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VanaheimRanger

Amazeing Facility (Bloodloss Sample Map)

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This is the first map I've made for Doom II I made back around February 2018, build time was roughly a month off and on.  It was originally planned as MAP02 for a project I was working on called Bloodloss.  Now, I have decided to work on it again and remove this map from the project and release it as sort of a demo for Bloodloss.  I was learning lot's of cool UDMF mapping tricks and basically trying to test them out in one map.  Huge thanks to @Nevander and @Gez and any other people who helped me in my Doom mapping adventures.

 

Project Info:

 

In Bloodloss "You are a vampire scientist working on a space station built to guard the entrance to the Blood Realm TM, the home of all vampires in the galaxy.  A portal from Hell opens up and the demons overrun the station and begin invading the Blood Realm TM, now it's up to you to go kick their sorry asses back to Hell, some motherfucker's are always trying to ice skate uphill..."

 

As a vampire, in the Blood Realm TM, you will have to rely on sources of blood for healing.  The only healing items are Blood Vials (recolored health bonuses +1hp.  I may decide to make them +2 in the future), the Bloodsphere (Recolored Soul Sphere, has the combined properties of the Soul Sphere and Berserk Pack, there will be at least one in every map), and healing blood pools that will regenerate +5hp per second as long as you stand in them, I want to place these strategically in each map so they aren't too overpowered, but i'm sure that will be a tricky thing to perfect.  And possibly Megaspheres, I haven't decided if they will be necessary yet.

 

The final project aims to be around 7-10 maps long, and I may recruit other mappers to help with maps in the future, depending on how big my ambitions for it get.

 

This single map is just a small sample of the kind of gameplay I wish to accomplish.

 

This map is a UAC Facility in the Bllod Realm TM "How did those assholes get into my realm, anyway?".  It's a relatively small map with 160 enemies, lots of hitscanners and imps with a few brutes here and there, there is a bit of a maze puzzle, as indicated by the title, but it shouldn't be too difficult for most novice Doom players to clear.  Have fun and let me know what you think.

 

DOWNLODE: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wydyv88scal208n/bloodloss_a1.pk3

 

GAME: DOOM II

MAP: MAP01

PORT: GZDoom (Tested on 3.4.x and 3.5.x)

Hardware rendering suggested for new lighting features.

Jump/Crouch/Freelook not needed but shouldn't break the map.

 

ACS Healing Pool script, Language and Decorate by @Nevander

A few textures from GothicTX

New sky from Mechadon's Box'o'Skies

Recolored sprites for Soulsphere(now called Bloodsphere, and doubles as a Berserk), Health bonus (Now called Blood Vial), and large armor (Now called Bloodshield)

 

 

New screens

Spoiler

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20181110054459_1.jpg

 

Edited by guitardz : New version and new screens

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Put few screenshots on your first post, so it will help to get more attention. Also, try make main information more visible - port, map slot, iwad and other things. Refer to this thread as guideline:

 

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9 minutes ago, Myst.Haruko said:

Put few screenshots on your first post, so it will help to get more attention. Also, try make main information more visible - port, map slot, iwad and other things. Refer to this thread as guideline:

Thanks, I made some edits :)

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I'll give you my feedback (but note that I'm not an excellent player/mapper)
The visual is good, I like the gzdoom lighting, good use of it, not too exaggerated.
The gameplay it's also quick and intense, with some changes it could become even unique to play.

 

Please note: I have not completed the level because my operating system is completing some nasty annoying updates. So mine are first impressions.

I'm following this thread because I like this map.

 

(A little advice: do not publish so many screenshots of the level, it ruins the surprise.)

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2 minutes ago, croma said:

I'll give you my feedback (but note that I'm not an excellent player/mapper)
The visual is good, I like the gzdoom lighting, good use of it, not too exaggerated.
The gameplay it's also quick and intense, with some changes it could become even unique to play.

 

Please note: I have not completed the level because my operating system is completing some nasty annoying updates. So mine are first impressions.

I'm following this thread because I like this map.

 

(A little advice: do not publish so many screenshots of the level, it ruins the surprise.)

Thank you :)  I am not well versed in how to properly balance a map yet, and this whole project is pretty much a practice in my mapping skills.  I am hoping by the time I finish it I'll be at least decent at mapping.  I'm glad the gameplay was enjoyable, I am planning to use harder enemies in later maps.

 

P.S. I'll try not to post so many screens in later maps.

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I can't play now sorry , but by looking the screens , I can say that the detailling looks pretty decent. However , the whole seems to be very flat. Maybe you should make more relief by adding stairs , lifts...

 

The map looks also really dark , a bit too much according to me but I think it's intentional.

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4 minutes ago, Roofi said:

I can't play now sorry , but by looking the screens , I can say that the detailling looks pretty decent. However , the whole seems to be very flat. Maybe you should make more relief by adding stairs , lifts...

 

The map looks also really dark , a bit too much according to me but I think it's intentional.

Thanks, I hope you do get time to check it out.  It isn't completely flat, there is a "basement" area, I didn't take any shots of the stairs her however.  Yes the darkness is intentional.  I wanted to try out some GZDoom lighting stuff, in the next map Nevander is gonna teach me how to do dynamic lighting, I'm looking forward to that.  I hope to also have a bit more verticality overall.

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Here's a video of my first demo attempt. Unfortunately, the audio seems to get progressively ahead of the video for some reason, so you probably want to watch without sound.

 

Welcome to mapping. This is a solid first effort. I like the healing pool idea. It creates a fresh dynamic of "I know I can always go back and heal, but I also know that any encounter could be dangerous because there won't be any health." It will be interesting to see how that plays out, whether it encourages too much fleeing/backtracking, etc. I did think the megasphere was a bit of a bailout, especially not even being secret.

 

My biggest issue with the combat was the use of barons and hell knights. The hell knight secret was kinda weak - it's two hell knights for a backpack and a chaingun, but there are lots of commandos, and ammo is never really an issue, since almost every enemy gives you 5 bullets or 4 shells. I didn't find a plasma gun or rocket launcher either. The barons of hell were even worse. Too much space and not enough enemies to make them a threat, especially since the second one didn't even see me right away. So as you can see, I just pump ~30 shells into them. The hell knights in the maze part was a much better use of meatier enemies. Going down corridors and shooting humans was fun. You made it not impossibly easy by having a lot of turns, darkness, and nondeaf monsters. You did, however, have some block sound lines that made parts too easy.

 

I wasn't sure if the one maze was intentionally hidden on the map or not.

 

I think I got the blue key in a secret, yet that was the only one I needed to finish. I never found red, and I thought the end was rather abrupt, so you may want to revisit the overall flow of the map. 

 

The map looked decent, especially for a first map. You seem consciously to avoid rectangles simply by altering their corners. Sometimes it takes more than that, but it wasn't bad here. I would advise you to spend more time on flow/layout and combat than on aesthetic detailing, because the latter will come more organically as you get better at the editor, whereas the former are more about what's in your head.

 

Keep at it and good luck.

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@HAK3180 Tagging because quote editing is giving me hell on mobile. 

 

I do want to keep the megasphere, but making it secret is probably a good idea.

 

I was trying to emulate a bit of old school Memento Mori with the Baron/HK in tight corridors gameplay, I'm not sure if I did it well or not, I've heard gameplay balancing is the hardest part of mapping, lol.

 

Yes the maze is intentionally hidden on the map, and there are a couple of issues with that, for example the end room is partially visible on the map when you haven't even seen into it, still don't know what causes that.

 

The secret path to the blue key is supposed to be a "super secret" area skip to bypass the entire red area, I wasn't sure how easy or difficult it would be for people to find, I'll take suggestions on how to hide it better.

 

The placed weapons, chaingun and SSG are both hidden, I didn't want to place anything more powerful because I intend the episode to be played continuous, and it's only MAP02, lol.  The chaingun was placed before I decided to use chaingunguy to beef up the difficulty, I'm not sure how to make the reward better, perhaps I should place the Megasphere here instead?  (Or even just make it a soul sphere and put a super armor in the maze, hmm.  The SSG room was the last thing I added because I was having trouble with the Archie in the end room, so you actually have to come face to face with the Archie in order to open the room.  This kind of throws off my next map where you were supposed to get the SSG, now I feel like I need to change the MAP03 reward...but people might not find it in MAP02?

 

The sound blocking lines were to try and keep you from being completely flooded by non-ambush enemies as soon as you enter an area.  I wasn't sure what else to do there.  The ones by the blue key line portals are there to stop some portal weirdness, the way enemies act around portals was one of the most annoying things I ran into in testing because they can't see through them and will start doing their random search as soon as you walk through it.  I think in the future I'll just avoid putting enemies in rooms with portals at all.

 

I didn't place much ammo in the map because I wanted to use the human enemies like mobile ammo crates, lol, may have overdone it a bit.

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2 hours ago, guitardz said:

The placed weapons, chaingun and SSG are both hidden, I didn't want to place anything more powerful because I intend the episode to be played continuous, and it's only MAP02, lol.  The chaingun was placed before I decided to use chaingunguy to beef up the difficulty, I'm not sure how to make the reward better, perhaps I should place the Megasphere here instead?  (Or even just make it a soul sphere and put a super armor in the maze, hmm.  The SSG room was the last thing I added because I was having trouble with the Archie in the end room, so you actually have to come face to face with the Archie in order to open the room.  This kind of throws off my next map where you were supposed to get the SSG, now I feel like I need to change the MAP03 reward...but people might not find it in MAP02.

In Doom, you could get the plasma gun in E2M1, well before every other weapon except the shotgun, and long before you could find it in the non-secret flow of play. The E2M1 plasma gun was in a secret.

 

I would suggest not worrying if the players don't find the SSG in Map02 and have to wait until Map03. Even if they have it in Map02, I don't think that will make them less happy to get it in Map03 or spoil the difficulty of Map03. If you're concerned about the Archvile being too difficult without the SSG, just take the Archvile out and replace it with either a Revenant or a Mancubus.

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41 minutes ago, Pegleg said:

In Doom, you could get the plasma gun in E2M1, well before every other weapon except the shotgun, and long before you could find it in the non-secret flow of play. The E2M1 plasma gun was in a secret.

 

I would suggest not worrying if the players don't find the SSG in Map02 and have to wait until Map03. Even if they have it in Map02, I don't think that will make them less happy to get it in Map03 or spoil the difficulty of Map03. If you're concerned about the Archvile being too difficult without the SSG, just take the Archvile out and replace it with either a Revenant or a Mancubus.

I think I'll keep the Archie, and keep the SSG in both MAP02 and 03, but I definitely need to change the chaingun, it doesn't feel rewarding at all when there's so many enemies who drop them.

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When thinking about balance in continuous play (or a long single map, for that matter), people focus too much on the weapon pickups. BFG availability is the only true 'point of no return' -- after the player gets it, the plasma rifle will become obsolete outside of rare scenarios or contrivances. SSG availability has a similar effect on the single shotgun when the chaingun is available to play the role of a sniper weapon. But the SSG is best given somewhat early, unless the gameplay has a core identity that really suits a SSG gap.

 

It's ammo availability that is truly the best at shaping progression. For all weapons, there are three general tiers of ammo availability: 'scarcity', 'moderation' (enough or even slightly too much, but not so many that you can spam endlessly and carelessly), and 'abundance' (for all practical purposes, limitless). Providing the rocket launcher or plasma rifle on the first map won't kill progression if you monitor ammo well. For example: 01-02 can provide the RL but not so many rockets, 03 can be the first map where the RL is used frequently, and 05 and subsequent maps can be designed either for RL spam or to be impervious to it. The PR might follow a similar trajectory but on maps 02 -> 04 -> 06 instead. This is what sets like Counterattack (where most maps are large enough to have a few full maps' worth of content anyway) really understand with their quirky starting combinations: pistol and rocket launcher in the first map, berserk and plasma rifle in the third map. 

 

Other items of note are the berserk and the backpack. The berserk is a useful one. Structuring a map around it (preferably early on when carryovers don't trivialize the monster composition best suited to it) allows you to compress the regular progression more, and it lasts only one map so it can show up multiple times as a reward throughout the course of an episode. (You can mod the berserk to not provide health.) Backpack availability is dangerous; an extreme abundance of bullets and shells can bleed into one for rockets and cells too. When designing for continuous play, it's best as a later game convenience for when you want the player to be carrying lots of ammo anyway. Don't use it as a throwaway secret early on, imo. Early, it could be worth a dedicated high-effort sidequest. 

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52 minutes ago, rdwpa said:

When thinking about balance in continuous play (or a long single map, for that matter), people focus too much on the weapon pickups. BFG availability is the only true 'point of no return' -- after the player gets it, the plasma rifle will become obsolete outside of rare scenarios or contrivances. SSG availability has a similar effect on the single shotgun when the chaingun is available to play the role of a sniper weapon. But the SSG is best given somewhat early, unless the gameplay has a core identity that really suits a SSG gap.

 

It's ammo availability that is truly the best at shaping progression. For all weapons, there are three general tiers of ammo availability: 'scarcity', 'moderation' (enough or even slightly too much, but not so many that you can spam endlessly and carelessly), and 'abundance' (for all practical purposes, limitless). Providing the rocket launcher or plasma rifle on the first map won't kill progression if you monitor ammo well. For example: 01-02 can provide the RL but not so many rockets, 03 can be the first map where the RL is used frequently, and 05 and subsequent maps can be designed either for RL spam or to be impervious to it. The PR might follow a similar trajectory but on maps 02 -> 04 -> 06 instead. This is what sets like Counterattack (where most maps are large enough to have a few full maps' worth of content anyway) really understand with their quirky starting combinations: pistol and rocket launcher in the first map, berserk and plasma rifle in the third map. 

 

Other items of note are the berserk and the backpack. The berserk is a useful one. Structuring a map around it (preferably early on when carryovers don't trivialize the monster composition best suited to it) allows you to compress the regular progression more, and it lasts only one map so it can show up multiple times as a reward throughout the course of an episode. (You can mod the berserk to not provide health.) Backpack availability is dangerous; an extreme abundance of bullets and shells can bleed into one for rockets and cells too. When designing for continuous play, it's best as a later game convenience for when you want the player to be carrying lots of ammo anyway. Don't use it as a throwaway secret early on, imo. Early, it could be worth a dedicated high-effort sidequest. 

Thanks for these tips, I'm definitely going to ramp down the ammo carrying enemies later in the set to try and choke the ammo count.  I didn't think about the backpack too much but your right, should probably ditch it in MAP02, In your opinion, in a 7 or 8 map set, would MAP03 be a decent place for a "hey I can see a backpack over there but how the hell do I get to it?" type of elaborate sidequest and then maybe add a regular progression backpack around MAP05 (or 06 if it ends up being 8 maps overall)?

 

As for berserk packs, I hadn't taken them into account for my "health items rule" in this yet, not sure if I should consider them "normal health items" or not, I may look into modding them not to recover health as you said...and perhaps is a different sprite for them as well.  Something more shpere-like.

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7 hours ago, guitardz said:

Thanks for these tips, I'm definitely going to ramp down the ammo carrying enemies later in the set to try and choke the ammo count.  I didn't think about the backpack too much but your right, should probably ditch it in MAP02, In your opinion, in a 7 or 8 map set, would MAP03 be a decent place for a "hey I can see a backpack over there but how the hell do I get to it?" type of elaborate sidequest and then maybe add a regular progression backpack around MAP05 (or 06 if it ends up being 8 maps overall)?

 

Sounds good. The backpack is a pickup that signifies 'I want the player to have lots of an ammo type at this stage, without having to worry as much about backtracking for ammo, or encountering lots of shell boxes or bulk cells while at just a bit under the max non-backpack capacity.' 

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I've uploaded the newest version and updated the OP with the link.  The new version has a resource wad packaged with it, load both files in GZDoom.

 

I've removed the chaingun secret and the megasphere.  I've placed a new item called the Bloodsphere (Red version of the soul sphere with the power of the berserk pack added to it) where the chaingun was, and a Bloodshield (just a red megaarmor) where the Megasphere was.  I've also taken a few other suggestions from this post and realigned a couple of bad textures.

Edited by guitardz

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New Version Uploaded, entire first post revised.  This is now a demo release and not a "Hey give me feedback on my first map" kind of post.  Hope all enjoy :)

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