Chief Smokey Posted April 22, 2020 (edited) Everglade is a single map set on a serene island drenched in a tropical sunset. A task force of Hell has occupied an ancient temple and Doomguy has been sent in to liberate the island from their fiendish presence. The map was originally made in 2017, released in April 2020 and now reborn in January 2021. The map is to be played in GZDoom, preferably with dynamic lighting enabled. Mouselook and jumping have been enabled and are encouraged for the sake of your survival. It is to be run with the Doom II iwad. Download: https://www.mediafire.com/file/f85wxcnelr17cf5/EG_Redux.zip/file Related:https://discord.gg/S8jaGfw https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=68330&p=1148202#p1148202 Edited January 9, 2021 by Chief Smokey 17 Share this post Link to post
Paul814 Posted April 22, 2020 I will check this out after work. The screenshots look great. 0 Share this post Link to post
grrfield Posted April 22, 2020 I started this with Zandronum. I survived the first zombiemen ambush. Got further in the caves. I was not able to pick up the RL on the right hand side of the door. Next I ran without RL into the wide open, unleashing everything that was there. I returned to try another pickup of the RL. It did not work, but worse, the door closed and I could not get it back open..... pity 0 Share this post Link to post
RonnieJamesDiner Posted April 22, 2020 For the most part, I really enjoyed this. The aesthetics are beautiful, down to the huge mountains filling up the skyline, and the textures really helped sell the environment (love the purple-ish water). The majority of the combat was fun and offered up a certain challenge, here and there; I particularly enjoyed the interior areas throughout the middle of the map. Sometimes it felt a little too reliant on hordes of Pinky's (or beefier mobs) that needed to be chewed through without actually being a threat, but there's enough ammo to deal with it, at least. To that end, I really enjoyed the pacing of the map overall, especially when it came to ammo. Not sure how I feel about the final battle in the huge open canyon. The centre temple looked awesome, but, as soon as I realized I could simply run up its steps and exit the map, I did. Given the sheer amount of PE's and lost souls, I wasn't very keen on trying to actually beat that fight. I think you could do something fun with that setup, but it might need a little tweaking. Otherwise, an enjoyable experience. I'd love to see more maps with this aesthetic, for sure! On the topic of bugs/glitches, this door (spoiler tag) seemed to only open once (on both sides). Ended up having to noclip through it. Spoiler 1 Share this post Link to post
Chief Smokey Posted April 22, 2020 22 minutes ago, RonnieJamesDiner said: For the most part, I really enjoyed this. The aesthetics are beautiful, down to the huge mountains filling up the skyline, and the textures really helped sell the environment (love the purple-ish water). The majority of the combat was fun and offered up a certain challenge, here and there; I particularly enjoyed the interior areas throughout the middle of the map. Sometimes it felt a little too reliant on hordes of Pinky's (or beefier mobs) that needed to be chewed through without actually being a threat, but there's enough ammo to deal with it, at least. To that end, I really enjoyed the pacing of the map overall, especially when it came to ammo. Not sure how I feel about the final battle in the huge open canyon. The centre temple looked awesome, but, as soon as I realized I could simply run up its steps and exit the map, I did. Given the sheer amount of PE's and lost souls, I wasn't very keen on trying to actually beat that fight. I think you could do something fun with that setup, but it might need a little tweaking. Otherwise, an enjoyable experience. I'd love to see more maps with this aesthetic, for sure! On the topic of bugs/glitches, this door (spoiler tag) seemed to only open once (on both sides). Ended up having to noclip through it. Hide contents I'm glad you enjoyed it. Forgetting to set doors to open more than once is a common mistake I make so it's no surprise at least there was one slipup. Its been patched now. Its interesting that people seem to like the mountains when to me they look like stacks of pancakes. I could have used vertex slopes but I wanted to keep things mainly vanilla in terms of layout and save the GZDoom stuff for just visual flair. As for the final battle being a little underwhelming in terms of gameplay, I think that stems from my original half-serious approach to making the map years ago when I was more interested in trying to make it as absurd as possible rather than properly planning things. At the time this was my most ambitious project yet and in retrospect it's clearly very excessive. I think I expected the real challenge of the map to be the framerate rather than the hordes. It certainly was on my old PC. I guess the mad sprint from the cliffs to the temple while avoiding projectiles could be considered the main challenge of that area. I don't know if the ammo supply in the lake is enough to wipe out everything although I think it might be. Infighting would probably help a lot. The most ridiculous thing is that in the OG 2017 version the temple was just there for the blue skull key and you had to backtrack through the whole map to get to the exit. Again, another relic from the "how stupid can I make this" train of thought. 0 Share this post Link to post
General Rainbow Bacon Posted April 22, 2020 (edited) The shots look great and I glanced around quickly and saw some really good stuff. But now that you said this: 20 minutes ago, Chief Smokey said: stacks of pancakes. You need to change the name of this to Mt. Pancake. I can't unsee it now. E: Probably Mt. Banana Nut Pancake would be best. 1 Share this post Link to post
Chief Smokey Posted April 22, 2020 4 minutes ago, General Rainbow Bacon said: The shots look great and I glanced around quickly and saw some really good stuff. But now that you said this: You need to change the name of this to Mt. Pancake. I can't unsee it now. E: Probably Mt. Banana Nut Pancake would be best. Maybe I should replace the water textures with golden syrup... 0 Share this post Link to post
Arbys550 Posted April 22, 2020 (edited) Haven't played it yet but just letting you know it's UDMF format, so PrBoom won't run it. I would recommend saying this in the OP as you say it should work with most modern source ports. People might think this includes PrBoom. Edit: Just played the map. I thought it was pretty fun for the most part. The strength I think was definitely the layout. There were multiple routes to take, which I liked. Also the visuals were pretty good and stuck to a pretty distinct theme. I thought the gameplay was pretty good, however overall I think there was too much meat in the beginning. I think adding more rockets in the beginning would make it a bit less time consuming to clean up all the hell knights and barons in that first outdoor area. There were a lot of areas that I think lacked any kind of danger. A lot of the bigger, more open areas consisted of just running around until enemies infought each other into oblivion. Nothing really threatened my space in this map aside from the east wing of the indoor part, which I think was the best part of the map. There was a part just after the yellow door I think where all you have to do is stand behind the cage and hold left click until all the enemies were dead, as it was just melee monsters. There's also a serious door camping issue at the west red door. You just have to sit back and wait for 8 or 10 barons to come through and SSG them to oblivion. As for the last fight, I think there are too many pain elementals. The thousands of lost souls are really just a hassle and add nothing to the fight in my opinion. I also think something could be done to prevent this part from becoming an all out circle strafe festival. Maybe adding a couple archviles on pillars would make for some kind of goal to be doing while the other monsters are dying. IDK, it's your map. Overall I had fun! Also cool skybox. Edited April 22, 2020 by Arbys550 0 Share this post Link to post
Chief Smokey Posted April 23, 2020 I've considered the feedback thus far and have promptly reworked some stuff. For starters the canyon has less barons (infact the whole map has less barons) and more rockets, secondly the blue skullkey plays a role, thirdly I've cut down on the amount of pain elementals and pinkies while adding some more archviles (I was hesitant to add them in early on since long range archvile combat is pure misery) and lastly the final battle has been reworked to involve the player needing to hit some switches around the arena to access the exit. Hopefully this makes the gameplay a bit more smooth and balanced. Slaughtermaps are by definition based on stupidly large walls of demon meat coming your way but there still needs to be some sense to things and I'd like to avoid spiraling into unfocused excess. I'll likely be making more minor patches in the coming days anyway since these things never turn out perfect on the first try. I'm glad people have liked it so far considering it was a half-throwaway map from a bygone era that received no major upgrades outside of some fancy graphics. 1 Share this post Link to post
DynamiteKaitorn Posted April 23, 2020 Okay. I understand it's a slaughter map so brutally high difficulty is to be expected... but I didn't think it meant so high that it's impossible to even START the map. One major flaw I located is well... you have hundreds of enemies firing at you within the first second of the map. I've located a BFG9000 and invulnerability sphere but getting to them is nigh impossible just due to the thousands of projectiles flying towards you and how tall the lift is. Maybe introduce some way for the player to survive longer than 10 seconds would at least help with beginning the map. (And this was on HMP, not UV). 0 Share this post Link to post
Chief Smokey Posted January 6, 2021 (edited) So I decided to give Everglade the redux treatment, with a big overhaul in gameplay and upgrades to the visuals. No more stupid final area either. Also depending on feedback I may split it into two maps considering its size. Download it here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/f85wxcnelr17cf5/EG_Redux.zip/file Edited January 9, 2021 by Chief Smokey 3 Share this post Link to post
