New map designer showcases one of his masterpieces so far

Hello everyone!

Information about this level:

(DOOM II Map 13)
 

This map is non-linear, although there is an optimal route. There is a teleporter at end of the map in case the player needs to go back for missing enemies or secret hunting. This map took me around 40 minutes to beat - I have a gameplay video linked down below. The secrets should be okay to find. Also, please note that the map is currently only available on the ultra-violence difficulty.
 

Extra information:

This map is part of a personal project, an intended 32-level megawad called Astroverse. This one is map 13, and as of now I am working on map 18. All has been done on Doom Builder and Slade, and has vanilla Doom II textures, mechanics and what not. My wad's levels are very simple aesthetic-wise and have an intended somewhat hard difficulty. All maps were designed for pistol start. It is all a work in progress, so there is room for improvement. I started this project last September and have ever since quit and got back to designing a few times now. I do not own the midi, I got it from a very dedicated composer and doomtuber - Decino.
 

If you have any problems, please let me know and I will gladly help you.

Screenshots:

Nifty little (so to speak) level; the aesthetics really aren't at all my cup of tea, which is fine—although to be honest I was quite pleasantly surprised to find how good the naturalistic exterior areas looked for being essentially monotextured aside from the water.  I wonder if there's a similarly simple and good-looking texturing scheme for indoor areas.  It also occurred to me that you could use varied light levels to add some visual interest to the indoors for a very small amount of work.

Your mapping style has a certain retro, timeless quality to it; it reminds me very much of Hell Revealed and other such visually minimalist but otherwise competently executed 90s wads.  Definitely tickled my nostalgia bone even if I probably wouldn't choose to play something like this for the first time today—which, to be clear, is more due to my tastes than to any inherent problem with the map itself.  

3 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Looks pretty nice, but I just wanted to let you know it's very obvious that you're handing off some drugs to the Imp in the second screenshot.

 

I mean, they've clearly been busted by the Mastermind, gotta finish the deal and get outta there.

What's the format of the map?

11 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Looks pretty nice, but I just wanted to let you know it's very obvious that you're handing off some drugs to the Imp in the second screenshot.

 

i seen that imp on an episode of intervention. hes addicted to soul spheres like crazy. @Astro X is the only dealer  he can find that sells cheap

55 minutes ago, GarrettChan said:

What's the format of the map?

U D M F

N R O O

D U V R

E G I  M

R    N A

H   G  T

A

N

D

@ScrappyMcDoogerton Did OP say that in the post?

Just a joke but judging from the screens and gameplay video you are probably safe with complevel 2 but you could use 11 just to be safe I see no Boom or GZDoom specific stuff here.

I feel kinda bad for this guy because it seems like they put a lot into making the sort of map they really love to play, and the thread is just drug jokes. :V

2 hours ago, jerrysheppy said:

I feel kinda bad for this guy because it seems like they put a lot into making the sort of map they really love to play, and the thread is just drug jokes. :V

Sorry lol, that was not my intent. At least the replies might bring some attention to the topic/help keep it afloat. The wad does look nice and I like the simplistic look of the indoor areas with the bookcases.

7 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Looks pretty nice, but I just wanted to let you know it's very obvious that you're handing off some drugs to the Imp in the second screenshot.

 

Yea, believe it or not, I had a hard time dealing drugs and had to act quick with that spider in the back shooting at us lol

7 hours ago, GarrettChan said:

What's the format of the map?

Vanilla Doom II. I have attached a readme file to the zip over there :)

It's good to have that sort of info in the OP also, as some folks won't even bother downloading the zip if they don't know what they're in for. :)

I agree with jerry so I went ahead and played the map.

I'll start with the positive. This map is competently made. I did not encounter any bugs or errors while playing. The fights were often challenging and fun and the map has a good progression to it.

The map also has a few things I would say still need some work. The visuals in this map are as bland as it gets. All the rooms just look like one shade of brown and if you're lucky maybe one other color makes a small appearance. A few examples:

The two wall textures shown here are the only two I saw in any room after 130+ kills. The aesthetics of this map go beyond simple and approach 0 effort. Texture work doesn't need to be crazy elaborate to be good it just needs to look like you actually thought about it. Take the room in the first pic for instance having the same brick texture on the walls is fine but the platforms coming out of the walls should not be the same. Like just put any other brick or wood texture there and the room will look 10x better. Spending just a few minutes doing a small amount of texture work on this map will greatly improve it.

Alright so now to address the real problem I had with this map. My entire playthrough of this map I only got the ssg. 130 kills with the ssg. All of the fights have enemies on platforms 128 units or more above the player and the only weapon I had to deal with them is the last weapon I would choose to do so with. I mean in most of the rooms I just moved past the enemies on the platforms they can't follow me and dealing with them is just a pain in the ass. Also I didn't have enough ammo to deal with them because as I said only one weapon and I barely had enough ammo to deal with the other enemies. And it feels like you forgot to put a chaingun or rocket launcher somewhere because every room I played in had bullets and rockets in it. Maybe I went north instead of west at the beginning of the map and missed all the weapons or something but I really didn't want to go through 130 kills of brown rooms again to find out.

My run ended in this room:

another room with the same textures and a bunch of ammo I can't use once I ran out of shells and had multiple pain elementals and arch-viles to deal with I decided my run was finished.

Please keep in mind this is a positive review I liked the map and that's why I took the time to write all this. With just a little more work this map has some real potential so keep at it.

18 hours ago, ScrappyMcDoogerton said:

I agree with jerry so I went ahead and played the map.

 

I'll start with the positive. This map is competently made. I did not encounter any bugs or errors while playing. The fights were often challenging and fun and the map has a good progression to it.

 

The map also has a few things I would say still need some work. The visuals in this map are as bland as it gets. All the rooms just look like one shade of brown and if you're lucky maybe one other color makes a small appearance. A few examples:

 

The two wall textures shown here are the only two I saw in any room after 130+ kills. The aesthetics of this map go beyond simple and approach 0 effort. Texture work doesn't need to be crazy elaborate to be good it just needs to look like you actually thought about it. Take the room in the first pic for instance having the same brick texture on the walls is fine but the platforms coming out of the walls should not be the same. Like just put any other brick or wood texture there and the room will look 10x better. Spending just a few minutes doing a small amount of texture work on this map will greatly improve it.

 

Alright so now to address the real problem I had with this map. My entire playthrough of this map I only got the ssg. 130 kills with the ssg. All of the fights have enemies on platforms 128 units or more above the player and the only weapon I had to deal with them is the last weapon I would choose to do so with. I mean in most of the rooms I just moved past the enemies on the platforms they can't follow me and dealing with them is just a pain in the ass. Also I didn't have enough ammo to deal with them because as I said only one weapon and I barely had enough ammo to deal with the other enemies. And it feels like you forgot to put a chaingun or rocket launcher somewhere because every room I played in had bullets and rockets in it. Maybe I went north instead of west at the beginning of the map and missed all the weapons or something but I really didn't want to go through 130 kills of brown rooms again to find out.

 

My run ended in this room:

another room with the same textures and a bunch of ammo I can't use once I ran out of shells and had multiple pain elementals and arch-viles to deal with I decided my run was finished.

 

Please keep in mind this is a positive review I liked the map and that's why I took the time to write all this. With just a little more work this map has some real potential so keep at it.

Unfortunately, I found out I am allowed to only comment 3 times in one day, so I couldn't reach anyone sooner.

So, first, the SSG problem, I got your point, but it was part of the map "exploring" thing that you had to navigate through the various regions of the map to find each weapon placed on each room. The map is non-linear and quite large. I wanted to give the player that kind of feel "where do I want to go now?", go for powerups, secrets, or the exit?, go for easy fights, go for challenging ones? Rocket and Plasma can be found on the bottom level of the map. The BFG is located in the secret area, and an Invulnerability is accessed once you have the secret yellow key.

The map was meant to be "open world", relatively large and a little difficult and grindy to master, offering various minutes of gameplay, without boring fights - the map is action-packed throughout. As I stated, it did not have great aesthetics. And this is mostly due to me not having access to a whole lot of textures, I only have the vanilla textures, and that is not enough if I want to keep the map coherent and not put some random colorful spots that make no sense with the background. Although I would love to improve the aesthetics of my creations, I just don't have the resources just yet. As a side note, each of my maps follow a certain unique theme textures, so there is that, I could not repeat too much the textures I already used on other maps. And as for reference, this one was inspired on Gynoug (aka Wings of Wor) Stage 1, if you want to take a look at it.

Also, note there is a gameplay video walkthrough kind of thing I posted here so anyone can see for themselve how the map looks and works if they are unsure.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback :)

3 hours ago, Astro X said:

So, first, the SSG problem, I got your point, but it was part of the map "exploring" thing that you had to navigate through the various regions of the map to find each weapon placed on each room. The map is non-linear and quite large. I wanted to give the player that kind of feel "where do I want to go now?", go for powerups, secrets, or the exit?, go for easy fights, go for challenging ones? Rocket and Plasma can be found on the bottom level of the map. The BFG is located in the secret area, and an Invulnerability is accessed once you have the secret yellow key.

Yeah I figured I should have maybe chosen a different path to go down first. But I have to say in the video you posted you go past two open doors and a spider mastermind before you reach the door that has the weapons behind it. I feel like most players will probably go in one of the first two doors before heading to the area past the mastermind, but then again I don't play like most players do so maybe I'm wrong.

3 hours ago, Astro X said:

As I stated, it did not have great aesthetics. And this is mostly due to me not having access to a whole lot of textures, I only have the vanilla textures, and that is not enough if I want to keep the map coherent and not put some random colorful spots that make no sense with the background.

I gotta tell you this is a poor excuse. Many beautiful wads have been made with the D2 vanilla textures. Going Down, Scythe, Nova just to name a few. Again I'm not saying your visuals need to be on par with these wads, but come on you use the same wall, floor and ceiling texture for EVERY SURFACE in every room. Except for the bookcases.

I included an updated file for this map below :)

- Added various textures (nothing too crazy, but the map does not look all samey anymore);

- Added other difficulties, in which I change the location of the weapons and reduce the kill count, and also replace a few monsters.

I hope you have fun, and any feedback is much appreciated!

JDoom13.zip

Ok I played through it again and yeah this version is much better looking as I said before the map is fun to play through so don't make us wait too long to see more!