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SaladBadger

[WIP-Demo available] yet another attempt at doom evil unleashed

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for some reason, I decided to try to make the most cursed and most commonly failed project, with various experiments to try to make it not completely fail. One of these ideas is to only introduce the project with an extensive demo to see if it's actually any fun to play.

 

What's in the demo:
The demo focused mostly on gameplay, so all the main gameplay elements are in. Things like specialized art and sounds were skipped over in favor of getting levels working.

  • Seven mostly complete (playable from start to finish) levels: Hangar 2, Supply Depot 2, Waste Processing Facility, Enlisted Quarters, Recreation and Training Center, Mess, and Officer's Quarters. A stub for Control Center is in, to add an end to the demo.
  • Level design that I seriously hope isn't very flat and alpha-like. (I probably failed, ugh)
  • The basic arsenal: Knife, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, and a new missile launcher. The chainsaw is also available, and heat-seeker missiles can be dropped from canisters.
  • Basic bestiary: Two possessed humans, demon troops (lesser impling and greater imp), demon sargeants (lesser demon and greater fiend), and "flying imps" (lesser lost soul and greater name tbd)
  • Some minor gameplay tweaks. Nothing serious, it should hopefully be relatively doom-like. This came about mostly from my dislike of E1-style combat, but we'll see how this goes.Lives, scoring, and scoring items. You get a new life every 50,000 points. When you die, you lose a life and drop all your items at the spot. You can then respawn to get it back. Much balance is still to be done, and there's no fate when you run out of lives. (in the final game, it'll probably just zero your score, and then give you 3 new lives)
  • Four player characters with individual gameplay traits.
  • A temporary intermission map to serve as the hub.

 

What's still to be done:
There's a lot that needs to be done:

  • Complete the seven remaining levels (thankfully a bunch of these are short): Communication Tower, Personal Storage, Control Center/Power Plant, Lab, Observatory, Supply Depot 1, and the Anomaly.
  • Finalize the current levels. This will mostly involve getting the specialized art needed done, and some fun details like signs and blood decals, and so on.
  • Balance the four characters. The faster characters seem to suffer more at the moment.
  • Get the special weapons in: The officer's pistol and the sawn-off shotgun.
  • Get sounds for most of the things that don't have sounds yet, such as sliding doors.
  • Finalized screens for the intermission, character select, and so on.
  • An intro sequence.
  • Balance the characters, and give the females a new voice. The faster characters currently suffer more compared to the slower, tankier characters.

 

Screenshots:
Not many atm because imgur's been having issues lately.
N2mTIKE.png

 

aEz1jqA.png

 

VrE7gHf.png

 

Download: (for GZDoom, using DOOM.WAD)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14MWJsKsCwEHJebxPiu5xb8KaZ-z9w1Ub/view?usp=sharing

Edited by SaladBadger

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I usually don't play wads which mostly use vanilla textures. But judging from the screenshots, it actually looks pretty decent, so i'll give this a try anyway ;) What's the map format to be precise btw ?

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I was just thinking about how I'd love to play a Doom mod with a dedicated scoring system, and the new arsenal (please tell me there's a decent revolver, ha ha) and extended bestiary sounds cool. I will give this a playthrough over the weekend to get you some feedback. Thanks for the demo!

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The map format is just UDMF, but it's a very deliberate subset to be more like a "vanilla+" sort of deal. I tried to keep the features relatively plausible for something that could have been implemented back in 1993, like 90 degree flat rotations and flat alignment. The rest of the project is too buried in GZDoom features (hubs, gameplay related scripting, and so on) to actually be for vanilla or boom, though.

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So I gave this a try earlier and I couldn't get very far, having a few issues that were stymieing my progress. I do want to say that I like the new enemy variant in the imp and I think you've done a great job detailing with the visuals; I see you've used elements from Tai Tenga in here and am really happy to see that episode getting some mod attention; its a great base to build from.

One thing I was confused about was the lack of a Score display; I switched to the Alt HUD, but it was not there either, so I'm guessing it hasn't been implemented yet? I think this could be a lot of fun collecting treasure and blasting demons to rack up a High Score, not to mention the obvious value of ties to the life system, so I was a bit disappointed I didn't get to enjoy it just yet.

I think the music is unimplemented in the first map, which is fine at this point given that its in Alpha, but the transition HUB between maps seems to have left its looping theme going when I began the second map, which quickly became a bit annoying. I didn't have any weapons besides the pistol going into the second map, and the sudden hot start with the crowded imps and hitscanners caused me extreme frustration and cost me a life the first time. Repeating it from the save, I barely scraped through with 21 health. Frustrating, sure, but not necessarily a deal breaker, if you compensate for the abuse. Unfortunately, at this stage of design, there aren't any medkits in the immediate area, so taking another bullet left me with 9 health to deal with the next ambush at the top of the elevator and a few stray zombiemen. Needless to say, I didn't survive the point-blank retaliation from the sergeant. That is a big deal-breaker for me as far as frustration tolerances go.

Now, I did go back and try it with 2 lives left, but unfortunately ran into a collision somehow where my player corpse caused an immediate "telefrag" death as soon as the lift began ascending. I don't know enough about the mechanics to identify the cause of the problem, but that is something that will obviously have to be fixed.

No other bugs, and like I said to begin, you've got a good foundation here. When you've had some time to rework some of the balancing and implement the scoring system, I'd be happy to give it another go for you.

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Ah, this is why I wanted to do the demo. Health balancing has been fairly tricky for me, and I find in my own tests there's often an excess, but I also know the levels by heart, and if players are having issues, I should probably do something. I was trying to be a bit stingy so an occasional life would be lost, but I can add more if too many lives are lost.

 

To rationalize my thoughts on a few things here, most levels have multiple ins and outs, I wanted the monorail to be a bit more difficult since it's more direct, older versions were even more stingy, not providing any extra ammo or health, but I backed out of that. The external route is a little more annoying, but you get a shotgun immediately on the next level (okay on UV you have to beat it out of a shotgunner's hands, but that's not much of an issue), but I think the external route wins out here. Also I'll double check why the music isn't playing, I have it defined in MAPINFO (I usually test with music off, ooops.....)

 

Scoring is there, though I haven't found a good way to put it in the default Doom-derived UI yet, so it's only on the automap status bar. Hopefully I'll find a better way to place it... The other alpha-derived HUDs have it as a more first-party feature.

 

EDIT: The telefrag bug was easy to fix, thankfully. I'll try to release a demo tomorrow with the telefrag fix and a little more resources available, since this seems to be a pretty common grumbling. It's annoying, since my testing constantly pointed at the game having way too much health and ammo, but again, I also know everything about the encounters

Edited by SaladBadger

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This has to be one of the best Evil Unleashed recreations I've ever experienced. Keep it up!

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