New Arrivals - a first wad.

[Aristaeus]

New Arrivals

Only tested on GZDoom

This needs the Doom 1 IWAD

This is a single map, replacing E1M1 of Doom 1 

Single player only

No difficulty settings implemented

This map wasn't built with jumping, crouching, or freelook in mind. Crouching and freelook are most likely fine, jumping probably isn't.

 

This was built using ReDoomEd. Many thanks to Josh Freeman, who I believe developed the port!

 

Since I was only starting out, this is a pretty darn small level (my fastest time knowing the layout/secrets is about 20 seconds...) that took about 5 days to make once I learned the editor and mostly takes heavy cues from E1 of Doom 1 (Hangar in particular). With a handful of exceptions, the assets used are limited to E1's. Similarly to Hangar/ Nuclear plant, this tries to make the most of only the very basic enemies. 

 

Its not a particularly difficult map, probably similar to E1's slightly more challenging levels I'd say?

 

I could probably go mad tinkering with it forever. I'm sure that I can think of at least a few ways I could improve on it a little, particularly in transitioning from one texture to another (+ at least a handful of textures that could probably do with realignment I haven't noticed) but at some point I need to just say its done and kick it out the door or It'll never be finished. Overall I'm fairly happy how it turned out? But I'd love some feedback. There are a few spots I'm slightly iffy on, mainly because I'm not sure If I went too far, or not far enough in trying to teach the player. 

 

In any case, I felt like I learned quite a bit making this so far. So that's nice

 

Now I'm just praying I haven't somehow horribly broken the entire thing at some point between last exiting the level and hitting save and/or I've haven't accidentally uploaded an unusable file...

 

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated <3

 

 

New_arrivals.zip

Edited January 21, 2020 by Aristaeus

[tamara mochaccina]

That's a pretty solid Hangar replacement. Could do with more small rooms and keys tho. Big, slaughter-like rooms are really easy to just run past, and keyhunting is an important part of what makes E1... Well, E1. Gorgeous design though, looking forward to more from you!

[Summer Deep]

Yes, it was quite fun to play this. Please note though that the player can get locked in after collecting the green armour. This only seemed to happen to me if I had previously entered the secret area at around 1:30 on this playthrough. Sorry for the jittery picture and temporarily blank screen near the start, courtesy of OBS screen recorder.

 

EDIT: Er, no, you can shoot it open. Sorry about that....

 

 

Edited January 21, 2020 by Summer Deep : spelling

[Summer Deep]

Well, anyways, here's a full playthrough. Not sure where the 10% of missing kills are.

 

 

[Aristaeus]

3 hours ago, Summer Deep said:

Well, anyways, here's a full playthrough. Not sure where the 10% of missing kills are.

 

Hmm. Thank you. Its very interesting watching someone else play and sometimes going straight where I was expecting but other times either beeline towards things I thought were a bit more hidden or not notice things I thought were a little more obvious!

Spoiler

 

The 'intended' route for a first play through is to end up in the green armour corridor first. I wanted to play with the shootable walls a bit, since they're not used that much in vanilla, so that bit was intended as a teaching moment. You're guaranteed to pick up a shotgun as you approach the button, shooting the possessed human shoots the wall behind him, then it immediately gives you the same Tekwall texture to shoot again. Then either on a second play through or about then you see/remember the same texture in an earlier part of the level. Maybe I need to rethink it a bit.

 

The other handful of kills are in the corridor just past the tekwall closet off the start room, in a loop that ends up back at the supercharge. You actually walked right by the route about 3:40 in the second video but didn't think to shoot the tekwall! It was nice to see you going straight through the other optional shootable walls on your second video though once it was obvious it was possible.

 

 

Thank you for playing and giving some feed back. <3

[Aristaeus]

6 hours ago, tam said:

That's a pretty solid Hangar replacement. Could do with more small rooms and keys tho. Big, slaughter-like rooms are really easy to just run past, and keyhunting is an important part of what makes E1... Well, E1. Gorgeous design though, looking forward to more from you!

 

For sure. Once I put something together a little larger that'll certainly be something I'll be thinking about. Thank you for the feedback/ kind words <3

[pcorf]

Looks good. Very old school 1994-like.

[DynamiteKaitorn]

Well, this is an interesting experiment! The map uses some rather quick moves to make the map feel like its moving by itself. Two doors close behind you, you turn around, "oh noes! trapped? Wait, there's an exit! but I shoot the wall?". Yeah, that hall way wasn't the cleanest transition. I did like the sudden light-up of the lamps near the exit door, did catch me off guard. Try working on the whole "dynamic map" tricks. May make for some really unique designs!

 

A few floors I need to mention:

The dev console mentions 3 unknown textures. I'm guessing you wanted to make a texture slot be invisible/textureless. If that's the case use " - ". Also, the window that shows an outside area seems to contain a few broken sectors. Lastly, NEVER use textures with invisible parts as walls/parts of a decoration without something behind it. For GZDooM it just renders a black void but other engines may just vomit out a tutti-frutti error or a HOM error.

 

 

Overall, a nice experimental wad with some really nice ideas. :)

[Aristaeus]

2 hours ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

Well, this is an interesting experiment! The map uses some rather quick moves to make the map feel like its moving by itself. Two doors close behind you, you turn around, "oh noes! trapped? Wait, there's an exit! but I shoot the wall?". Yeah, that hall way wasn't the cleanest transition. I did like the sudden light-up of the lamps near the exit door, did catch me off guard. Try working on the whole "dynamic map" tricks. May make for some really unique designs!

 

Thanks for playing!

 

Yeah the shootable walls are definitely what I was least sure about. I wanted to play with them a little more since they're so rarely used in vanilla, but its something that's very hard to teach the player without being very overt about it I think. So ideally you move towards the button over a shotgun on the ground, which guarantees you have ammo for the shotgun and not just the pistol, the button raises, you shoot the weak zombie with the shotgun and therefore the wall behind it, then it immediately shows you the same texture to reinforce it once you turn around. Then knowing that also lets you access the hidden stretch of the map. But it's definitely clumsy and something I'll need to think more on.

 

2 hours ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

The dev console mentions 3 unknown textures. I'm guessing you wanted to make a texture slot be invisible/textureless. If that's the case use " - ". Also, the window that shows an outside area seems to contain a few broken sectors. Lastly, NEVER use textures with invisible parts as walls/parts of a decoration without something behind it. For GZDooM it just renders a black void but other engines may just vomit out a tutti-frutti error or a HOM error.

Looking at the console, I can see exactly what I did.

Hitting z on ReDoomEd is the short cut for zoom and g is sector get/fill. All I've done is hit g/z before clicking off the line inspector window and accidentally set those as a texture for a lindef. Its something I've done before but normally caught the error. Similarly with the window. I didn't look out of it at an extreme angle, so I didn't catch that I hadn't textured a handful of lines that needed it. Silly mistakes that I should have caught in the final pass but mistakes still. I'll definitely bear the other things in mind for future projects.

2 hours ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

Overall, a nice experimental wad with some really nice ideas. :)

 

Thanks for playing and for the kind/helpful feedback :)

[PeceMan]

i liked it a lot! It was definitely aesthetically pleasing, if not a bit easy, but that is expected of e1m1.

 

Those shootable walls should probably be removed though...

[Aristaeus]

13 hours ago, PeceMan said:

i liked it a lot! It was definitely aesthetically pleasing, if not a bit easy, but that is expected of e1m1.

 

Those shootable walls should probably be removed though...

 

Thanks <3

 

Shootable walls are definitely iffy. I wasn't entirely sure about them anyway and the response has generally been that they don't really work. So back to the drawing board for them :)