 shells, you get 4. I found myself punching out 5-6 shotgunners and chaingunners just to have a bullet or two in any of my guns. One of the most frustrating bits was going through most of the map with very little health and armor, only to find a medikit, two stimpacks and a suit of armor right next to the exit switch, when I no longer needed them! I would have killed to have those supplied a few rooms earlier.

 

People who like this kind of challenge should really check out the CHORD series, you'll be out of ammo and damaged without warning to your hearts content!

 

I know this sounds like negative feedback, but it really isn't, the map just has some frustrating elements - It is a fine map overall. Anything with the "Hell and also wooden bookcases" vibe going on gets instant points from me. As a side note, that little itch.io site reminds me of the better GeoCities Doom sites from back in the day, which is just awesome.

 

Hope to see you making more!

Edited by Doomkid

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Here's some commentary from my playthrough (some will be in spoilers for including secret related things):

 

I like the survival, optimization focused play, especially in a short map like this. Reminds me very much of the CHORD series that Doomkid mentioned, where I took my time berserk punching a ton of barons because why not.

 

Spoiler

The player is taught early on that ammo is scarce, so they play more carefully, which leads to very sloggish pace. As a short map that probably relies on this idea, it's not too bad. I kind of like it. Though the amount of Lost Souls is a bit of a drag, considering for a safe approach you have to wait for them to come to you before you can off them (chainsaw helps here), adding to the already sloggish nature of the gameplay. 

 

Secrets are relatively important (chainsaw and blue armor in the beginning especially), making them seem almost mandatory to any casual player who don't get extremely lucky with their punches. Then again, they shouldn't play on UV so it's fine that way ;)


I was originally going to comment on the damaging floors as most other people have, but after finishing the map I realized that with optimized movement and taking no unnecessary risks, the floors are a minor inconvenience and nothing more. You can also time your movements across them with your weapon bob, which is (AFAIK) in sync with the same "clock" that keeps track of the damaging floors.

 

Spoiler

While not completely necessary, I liked the presence of a rocket launcher, because it makes the final fight with the baron feel much less grindy. The overall atmosphere is that of ammo conservation, so saving the RL ammo pays off when you see the baron. It could also be two barons on UV, which would be rewarded if you found that RL ammo box secret.

 

Overall I really liked this map, but if it were any longer it might feel tedious. The gameplay works for those who like survival grind (which I do), but ultimately it left me with quite a bit of ammo at the end, so maybe if you go for this approach you could try going all in and drop the ammo count even more (if not here, then maybe in a later level if you force pistol starts). Then again, it would effectively make some of the secrets mandatory, but I kinda felt that was the point of the map in general on higher difficulties (correct me if I'm wrong).


If I suggested improvements, I'd say you could do more varying encounters, since it was mostly corridor shooting which the player can optimize far enough that you hardly need to use any ammo. Maybe a few tight space ambushes would break up the monotony a bit. Also, I think Lost Souls coming from every single nook and cranny (often straying into areas you've been in to make their frustrating surprise acquaintance) might put off some players.


Enjoyed it a lot though, will be looking forward to continuation to this map!

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Just played the level with Crispy Doom, on Ultra-Violence difficulty. Finished it in 5:53. Died once to a damaging floor. I thought it was about average, and while overall I wouldn't say it is a good map, its flaws are simply because you're inexperienced, and with that in mind, your level is actually better than most people's firsts.

 

- The MIDI used, albeit nice in itself, feels very unfitting for the level.

- The lighting wasn't very good, and showed a lack of contrast. Noticeably, there were a few overexposed areas (ex.: the hallway where the Shotgun can be found), and for the rest of the level, it was very unremarkable.

- The texture scheme doesn't make sense, nor do the colors fit well with each other: Brown brick, near bright red hellish rock and lava, which can be seen in combination with metal or blue technological floors... It doesn't look good. 

- There's a mild lack of health items, specifically because of how often the player has to run through damaging floors and forcibly take damage.

- The map is way too easy, most of the damage I took was because of the aforementioned damaging floors. Overall, the gameplay feels dull.

- The layout/architecture are uninteresting, for every area feels quite similar to each other, and don't have notable features.

 

I didn't have any trouble with ammo as other people in this thread seemed to have, but I was indeed often with low ammounts of it, but I never had a complete lack of it, nor did I have to punch any demons. The problem is that, if I had missed only two or three shots, I'd be completely out and have probably no chance of survival, and that can be uncomfortable.

Edited by Juza

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3 hours ago, Juza said:

- The lighting wasn't very good, and showed a lack of contrast. Noticeably, there were a few overexposed areas (ex.: the hallway where the Shotgun can be found),

Probably because you pressed the light switch early-on. There is a cool gimmick with darkness on the hallway, that unfortunately is ruined by that.

Edited by Noiser

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I want to complete this map but the excessive use of damaging floors that deal 10% of your health is really unfair, especially due to a lack of health items and rad-shielding suits.

 

Outside of that, the song kinda sounds like it could work in a 90's platformer game that was in some science or cyber level.

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Alright let's review this, its bootleg sigil at worst but at best its mediocre and boring sure i was being challenged around every fucking corner but midi is good enough, for me at least.

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I wanna thank everyone who has played the map so far!! It's been great to see that most of the feedback to be positive, and for the general criticism to be mostly about amateurish errors that I either forgot to fix or didn't consider so far.

 

19 hours ago, 6DB said:

Only one problem I came across, you have a medkit in front of a switch, I had to squeeze round the med kit to hit the switch as I didn't want to waste the medkit.

I'll go about moving that medkit. This is a really important issue for the map, as there's indeed a balance between health pickup scarcity and capacity that is really important for the flow of the level, and having players waste good medkits like that only makes the map unnecessarily harder than it needs to be!

 

19 hours ago, Matias said:

Only thing really wrong with it was the doortrak textures sliding with the doors other than that really good

Yeah, I kept telling myself I'd go about fixing that up before release, but in the time since I made it and now, I completely forgot about it. It will be fixed too.

 

18 hours ago, 6DB said:

Noticed you can run past the last enemies and end the level by hitting the switch to end the level, don't know if intentional or not.

Yeah, a lot of the map was designed so that it could entirely be avoided, and also to be somewhat speedrun friendly, but not so much that it could all be skipped cuz that would ruin the fun of figuring out what to do.

 

18 hours ago, Noiser said:

The only thing I didn't liked was the obligatory damage sectors, the later one seems to relies on luck to not hurt or kill the player.

I understand the gimmick is quite controversial with some players but since it's the core design idea of the map and it's stated as so on the page, I think players can make an informed decision about not playing it if that's not the kind of map they like. And especially considering the only serious use of the lava is the one after hitting the blue switch, I'm not preoccupied about it on terms of design. The lava really only becomes a true obstacle when trying to 100% the map, but that's the fun of it.

 

12 hours ago, Doomkid said:

There was not enough ammo, but there wasn't so little that it was unmanageable.

When testing, I found myself having way more ammo than normal. Maybe it has to do with my skill as a player, and the obvious "cheat" of being the designer of it, but since I do want to "democratize" the map, so I might go about putting more ammo, although not that much as to make difficulty redundant.

 

12 hours ago, Doomkid said:

One of the most frustrating bits was going through most of the map with very little health and armor, only to find a medikit, two stimpacks and a suit of armor right next to the exit switch, when I no longer needed them!

Yeah, I can see how those pickups make more sense on the context of a megawad, but even then, they're placed there to make the Baron confrontation easier in the non-UV skill runs.

 

5 hours ago, Aurelius said:

Then again, it would effectively make some of the secrets mandatory, but I kinda felt that was the point of the map in general on higher difficulties (correct me if I'm wrong)

Yeah, the map was particularly designed to make UV as hard as I could make it without having it be unfair. That does make the secrets more important on that level, but that's what I'm rewarding — the skill to play economically, to explore and not be afraid of risk.

 

51 minutes ago, Noiser said:

Probably because you pressed the light switch early-on.

Sadly there is no way to choose on vanilla what the light intensity for that section would be after hitting the switch, so it's forced to 255, which looks ugly for sure, but it's a compromise of design, which is a part of mapping with these limitations.

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19 hours ago, Matias said:

Here is my gameplay video

 

Oh and also i really wanna thank you @Matias for recording this video! it was very fun to see someone else play the map! I understand that about half the comments here have been about the map being too hard, but seeing this I kinda feel that I didn't go hard enough ;P

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5 hours ago, kid marscat said:

I understand the gimmick is quite controversial with some players but since it's the core design idea of the map and it's stated as so on the page, I think players can make an informed decision about not playing it if that's not the kind of map they like. And especially considering the only serious use of the lava is the one after hitting the blue switch, I'm not preoccupied about it on terms of design. The lava really only becomes a true obstacle when trying to 100% the map, but that's the fun of it.

Yes, the blue switch is the moment in question. When I played for the first time I died because of the obligatory hurt section and there was nothing I could do to circumvent that. I can't even say it's a gimmick at this point because it punishes the player no matter what. Maybe you could put a health item next to the switch that opens the passage.

Another tip for future maps would be to make better use of verticality (different height values) and monsters attacking from different directions. I'm fine with this map not being fully focused on combat though. I like the slower nature of it.
 

Spoiler

About the light switch, I think that was unnecessary. The dark corridor was a lot cooler and most people will not even see it because they will press the switch first. Just making the elevator more noticeable on the dark would be enough. Of course, it's just my opinion. 

 

Edited by Noiser

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4 minutes ago, Noiser said:

When I played for the first time I died because of the obligatory hurt section and there was nothing I could do to circumvent that.

That will happen if you play on high difficulty (which means less pickups), take too much damage and don't explore the map for secrets to help you deal with that very obstacle. That's part of the design, it's not a flaw. I mean, I could put some health pickups before or after that obstacle, but on a design level, that just makes the obstacle redundant, at which point why have the lava to begin with? And what would I be rewarding by putting obvious pickups before obvious obstacles? How does that help the player make better choices?

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Alright. Maybe I didn't searched enough so. The health idea was to prevent straight up killing the player.
But hey, if it's important for you don't worry about it. It's a minor detail after all.

Edited by Noiser

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