Infraworld - The Hatehammer

[ebartleby]

This is a must-play and one of the best WADs ever made. You mention it has gone through a lot of compromises. I can't tell how much you've had to sacrifice while trying to make it all fit, but the end result is nothing short of spectacular. Though I will say I got lost at a couple points, once I found my way it all made sense. I think it's safe to say that for most players, it's going to be hard to tell where a particular area ends or begins since it all blends so well together.

 

There are more qualified people than me to talk about the gameplay side of the map, overall I thought it was hard but mostly fair. It's probably beatable first-try for someone better than I am.

 

That lava lake is beautiful. The compound above it could be straight from a metal album cover. Most of all, I'll remember the Hatehammer itself. I wasn't sure what it was from below, but once I saw from higher up that it was a giant fucking hammer, that hovered, and even had a chain attached to the pommel...one of the coolest experiences I've had in Doom. Top-notch music, too. It had to be pretty good to not get tiring since it took me a couple hours to run through.

 

I will remember this map for a long time, and go: ''Fuck yeah, Hatehammer'' every time I read about it.

 

 

[StormCatcher.77]

@Aurelius I tested this map into PrBoom Plus 2.5.1.3 and haven't any problems... Then I was try it in Eternity 4.0.0 and catch a fatal crash in a middle of the map :3. I think it's not nodebuilder problem, something else, because all looks and work properly, like in Boom. Into G\ZDoom it's all fine. I know about ZokumBSP but same, still wasn't trying it.

 

Doubts can be difficult to overcome, but I feel that it was not in vain. In the sense that I was able to overcome some creative barriers... That i can't overcome it's a quicksand of procrastination, where I slowly drown after finishing few big maps.

 

@ebartleby I'm so glad to know that! Metal album cover? Its really strongly said. Thanks!
I also doubted about the music, but my MIDI collection is not big and I chose what was at hand. But so far no one has complained ... It seems I choose that track right. An interesting detail: people saw a crane in this hammer. :D They saw the chain and thought it was a crane hoist. Indeed, there are similarities ... and new idea for pseudo-3D stuff!

[fabian]

16 hours ago, Aurelius said:

I haven't tried ZDBSP, but I had the impression that it was not supported by all source ports - in this case I mean ports like Crispy for limit-removing or PrBoom+ and Eternity for Boom-compatible maps

 

Crispy Doom is able to copy with any type of nodes, including DeepBSP and compressed or uncompressed ZDBSP nodes.

[Firedust]

Hey, man! Apologies for the bump.

 

I've played through your map - the level geometry is stunning here! You certainly have an eye for detailing sectors.

 

However, the gameplay felt a bit repetitive. It often occurred to me that you teleported in similar groups of monsters (after you get to the green "hub" area) - some lost souls, imps, cacos, chaingunners and a couple revs. It was a tad disheartening to know what awaited you in the traps because it was the same mons over and over again.

 

I've found only half of the secrets, by the way, so I'm hoping someone is going to do a UV-max playthrough of this to see how to get the rest. I'm not good at that, unfortunately. Missed five mons in the end and I'm guessing they were part of one of the secrets.

 

Also, the player can trap themselves if they go through the teleporter that leads to the structure on the other side of the lava lake after getting the red key, because there's a pillar that's blocking the path to get to the other teleporter - and if you jump into the lava then you'll be teleported back, meaning you're stuck on that island on your lonesome (or not) forever. A cruel fate indeed.

[StormCatcher.77]

Thanks for the feedback! c:

I never managed to make the gameplay fun, so I tried to make it at least not annoying. In addition, it is difficult to predict where player will go first, and I arranged the opponents so that the difficulty was without sudden changes.

This bug ... I was sure that everything was fixed in the last update. This is something mystic... In the near future I’ll check everything and in addition I will publish that  map on \idgames.

[Aurelius]

38 minutes ago, StormCatcher.77 said:

I never managed to make the gameplay fun, so I tried to make it at least not annoying. In addition, it is difficult to predict where player will go first, and I arranged the opponents so that the difficulty was without sudden changes.

 

I felt the gameplay was a lot of fun. But I'm probably a bit biased that way since I look at big maps like this as and adventure of sorts, exploring this beautifully created world, and the detail of the surroundings are what keep me interested. Doesn't mean you can't have both, but I'm such a visual person that aesthetics and atmosphere go a long way. Non-linearity is always a difficult thing to pull off, but I still do think that Hatehammer did it in a very good manner, and it makes the fights that were more planned and organized stand out better when there's some regular fodder in between.

 

Not to mention the sexy conveyor stuff.

[TravyB]

If only I could be so grossly incandescent 

[Demon of the Well]

Hello, I almost certainly should have mentioned this before, but kept forgetting. There is another point of game-ending map dysfunction resulting from a "ZDoomism" still present in the map in the current version if played in target port/settings (prB+ -cl9). In the roughly U-shaped lava pit surrounding the plasma rifle gazebo in the southwestern part of the map, if the player falls or jumps down in there on purpose (i.e. in pursuit of the nearby secret button or such) they become stuck/unable to get out because the lift leading out of it is untagged or not tagged correctly and thus cannot be activated outside of ZDoom-family ports.

 

(this is the area in question)

 

 

(this is the offending lift)

 

This issue actually ended my FDA attempt back when I was first playing this, though I found the map enjoyable enough not to resent replaying it again later. :) Some commentary/criticism:

 

For a map that is basically composed of a large number of disparate scraps or one-off construction experiments all stitched together, I think that you did an excellent job of creating a sense of environmental/aesthetic cohesion as concerns the overall presentation -- while you can still see the patchwork nature of the design if you look at the 'meta' of various areas, overall the level reads quite naturally as a single location, with organic and mostly believable connections and a really admirable sense of 3D richness in the design without actually leaning on 3D floors or portals or the like.

 

The environment being enjoyable to travel and experience carries a lot of the action well enough, though my main criticisms do all pertain to gameplay. Overall I feel like you overcompensated for the possibilities of the level's non-linearity in the thing balance, trying to make sure that no route is markedly more or less harsh/tenable than any other. While I personally often enjoy it when some routes in big non-linear maps are markedly more harsh/perilous than others (at least without map knowledge), I would consider this a valid artistic choice nonetheless, but I think you added one layer of safety insurance too many (on skill 4 anyway), to the point that it undercuts some of the map's potential excitement and has the effect of homogenizing different battles just by sheer virtue of how powerful/overarmed the player is likely to be while experiencing 75% of them, no matter what route they take.

 

Basically you've got really generous ammo/item/weapon placement all over the map, AND very similar levels of monster density throughout, AND mostly similarly restrained battle/trap placement which almost all seem to worry "but what if the player comes here first?" (the 'blood pits' room is the lone bizarre outlier, being a really pronounced and exciting(!) danger spike), even in the deeper reaches of the map where this is very unlikely, if not more or less impossible. All of these 'err on the side of safety/accessibility' decisions together combine to make a lot of the action throughout feel similar even while the traps/terrain vary. I feel like you might've achieved a similarly 'smooth/even' balance by keeping the generous item placement but offsetting it with more violent battles players are most likely to encounter later in the map. Alternatively, by having more of a tight hunt-for-resources style of thing placement throughout, or even just in stages (i.e. in the parts of the map most likely to be visited earlier), additional wrinkles would likely have naturally emerged in many of the existing encounters; there's no shortage of different terrain types and different methods of framing/staging in the fights, it's just that as is, this tends not to be very assertive in the moment-to-moment experience since most can be simply steamrolled without much thought given the luxurious thing placement. I also felt that the final parts of the map having no significant spike in intensity or even sheer spectacle vs. the earlier/intermediate parts undercut the overall sense of adventure to some degree, and it was in this that I felt the map's origin as a collection of separate/unrelated fragments was most noticeable.

 

If all that sounds terribly grumpy/curmudgeonly, well, don't let it get you down. I may not personally agree with the design goal to make everything very accessible as priority one, but there are certainly those who will appreciate it, and even most of my criticism is a sort of aggregate of very small balance decisions I would consider 'less than ideal' rather than actually 'bad/wrong', and in this map's case may be as simple a question as 'what's a good skill 3 balance?' vs. 'what's a good skill 4 balance?'. Each new map I play by you is better than the last as regards gameplay, so the future looks bright. :)

 

[StormCatcher.77]

@Demon of the Well

I'm sorry I took so long to answer. I just forgot about Infra...

I am very grateful for your feedback and now already working on all accumulated corrections.
Maybe today Infraword will be published on /idgames.

[adamadam]

Played through this level and thought it was absolutely incredible!  Well done.  For as gigantic it was, I never got tired of exploring the different areas, and especially liked the key system, I've never seen that before in Doom.

 

 

Throw out couple small items if you're wrapping it up for final release, I had troubles with the teleporter in & out of the final area.  GZDoom latest version.  The pentagram teleporter you can walk across the pentagram in one direction and you don't teleport, only when walking in the opposite direction do you teleport, that caused me a lot of confusion not realizing that's where I needed to go.  Then teleporting back after getting the red key I think wasn't right, I was brought back near that pentagram, but was I supposed to have teleported to the raised platform outside with the structure resembling where the red-key was held?  I was very confused on that too.

 

Otherwise, absolutely loved the level, can't praise it enough!

[StormCatcher.77]

@adamadam, thank you for kind words! I'm glad you liked it. But the news about teleport worried me again. I, alas, did not test the map on GZDoom last time. Only in PrBoom, and everything worked as intended. The player teleported by "silent teleport" to an area with similar geometry in the center of the map. Player should be teleported to the pentagram only when it revisits the Northern part of the map.
 

It looks like I'm going to have to radically redo this place so that everything work properly at all ports.

[eqagunn]

On 7/8/2019 at 8:40 AM, StormCatcher.77 said:

The map is very long (about one and a half hours)

I thought Lost Civilization MAP20 was long, but this one was longer. :D

 

On 7/14/2019 at 4:16 PM, StormCatcher.77 said:

I'm want to notice again that most of visual glitches visible only in GL-renders and Softpoly. You get best picture in software :)

Played in latest GZDoom with OpenGL and these were the ones I encountered. Very negligeable considering the size of the map.