Technicolor Antichrist Box [FINAL- now on /idgames!]

[Major Arlene]

(cheers to @Dragonflyfor making this beautiful title screen)

 

Ladies and gents, after a lot of blood, sweat, and linedefs, I present to you Technicolor Antichrist Box.

 

I started this map as part of the 2019 NaNoWADMo challenge and didn't think I was ever going to pick it back up again. However, as COVID swept the globe and we became quarantined I finally decided to play around with this map again just to see what would happen. It's been an absolute joy to work on- no limits, no rules. Just void-style aesthetics with monsters aplenty to keep you moving.

Warning: This is a slaughter style map so if you're not used to that sort of thing I'd recommend playing on Hey Not Too Rough or Hurt Me Plenty.

Screenshot album: https://imgur.com/a/fWBS4Y9

 

THE NITTY GRITTY TECHNICAL STUFF:
 

The file: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/s-u/technicolor

 

Map: MAP01

Source Port: This map has been tested in GZDoom 4.2.0, and has been played by testers on version 4.1.1 as well. I would not recommend going to any versions earlier than 4.1.1 though, I have not tested it and therefore cannot confirm it would be able to run. If you are able to run it on earlier versions without issue please let me know. Supercharge, which is bundled with this file, also is tested in GZDoom 4.0 but cannot be confirmed to run on earlier versions.

This map also makes heavy use of graphical and visual effects so it may lag a little in some spots on older machines. I've done my best to mitigate but due to the map's structure it's still a little janky on frame rate in some places.

CREDITS:

This map would not have been made possible without a LOT of help and support from the community.

PLAYTESTERS: @Bridgeburner56, @Liberation , Dragonfly, @Jimmy, @wolfmcbeard, @SiMpLeToNiUm, @Guardsoul, Puzzlewell, @Insane_Gazebo, @reflex17, @NoReason , and@CyanoBlugron (if I missed anyone I'm sorry!)

MUSIC:
Title and Intermission: The Next Sunset by Teknoaxe
Map: "Kontayjen" by @PRIMEVAL (bespoke)

Supercharge mod by @Tango : this mod has been an absolute joy to map with so thank you so much for making it available for us!

TEXTURES:
Zoontex by Jimmy, OTEX by @ukiro, GothicTX, ArchTex, AATex, and some recolors done by myself.
This map also uses a cyan palette that was linked to me by @antares031 and made bringing this map's visuals to life so much easier- thank you!

OTHER CREDITS:
@HexaDoken for their help with some graphics

The Hellforge discord community and my Twitch community for being a wonderful set of people to vent to, share ideas, and generally just being awesome.

Huge special thanks to Bridgeburner56- he's helped me in so many, many ways- gameplay and visual refinements, how to make a proper pentagram, testing a ton, and being a generally amazing human- he's been an amazing mentor and I would not be where I am today without him.

I really hope you all enjoy it and please let me know if there's any bugs or other things you happen to find!

CHANGELOG:
-missed some items floating in the exit area, now fixed.
-5.31.20 fixed an error with line portal heights, fixed a softlock and a node-builder error, got rid of the unnecessary Ultra-Randomized difficulty.
-6.2.20 fixed some other small blockline and softlock issues, added a startup graphic, cleared up some pk3 errors due to wrong brightmap pathing.
-6.5.20 removed two extraneous monster closets, fixed an issue with a key going into the ground. currently now RC1.
-6.14.20 officially on /idgames archive, file link updated

Edited June 14, 2020 by Major Arlene : added image album, hotfixes

[dac]

Still gonna play this right away, but I think you forgot the screenshots :p

[Major Arlene]

1 minute ago, dac said:

Still gonna play this right away, but I think you forgot the screenshots :p

Good point! imgur album to come :D

[Terminus]

Congrats on the release! I'm looking forward to playing this beast, watching your streams on making it has been a delight :D

[Fonze]

Nicely done Arlene, got to see a bit of this played on DF's stream the other day and it looks amazing!

[RonnieJamesDiner]

Congrats on the release, Arlene! I've enjoyed watching this come together via your stream and screenshots on discord -- the end result looks absolutely stunning. Looking forward to playing through this.

[Turin Turambar]

Ultra-randomized difficulty?

[Major Arlene]

2 minutes ago, Turin Turambar said:

Ultra-randomized difficulty?

That is unique to Supercharge, I've not tested how it works with this map but feel free to try it out.

[arnaldocsf]

This is it. 

I'm in love. 

[Turin Turambar]

36 minutes ago, Major Arlene said:

That is unique to Supercharge, I've not tested how it works with this map but feel free to try it out.

I found the relevant part:

 

NOTE All monsters below marked with (NEW) will only show up in game when placed specifically by a mapper. If you are using Supercharge as a gameplay mod (ie to play with Scythe), none of the (NEW) monsters will be present in game unless playing on the new Ultra-Randomized difficulty setting. 

 

So it's worthless here, it's an option to force the supercharge enemies in wads where the new enemies haven't been placed by hand (because the wad wasn't done with the mod).

[seed]

Added to my list, this looks so f*cking excellent. Dang.

[Tango]

yeah, Ultra Randomized randomly replaces hell knights with pyro demons,  revs rarely with diabs, pain elements with tortured souls, maybe some other things I forget.  you can certainly remove that difficulty if you so choose Arlene, I really put that in there for when you use Supercharge on wads not designed for it.

 

in any case, map looks awesome, can't wait to give it a whirl :D

 

edit: screenshots embedded in a spoiler rather than an external link to imgur would be sweet though

Edited May 30, 2020 by Tango

[ReaperAA]

Congrats on the release. This looks awesome and I can't wait to try it out.

[Major Arlene]

14 minutes ago, Tango said:

yeah, Ultra Randomized randomly replaces hell knights with pyro demons,  revs rarely with diabs, pain elements with tortured souls, maybe some other things I forget.  you can certainly remove that difficulty if you so choose Arlene, I really put that in there for when you use Supercharge on wads not designed for it.

 

in any case, map looks awesome, can't wait to give it a whirl :D

 

edit: screenshots embedded in a spoiler rather than an external link to imgur would be sweet though

aye, may go ahead and remove that in the next version, thanks for the explanation!
I'm unfortunately out of room on my file attachment allotment here so had to do an external link instead :/

[Tango]

39 minutes ago, Major Arlene said:

I'm unfortunately out of room on my file attachment allotment here so had to do an external link instead :/

 

you can still embed links directly - you just have to paste the direct link to the image (like with the .png or .jpg file extension in the URL) in your post, and the post editor on DW will embed it automatically. like if I open your album, left click the first image to see full view, right click -> Copy Image Location, and paste it in this spoiler, then voila, embedded:

 

Spoiler

 

[DuckReconMajor]

I love this.

 

Here is my skill 1 playthrough (starting with the brief attempt I made on skill 2 to test the waters).
It flows very well. I only got stuck once in the center liquid-y circle area, I failed to find that little switch.

 

you can see at the beginning I brought it up in GZDoom and thought for a second it was choking my 2080ti until I remembered I'd had it on truecolor software. smooth sailing after going back to hardware

 

 

[Steve D]

Just a quick note after taking a short romp in this beautiful map; it's possible to get soft-locked behind the northernmost pillars -- Sectors 4557 and 4559 -- in Sector 2110. Curving the walls close behind the pillars should fix it.

[Turin Turambar]

Fight in the plasma gun room was hard as nails, maybe you could put one less Pain Elemental...

 

One more thing, the blue key can be hard to see, even more because usually the player will have cleaned off that part to get the SSG, so he won't look at it super attentively:

Edited May 31, 2020 by Turin Turambar

[Major Arlene]

8 minutes ago, Turin Turambar said:

Fight in the plasma gun room was hard as nails, maybe you could put one less Pain Elemental...

If you're playing on UV, no.

As for the blue key I'll see what I can do, i it's sadly hard to make obvious against a blue background but I did try to at least signal that that platform lowered once you hit the switch.

[Turin Turambar]

Yeah, yeah, I usually agree with that, my fault for using UV, there are more difficulty levels... I didn't know what difficulty this wad had until it was too late.

 

Are those guys supposed to participate in the blue key fight? They do nothing for me:

[Major Arlene]

1 minute ago, Turin Turambar said:

Yeah, yeah, I usually agree with that, my fault for using UV, there are more difficulty levels... I didn't know what difficulty this wad had until it was too late.

 

Are those guys supposed to participate in the blue key fight? They do nothing for me:

They're just meant to stop you from going straight to the lift, a lock-in via meat instead of bars.
I'll be sure to put my difficulty disclaimer in bold.

[DuckReconMajor]

I was confused by the wording in some posts but I think based on what I've played so far:

1. Supercharge mod is packed in, you do not (and cannot) have to load Supercharge alongside
2. playing ultra-random does randomize the monsters.

Here is a half hour of me attempting Ultra-Random, sans saves and mouselook.

It's a ton of fun and I do plan on beating it eventually.

I am able to (and do) camp in the corner with the megasphere, which I am glad to be able to do, but wasn't sure if that's unintended.

You do have to make sure you stock up ammo first, and most of my deaths are trying to snatch the backpack from those spiders.

 

 

[ReaperAA]

Fantastic map. Played it on HMP and I found it pretty normal for the most part (except for the blue key fight and the final fight but even those too took only a few attempts). Though I do have some things to say:

 

33 minutes ago, Turin Turambar said:

One more thing, the blue key can be hard to see, even more because usually the player will have cleaned off that part to get the SSG, so he won't look at it super attentively

 

Firstly, I echo with this. I was lost for several minutes just because I didn't realize there was a Blue key. I had already been there before when I grabbed the SSG and I didn't realize I had to go there again. It was only until I started searching the entire map when I finally found the blue key there (by that point, I was already done with the purple key side). 

 

Secondly, I found a small visual glitch at the penultimate fight room (room with 2 cyberdemons guarding the entry/exit)

[Major Arlene]

38 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

Fantastic map. Played it on HMP and I found it pretty normal for the most part (except for the blue key fight and the final fight but even those too took only a few attempts). Though I do have some things to say:

 

 

Firstly, I echo with this. I was lost for several minutes just because I didn't realize there was a Blue key. I had already been there before when I grabbed the SSG and I didn't realize I had to go there again. It was only until I started searching the entire map when I finally found the blue key there (by that point, I was already done with the purple key side). 

 

Secondly, I found a small visual glitch at the penultimate fight room (room with 2 cyberdemons guarding the entry/exit)

Cheers! That's a nodebuilder error that should be addressed in the new version (same link)

 

As for the blue key I'll see what I can do.

[leodoom85]

Considering the hard fights and a bad save with resurrection included ^{(talk about bad luck)}, here goes the video. If it shows at 360p, then wait some minutes to enjoy watching at 1080p.

 

 

 

[Dieting Hippo]

Got through on UV with almost all monsters/items and 100% secrets!

 

 

This one was hella' frantic on UV, the last fight takes quite a few tries to get the flow down. I found that running straight to one half of the pickups then making ~3 CCW laps around the lower arena was enough to get infighting started, then I went to town on the Exiles (Archvile variants) with the BFG while dodging all the Cyberdemon rockets. I will say that most of my deaths here weren't from monsters but from either walking into the pit around the lower arena or one of the Exiles bouncing me into it. 5 damage/tick really adds up when you have to run all the way from the back to one of the two pit teleporters!

There were some fights that were cheesable like the Cyberdemon at the blue key (run to the lift and squeeze past the Pyro Demons) but for the most part the map does a really effective job at locking you into an area and forcing a fight. Very few times could I backpedal and safely murder demons while peeking out from behind a corner.

After getting to the end I went back to find the monsters, items, and one secret that I had missed. I was able to find the third secret, but 13 monsters and 14 items still eluded me. Not quite sure where they're at, and I don't want to crack open the WAD in UDB juuuuust yet to figure out where they got stashed.

Overall an A+ map! The visuals are stunning and I like that the cyan/pink color scheme even got applied to the keys. I didn't think to turn on bloom in GZDoom until after I finally finished it but bloom absolutely adds to the atmosphere!

 

I found a few other issues while playing through, they mostly involve the switch platforms that can repeatedly go up/down. (Video now attached)
 

Spoiler

1: Invisible Walls/Lift Height - The lift down to the Pink Key area will raise up past its original starting position when the lower switch is pressed, and when it is sent back down it will create an invisible wall around the platform.

 

https://i.imgur.com/iX3Mz9a.mp4

 

2: Soft Lock - The lift to the Plasma Gun room can still be operated after clearing the room and teleporting out, but if the bars to the Plasma Gun room are re-opened and you enter the room without lowering the lift, the player is stuck in there as the teleporter at the end of the room will no longer teleport.

 

https://i.imgur.com/kwJTee8.mp4

 

Edited June 1, 2020 by Dieting Hippo : Added video for bug reports

[Cacolemon]

Usually not a big fan of slaughter WADs because I'm not very good at them. But I had to try this one just because I freakin' love those colors!

Turns out, I had a lot of fun, although on the lowest difficulty.

I also experienced that softlock that Dieting Hippo mentioned. And there were about 12 monsters that didn't teleport in, they stayed in their "boxes".

Edited June 2, 2020 by Cacolemon

[DSC]

I AM THE ANTICHRIST!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

 

Lame reference-based jokes aside, this looks amazing. This is the project you were working on when Dragonfly raided you, right?

[Major Arlene]

5 hours ago, DSC said:

I AM THE ANTICHRIST!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

 

Lame reference-based jokes aside, this looks amazing. This is the project you were working on when Dragonfly raided you, right?

I believe so!

[Dark Pulse]

A WAD with a name that sounds like some lost 1990s grunge album? I'll have to give this a spin.