Map The Fourth - There Goes The Neighbourhood (v2)

I'm dialing back the size a bit from my last map and returning more to the style of my first map. Except, instead of being based on the urban neighbourhood I currently live in, this one is based on the suburban house and neighbourhood I grew up in - at least, as best as I can recall (there probably wasn't quite as many cacodemons in my actual neighbourhood, if I'm being honest).

Although the physical size of this map isn't nearly as big as the previous one, gameplay takes roughly the same amount of time for a 100% run (about 45min to an hour). A real smash-and-grab speed run may take significantly less time - though I did turn the monster factor up a notch or two so hopefully this one finally challenges some of you pros (instead of just confusing you...)

Built with Slade 3 on Vanilla/Doom II IWAD
Tested on GZDoom v4.5.0
MP3 Custom Music
No crouching. Jumping optional (except for one Big F'ing Secret)

More pre-populated screenshots:

And here's yer WAD:

Map04.7z

https://wadhosting.com/Wad/5F4D508BFAF05D0BBC3934CE48AE2E6D90EEFEF1

I must commend you on your prompt playthroughs Bio! This was definitely my favourite so far. I always enjoy how your initial amusement with my maps gradually turns into frustration. Haha.

PS

I assure you - the red card was there! But it seems my confounding choice of textures foiled you again....

Love your (vanilla) texture work!

2 hours ago, raviner said:

I assure you - the red card was there! But it seems my confounding choice of textures foiled you again....

Hey, enjoyin the map, loved this kind of stuff, but I cant find that rey key to progress, not sure what are you saying

with the choice of textures, just cant figure out, little hint in spoilers will be appreciated, really want to play the whole thing!

Thanks Zylinderkatze!

I'm just doing my best to exhaust the possibilities of the standard Doom II pallet before venturing into the world of custom textures...

Soulless - let's just say my use of the skull textures in the sub-sub-basement aren't just for decoration. Yellow + blue = red....

Thanks for the clue @raviner, your tip worked fine.

So yeah, as I mentioned in my map thread, this one reeks DoomCute everywhere you look, and the use of the Doom II stock textures works quite well!

Just some of the details that made me smile or straight up laugh.

-Meat packages in basement fridge.

-Paint cans, simple but the colours at top simulating actual pain colours is great.

-That classy swimming pool.

-The sand with the bucket for the kids-

-The teddybear and the cradle.

-The Fireblue tv & the later secret

-The umbrella.

And many more im forgetting.

I want to point out also the item placement, it was funny to collect all of them, 1st time I found myself also trying to get 100% items!

like a mini-game itself.

Fun fact, I went to the cyber/spider area without the rocket launcher, which I found later on, exploring for secrets, doh!

Found a softlock with an easy fix:

You can kind of parkour to that square box with an imp cells and other items, and since you can only open it from the outside, you get trapped, I really thought it was a secret.

I could only find 3/5 secrets, couldnt find the one with 2 imps and a bfg, saw that via IDDT but couldt find a way in.

It was a really entertaing hour of exploration with great enviromental details, very cool map!

Is this limit-removing? If not, what -complevel should I use?

Thanks again @Soulless - I love that you picked up on the meat packages. This was kind of a throw-away feature just to serve as steps to get out of the freezer. I didn't think anyone would really even notice them, let alone recognize what they were supposed to be! And RE: the soflock - wow, you really went exploring! Hahaha. I was actually going to make all those areas impassable but then figured, who would bother trying that? Maybe I should make that a secret....

@Phytolizer - I'm not quite sure. If you're using prBoom, there are no nodes in this, or any of my previous maps (I only recently learned about this), so I think its only compatible with certain ports like zDoom. El Inferno was kind enough to compile a Boom-compatible version of my last map in UDB - but I can only get Slade to work on my computer and its rather finicky with defining nodes.

PS

Silly question - how do you mention users in this thread?

type @ and the find the user from a list given, sorta like you did above, but something failed.

About the softock, I would make it a secret, it kinda felt rewarding all the exploration.

There Goes The Neighbourhood!

Ultra-Violence || GZDoom || Ang_Doom

Status:

-Deaths → 0

-Saves → none

A really interesting experience, because apparently, it is like playing on a semi-open map in the gta style, although of course, not with normal citizens, but the experience was very good anyway, everything structural and architectural really stands out very good here, because everything looks so detailed, with several interesting things inside each house or residence, it is as if the creator of the map has gone to get into the house of many people in their real neighborhood, and then take pictures of them and from there Get started with your work yourself. In the fighting it is not left behind either, this map does have extremely hard encounters, from the moment you enter the main house, until you reach the end of a basement where there was a huge battle area with 2 Spidermaster Mind and 2 Cyberdemons, What kind of neighbors built something like this in a basement?... Anyway, the method of collecting keys throughout the neighborhood turned out to be entertaining in a way, I got very confused in the search, but at some point regain common sense and keep moving forward, although a shame you will not find all the secrets. In general, it was a very fun experience, there were not as many problems as I had imagined at first, but for all that I ended up seeing, it was very well to my liking, great job that you have done on this map.

Thanks for the great review @ElPadrecitoCholo ! Based on all the feedback so far it looks like I finally struck a decent balance between design and combat in one of my maps - i.e., it doesn't entirely suck.

I'm just finishing an updated version based on some of the suggestions here - I'm just debating whether I should change that first red key scenario. Is it a little too obscure/annoying for a non-secret, especially so early in the game? Thoughts? @Clippy usually does a helpful playthrough of everyone's WADs, so I'm also waiting for his input here - though I'm not sure if he's back to full strength after his comp crash....

I have been interested in playing your maps just haven't got around to it yet stay tuned

9 hours ago, raviner said:

I'm just debating whether I should change that first red key scenario. Is it a little too obscure/annoying for a non-secret, especially so early in the game? Thoughts?

I would totally changed it, probably the only thing I dont like in the map, being honest here, I would rather find it while exploring, either that or make the puzzle

more intuitive somehow.

@Soulless: Yeah, I'm thinking I'll just disassociate that bit from getting the actual key, and incorporate it in the existing secret part of that area - if those who know what I'm talking about, know what I'm talking about...

@Clippy: Consider me tuned!

Just thought I'd sneak this new version in before the next playthrough:

https://wadhosting.com/Wad/5F4D508BFAF05D0BBC3934CE48AE2E6D90EEFEF1

Just a couple of tweaks. Nothing too surprising/drastic if you've already played or been following this thread.

Interesting map - really love the effort you put into visuals, like it's a town of apartments or something. The gameplay felt odd to me or maybe I picked the most unfortunate routes, took me a while to find decent weapons and I did spend a lot of time wandering and confused - still overall good map here is my play by play 

sadly I missed a lot of secrets and some monsters, you hide things well - I like that

Great playthrough as always Clippy!

You may have picked an unfortunate route here, but you always seem to pick a very helpful route for fixing my maps - like the yellow key door in the last map (no one else went to that building first, it seems) or finding that other softlock area on the fences in this map. Also appreciate your interior decorating tips for that TV area. The feng shui is definitely off in that room! Haha..

Appreciate the secrets compliment as well, though I think you're cat might have distracted you from one or two  - you walked right past them! (ie, that lift back to the starting area isn't entirely pointless...like some of my other features).

Thanks again!

I beat it in about 44 minutes. This map is huge - as it is with your maps in general. The attention to detail is incredible, but the gameplay lacks something. Maybe it's lack of health pickups or that everything is just too far apart from eachother - including weapons. You are lightyears ahead of Sandy Petersen in map making, that's for sure, in my opinion. It would be fun to see a small map pack from you that would contain at least a few maps :)

Thanks Voxelvoid! I think my gameplay suffers for not having actually played much doom since returning to mapping. I should probably take a break and start playing all the maps I've downloaded here (and the original - in all these years I've still never played Ultimate Doom or Final Doom, just basic I & II). Then again, I said that after my first map and immediately made 3 more....

Just one last little update:

The final fixed version (or, at least as fixed as they're going to get) of my past 4 maps are all together here:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/a-c/comeback

Thanks to all who helped!

OK, I'm really gonna go play Doom for real now.........