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

[Steve D]

I'm about halfway through, playing on HNTR, and of course The Ancient Doomer plays keyboard only.

 

By far the toughest fight up to now is the first RL arena. Not sure how many times I died, at least 8, probably. I was bedeviled by getting stuck on some of that luscious right-angle wall detail and wishing it was beveled, but I learned to deal with it. I attacked it pretty much like @leodoom85 and concentrated on defeating the Arachnotrons first. Came so close to victory on several occasions, dying in double-KOs and such, but finally prevailed. After that, the ground-level riff-raff was easily dusted off. Then I brought my health back up and killed the Pyro jagoffs before tackling a side room where Exiles teleported to platforms. This area was mostly quite easy, and I left a Megasphere for later pick-up. 

 

After that, the Mastermind fight was a breather, leading to that fun fight on the stairs against the Baron, Cacos and Imps. It was easy but also a blast. Also easy was the fight in that room where Exiles teleported to floating platforms outside. Easy, but irksome, since, as a keyboarder, I relied on autoaim and had a real hard time lining up those mooks for a kill. I have keys for look up/down/center and should have used them, but even so, there's some wickedly obtuse angles, and those little creeps move fast! ;D My next battle will be for the PG, I think.

 

All in all I like this a lot. A ton of front-loaded brutality with more to come; top-notch visuals in a glorious cyan palette from anatares031; and all kinds of clever architecture. You use a lot of custom enemies, which I typically dislike -- I guess this is where I'm something of a purist -- but for some reason they don't bother me here. The one thing that does bug me is the shotgun reloading. Not a fan, but getting used to it. At least we don't have to reload the RL, and this map encourages rocket spamming, which is always fun.

 

I hope to finish it off soon. My schedule is a bit hostile to gameplay atm, but that will clear soon enough.

 

Btw, the large number of snipers on floating platforms in the void can make this map difficult to max, since some of them might live without the player's knowledge. Also, has anyone successfully FDAed this map on UV?

[Major Arlene]

1 hour ago, Steve D said:

I'm about halfway through, playing on HNTR, and of course The Ancient Doomer plays keyboard only.

 

By far the toughest fight up to now is the first RL arena. Not sure how many times I died, at least 8, probably. I was bedeviled by getting stuck on some of that luscious right-angle wall detail and wishing it was beveled, but I learned to deal with it. I attacked it pretty much like @leodoom85 and concentrated on defeating the Arachnotrons first. Came so close to victory on several occasions, dying in double-KOs and such, but finally prevailed. After that, the ground-level riff-raff was easily dusted off. Then I brought my health back up and killed the Pyro jagoffs before tackling a side room where Exiles teleported to platforms. This area was mostly quite easy, and I left a Megasphere for later pick-up. 

 

After that, the Mastermind fight was a breather, leading to that fun fight on the stairs against the Baron, Cacos and Imps. It was easy but also a blast. Also easy was the fight in that room where Exiles teleported to floating platforms outside. Easy, but irksome, since, as a keyboarder, I relied on autoaim and had a real hard time lining up those mooks for a kill. I have keys for look up/down/center and should have used them, but even so, there's some wickedly obtuse angles, and those little creeps move fast! ;D My next battle will be for the PG, I think.

 

All in all I like this a lot. A ton of front-loaded brutality with more to come; top-notch visuals in a glorious cyan palette from anatares031; and all kinds of clever architecture. You use a lot of custom enemies, which I typically dislike -- I guess this is where I'm something of a purist -- but for some reason they don't bother me here. The one thing that does bug me is the shotgun reloading. Not a fan, but getting used to it. At least we don't have to reload the RL, and this map encourages rocket spamming, which is always fun.

 

I hope to finish it off soon. My schedule is a bit hostile to gameplay atm, but that will clear soon enough.

 

Btw, the large number of snipers on floating platforms in the void can make this map difficult to max, since some of them might live without the player's knowledge. Also, has anyone successfully FDAed this map on UV?

Pretty much all the custom enemies and weapons are from the supercharge mod- I figured they'd add a little bit of fun flavor from the map! direct all feed back to Tango- the mod is still evolving iirc.

 

as far as I'm aware no one's FDA'd it (if I'm understanding correctly an FDA is a saveless blind run) due to its length and difficulty but I'd love to see it happen! and yeah, it's a bit difficult without freelook since i'd designed it with the full of gzdoom's capabilities in mind.

glad to hear you're enjoying it! I do respect the idea of wanting to max maps and admittedly i didn't really design this with that in mind but it'll be interesting to see how different players approach it.

[Steve D]

It makes perfect sense that you'd design a GZDoom map to take advantage of GZDoom features. I just need to adjust, since I'm so accustomed to playing vanilla limit-removing. Btw, the issue of maxing a map is most important to speedrunners, but speedrunners do their thing in PrBoom, so whether or not you think it's important to make maxing the map easy is entirely your concern. One way or another, it won't be at DSDA. ;)

 

I really do hope to see some FDA attempts. The map is definitely not FDA friendly, though, so maybe I can hope for some killer prepared runs.

 

As for the custom monsters and such, I'll just give props to @Tango for making me like things I normally don't like with his Supercharge mod. And props to @antares031 as well for that scrumptious cyan palette.

 

A question for you; how did you make those swirling animated lava-lamp textures happen? I love those!

[leodoom85]

@Steve DI see that you watched my lil gameplay and took some ideas from it. I said it in the video and you also said it that some imps at those caged platforms can be deleted in order to attempt an UV-Max playthrough, even if those imps serves as annoying turrets (considering how I went for that fucking bad killing save, that says a lot lol)

[Steve D]

55 minutes ago, leodoom85 said:

@Steve DI see that you watched my lil gameplay and took some ideas from it. I said it in the video and you also said it that some imps at those caged platforms can be deleted in order to attempt an UV-Max playthrough, even if those imps serves as annoying turrets (considering how I went for that fucking bad killing save, that says a lot lol)

 

Yes, I agree that the value of those Imps as snipers is far less than the aggravation and time it takes to kill them. It's also true that the cages on those platforms blend together in the distance, making it very hard to see if there's still living monsters out there.

[Major Arlene]

6 hours ago, Steve D said:

A question for you; how did you make those swirling animated lava-lamp textures happen? I love those!

So those are simply an effect called WARP that can be defined in ANIMDEFS: 

 

https://zdoom.org/wiki/ANIMDEFS#Warping_graphics

 

I'd always wanted to do that effect and this was the perfect opportunity it seems!

[Steve D]

4 hours ago, Major Arlene said:

So those are simply an effect called WARP that can be defined in ANIMDEFS: 

 

https://zdoom.org/wiki/ANIMDEFS#Warping_graphics

 

I'd always wanted to do that effect and this was the perfect opportunity it seems!

 

Many thanks!

[Aurelius]

I posted some feedback in Discord, so I'll be a bit more brief here. Here's an accidentally potato quality playthrough on Youtube (adjusted the wrong bitrate from my OBS settings, so, heh), and here's the video file in my Google drive that you can download and watch it at a tad better quality.

 

Really gorgeous map, love the synthwave/vaporwave inspired aesthetics, and the partly non-linear nature is also a plus, giving multiple angles to approach things and plan your weapon acquisition to suit your style. My favourite fight is most likely the revs on the bridge and a Diabolist perched on top. It was devious in the way that the Diabolist could resurrect the revs on the ground and they could quite surprisingly get in your hair.

 

Took me a few attempts to get through saveless, but I did manage to kill everything barring 14 monsters that probably got stuck on their way out of the closet. Some cheese here and there, but as an average player I welcome it in a lengthy slaughter map. Very nice job overall, looking forward to your next one!

[Dieting Hippo]

2 hours ago, Aurelius said:

Really gorgeous map, love the synthwave/vaporwave inspired aesthetics, and the partly non-linear nature is also a plus, giving multiple angles to approach things and plan your weapon acquisition to suit your style. My favourite fight is most likely the revs on the bridge and a Diabolist perched on top. It was devious in the way that the Diabolist could resurrect the revs on the ground and they could quite surprisingly get in your hair.

 

I found One Weird Trick for handling that room that surprisingly worked out well!

 

Spoiler

Enter in through the ground floor, then immediately take out the Pyro Demons with a rocket launcher, run to the Plasma Gun and dispatch the Pain Elementals, then hide under the central bridge. The Revenants will (mostly) chill on that bridge and the Diabolist won't be able to revive them. From there you can duck out from under the bridge, fire a rocket/some plasma shots at the Revenants on the bridge, then pop out the other side of the bridge and repeat.

 

Eventually, all the Revenants will be putrid piles of debris and the Diabolist will be the only thing left to squash!

 

[Bridgeburner56]

1 hour ago, Dieting Hippo said:

 

I found One Weird Trick for handling that room that surprisingly worked out well!

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Enter in through the ground floor, then immediately take out the Pyro Demons with a rocket launcher, run to the Plasma Gun and dispatch the Pain Elementals, then hide under the central bridge. The Revenants will (mostly) chill on that bridge and the Diabolist won't be able to revive them. From there you can duck out from under the bridge, fire a rocket/some plasma shots at the Revenants on the bridge, then pop out the other side of the bridge and repeat.

 

Eventually, all the Revenants will be putrid piles of debris and the Diabolist will be the only thing left to squash!

 

The most consistent strat I found was

Spoiler

rush the revs with the rocket launcher and kill them where they spawn. The pyros can't get you and the PEs don't cause any issues if you deal with the revs quickly. Gotta dodge a bit with the diabolist but works well.

I may have helped design that fight :D

 

[Major Arlene]

Alright boys and girls, after a couple updates I believe I should have everything for this map pretty well sorted, I'll now be labeling this as RC1 and if nothing else changes for a week it will be finalized and uploaded to /idgames! Thank you all so much for all your feedback and support, I've had so much fun with this project and I couldn't have done it without you guys.

[Sapfiar]

Still a very cool map, most of all I like the part where the pink key is located:) 

Well done, great job!

[Major Arlene]

Bumping because I forgot to mention that this was /idgames official (it's in the main topic post but I'll post it here too)
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/s-u/technicolor

[elend]

Finally I can download it. xD

[Redneckerz]

I finally got time to get around this. Watch R667 for this Saturday to find this map covered :)

[bLUEbYTE]

Map looks dope.
Got these two lines in my console log:

Line 17765 has no first side.
Link offset mismatch between sectors 342 and 2032

 

[Redneckerz]

For those of you who missed the memo last month: Technicolor got coverage on R667. Now that i finally know how to link to seperate articles, here it is.

[captain caleb]

Loads of fun! Very much enjoyed the colors and architecture along with the fights. Pairing it with Supercharge definitely sweetened the experience. The arena where you circle around on tight pathways is my definition of good, challenging gameplay. Will revisit this one and be on the lookout for upcoming releases.

[Major Arlene]

Hi guys, did another quick update on TAB to fix a softlock so if you got stuck, feel free to update :D

[obake]

Awesome work as always, Major! I'm hoping with the updated UDB, I'll finally be able to properly play this map.

[Major Arlene]

4 hours ago, obake said:

Awesome work as always, Major! I'm hoping with the updated UDB, I'll finally be able to properly play this map.

all you should need is gzdoom 4.2.0 or later :)

[adamastor]

Another awesome map, even though my pc can't quite tackle it perfectly.

Many thanks Major.

 

PS: Great title by the way.

[Major Arlene]

Bumping because I'm planning an update in June (almost a year already, how????)- will be updating to the latest version of Supercharge with new scapgun weapon sprites and potentially reworking a couple fights. Watch this space!

[Hyacsho]

Hi guys, 

I'd like to commend the amazing work done by Major Arlene and everyone that worked on the map; it's both challenging and fun, but also looks absolutely inter-galactically goggle blastingly amazing to see, thanks for the surprises along the way good major!

 

Inspired I was, to do a review of it, I hope I did your work justice.