[GZDoom] Four Rooms

[Grizzly Old B]

Hej there! Wanna go on a small retro-style techbase adventure? Then this might be for you!

 

4rooms.zip

 

 

“Four Rooms” is my second map, made this summer after a 27-year mapping hiatus. The original version was submitted as map 185 to the RAMP 2023 community project; this standalone version has some issues fixed, some details added, and the difficulty spiced up a little bit.

 

I'm curious for your comments, criticism, and of course playthroughs!

 

Here are some screenshots:
 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the txt file:

===========================================================================
Title                   : Four Rooms
Filename                : 4rooms.wad
Release date            : 2023-09-22
Author                  : Grizzly Old B
Email Address           : grizzly@5d.de
Other Files By Author   : First standalone release
Misc. Author Info       : Played Doom when it came out, in 1996 created one
                          proper (but unreleased) map, lost interest in
                          gaming in the late 90s, regained interest in Doom
                          during the Corona pandemic, started mapping again
                          in summer 2023.

Description             : A small retro-feeling, oldschooly techbase map
                          (basically four rooms, hence the title), using
                          vanilla textures only, except for the sky. Lots of
                          secrets to discover! (Please let me know if you
                          found them all without cheating.)
                          
                          An earlier version of this map is part of the RAMP
                          2023 community project. For this standalone
                          release, I fixed some issues which became apparent
                          during playthroughs by various people, added some
                          more details, and spiced up the difficulty a bit.
                          
                          No jumping/croughing.
                          Freelook allowed/encouraged.

Additional Credits to   : Music track "Time Consuming" by Grizzly Old B and
                          Growmatic Beats. Sky based on a photo from Juergen
                          Fastje. Thanks a lot to the RAMP 2023 community for
                          playtesting the RAMP version and providing valuable
                          feedback! Special thanks to JediMB for help with
                          scripting the crusher room!
===========================================================================
* What is included *

New levels              : 1
Sounds                  : No
Music                   : Yes
Graphics                : Yes
Dehacked/BEX Patch      : No
Demos                   : No
Other                   : No
Other files required    : None


* Play Information *

Game                    : Doom 2
Map #                   : 1
Single Player           : Designed for
Cooperative 2-4 Player  : Player starts only
Deathmatch 2-4 Player   : No
Other game styles       : None
Difficulty Settings     : Yes


* Construction *

Base                    : New from scratch
Build Time              : I have no idea
Editor(s) used          : Ultimate Doom Builder, SLADE
Known Bugs              : Creation of ghost monsters can easily happen at one
                          point. If you don't want to deal with them, in
                          GZDoom please set Compatibility Options -> Actor
                          Behavior -> Crushed monsters get resurrected as
                          ghosts to No.
May Not Run With        : None UDMF compatible ports
Tested With             : GZDoom v4.10.0


* Copyright / Permissions *

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a
copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

You are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format;
and remix, transform, and build upon the material. If you do so, you must
give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if
changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way
that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. You may not use the
material for commercial purposes. If you remix, transform, or build upon the
material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as
the original.

 

 

4rooms.zip

 

Edited September 22, 2023 by Grizzly Old B : replaced attached file (uploaded wrong version first)

[Bengaltiger1]

Having played thru this map I can finally comment.  The difficulty surprised me! 

I had to fight for each weapon + the room with crushers & poison required some careful movement to avoid revenants ruining the party.

Some nasty ambushes with hitscanners at times in close quarter combat. It made the red key teleport near the end brutal even though I started firing with my plasma to stunlock enemies, esp those pesky revs and Pain elementals.  

The Caco cloud can get overwhelming if you can't keep them together in a pack. The frustration here is when they fly away to the point I can't lock onto them. The sniping Arachno is easy to forget if the player isn't aware. It's still probably my fav part for It's open ended gameplay.

The viles at the end have a very low pain chance so I couldn't stop all of them crossing. Though I isolated one and took him out with the rocket , I had to hunt the other 2 down. 

1 critique I'd give would be give more health. The soulpshere for the caco fight was a big help. But some fights are starved of health which some players won't like. Just a heads up.

Overall your style would be good in a wad like Hardfest. That's a cool wad if you haven't tried, I highly recommend. 

Keep at it!

[Grizzly Old B]

To anyone who has downloaded 4rooms.zip before I have posted this comment:

 

I had screwed up and uploaded a zip file containing an old version of the wad (not featuring the improvements I rambled about) when I first created this topic. I have now replaced the zip with the correct version. If your wad file's date is 2023-09-21, you're all fine. If it has an earlier date, please re-download it from the first post in this topic.

 

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience!

Grizzly

[Grizzly Old B]

21 hours ago, Bengaltiger1 said:

1 critique I'd give would be give more health. The soulpshere for the caco fight was a big help. But some fights are starved of health which some players won't like. Just a heads up.

 

Thanks a lot for giving my map a try! May I ask on which difficulty level you played it? I intended to make it hard on UV – at least when not finding any of the many secrets –, but not so hard that I myself cannot beat it anymore, and I'd consider me an averagely-skilled player. (Ok, on the other hand I know exactly what to do in my map ...)

 

Maybe give it a try on HMP (don't forget to download the corrected version). I'm sure you'll find that's considerably easier to beat.

[BlazedMaps]

Great map, obviously a lot of thought and effort was put into this. Very underrated. Having to clear out the first room with only a pistol was a nice challenge. Although it is a bit symmetrical, it's not really a problem because each room has its distinctive features and the map isn't that large (at least from what i've seen so far). The only problem is that for some reason the door to the room with the yellow key got stuck in mid-opening. I used GZDoom, got the chainsaw secret (Not sure if the secret changed a ceiling height or anything), and played on Ultra-Violence. I'm not sure if the problem is somehow related to those or if this is just a random rare thing that I encountered. Overall, though, the map is a very creative and fun map to blast through.

[DuckyCart]

I actually did download this map yesterday and gave it a try myself.

 

Very cool level. Very detailed.

 

the chain-gun guys hidden in the one area with the LITE5 textures took me by surprise.

 

Great job Grizzly.

[Grizzly Old B]

4 hours ago, BlazedMaps said:

The only problem is that for some reason the door to the room with the yellow key got stuck in mid-opening. I used GZDoom, got the chainsaw secret (Not sure if the secret changed a ceiling height or anything), and played on Ultra-Violence. I'm not sure if the problem is somehow related to those or if this is just a random rare thing that I encountered.

 

 

Thanks for your kind comment! The stuck door to the northeast room is by design. It opens just so much that you can see the yellow key inside, so you have your next objective, but to actually get there, you have to find another way. I'm sure you'll find it eventually ... ;-)

[Suitepee]

https://youtu.be/UEb-AFIJxDk

 

Playthrough starts at 26:15.

[Grizzly Old B]

On 9/24/2023 at 7:26 PM, DuckyCart said:

the chain-gun guys hidden in the one area with the LITE5 textures took me by surprise.

 

Thanks for your feedback! Yeah, that chaingunner trap is a bit mean, I will admit. They were not in the original RAMP 2023 version of the map, but rather part of my “spicing up the difficulty a bit” efforts. In particular, I tried various methods of discouraging boring doorstep fighting, and I think the chaingunners are doing a good job there. But I still have a lot to learn!

Edited October 7, 2023 by Grizzly Old B

[Quin]

Quite an intriguing mapping intermission from a twenty-seven-year mapping hiatus, slightly reminiscent of Doom 64 and the latest Cyriak map set that I forgot the name of! I played on HMP because this map pushes the difficulty skill to the maximum on UV; nonetheless, it is fun to play on the former skill level. One recommendation I would give is to add texture variation, similar to how Doom 64 for Doom II handles texture transitions and complementary color mixing. Otherwise, this is a good map in all regards!

[Grizzly Old B]

18 hours ago, Quin said:

Quite an intriguing mapping intermission from a twenty-seven-year mapping hiatus, slightly reminiscent of Doom 64 and the latest Cyriak map set that I forgot the name of!

 

Ooooh, I think that's certainly too much of an honour for “Four Rooms” to be named with a Cyriak wad in one breath! You're surely referring to his fantastic “Overboard” mapset. Well, the Doom-cute boat as an escape vehicle is an (intended) similarity of course, but beyond that? (Ok, maybe the music with it's odd 35/8 meter is another similarity, just in terms of being weird ...)

 

Thanks for your tip with the complementary colors. Will keep in mind for future projects.

[LadyMistDragon]

Found the time to play this this morning! As a RAMP map, it's exactly the sort of inventive concept one would hope to see. As a UDMF wad, it adds in enough little gameplay bits that it really feels like there's more than shooting happening! Thanks to the opening puzzle, things took just slightly longer than I'd like! Nice bits of explosiveness though, and the volcano was low-key kind of funny:)

 

 

[Grizzly Old B]

14 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

Thanks to the opening puzzle, things took just slightly longer than I'd like!

 

Hey! Thanks a lot for giving my map a try. Unfortunately it is not the brushed-up version which is available for download here, but rather the old RAMP version which I first uploaded here by mistake (see my first comment above). But I think you're aware of that.

 

Sorry for the suffering you had to endure in the first room. With its (intentional) ammo scarcity and seemingly no way out, it can be a hard start. Interestingly, I noticed that the playing style of players seems to have a larger influence on how hard it is to master this room than pure gaming skills. Careful & strategic players cope with it much better than quick & bold players. But I can see that the latter playing style is what most people expect from a Doom level ...

 

Regarding the green armor secret you cheated into: There's a hole in the wall with a shootable switch which gives you access to the secret. You can see it from around 10:35 in the video:

 

Edited September 29, 2023 by Grizzly Old B

[AshtralFiend]

Oh man, amazing map! Very detailed and deceptively large for its title! I'm a sucker for puzzle maps, loved every second!

You never know what to expect after you flip a switch.

 

Played on UV and everything seemed well-balanced. The only thing that really caught me off guard was the cacodemon cloud after that teleport.

 

Keep up the great work!

[Tangra]

Here's my failed attempt... i got so close... if only i was a bit more patient at the exit, but i didn't read the popup message correctly. Now i see i had go back and finish the archviles, but with the error of saving at 7% health, i'm not sure i would've been able to do it.

 

Anyway, great level, with some very creative encounters and beautiful visuals. I've struggled a lot because i'm bad at playing in tight dark spaces and i'm also terrible at solving tough puzzles and secrets.

 

 

[Koaku]

Love this map!

Also, the music is fire.

10/10

[Grizzly Old B]

On 10/6/2023 at 12:39 PM, AshtralFiend said:

Oh man, amazing map! Very detailed and deceptively large for its title! I'm a sucker for puzzle maps, loved every second!

You never know what to expect after you flip a switch.

 

Thanks a lot for your kind words! May I ask how many of the secrets you did find (if you still remember)?

[Grizzly Old B]

On 10/6/2023 at 1:40 PM, Tangra said:

Anyway, great level, with some very creative encounters and beautiful visuals. I've struggled a lot because i'm bad at playing in tight dark spaces and i'm also terrible at solving tough puzzles and secrets.

 

Hey, many thanks for your playthrough recording, much appreciated!

 

Let me reiterate one thing we already discussed in our Discord chat, because it may also be helpful for other players struggling with the fight on Caco Island: If you teleport there, there's a rocket launcher right at your feet (and plenty of rocket ammo scattered around). You picked it up in every try, but didn't notice it because you had automatic weapon switching disabled. So there's no severe need to get the secret rocket launcher in the north-west room.

 

Speaking of that one:

 

Spoiler

You were veeeery close to discover that secret around 07:56 in your playthrough.

 

 

Two of the bars are spaced wider than the others. This is where you can squeeze through and jump onto the crate with the rocket launcher.

 

[AshtralFiend]

2 hours ago, Grizzly Old B said:

 

Thanks a lot for your kind words! May I ask how many of the secrets you did find (if you still remember)?

If I remember correctly, maybe 3 or 4. It's less than 50% of the 10 secrets, but I didn't struggle with ammo or health.

Will probably try to get those 100% next playthrough

[Grizzly Old B]

1 hour ago, AshtralFiend said:

If I remember correctly, maybe 3 or 4. It's less than 50% of the 10 secrets, but I didn't struggle with ammo or health.

Will probably try to get those 100% next playthrough

 

Yeah, maybe I overdid it a bit with those 10 secrets, but I myself love finding secrets in other people's maps, that's probably why ... ;-)

 

Hint: Although some are quite tricky to find, all secrets are clearly marked in some way. There's no need to start humping all walls.

[DynamiteKaitorn]

Gave this a playthrough and this is a solid map! Despite it being, as the name says, only 4 rooms there's a lot to do in each one! the tech-facility theme looks really well implemented and the difficulty is juuust right (at least for HMP). Would like a few extra stim-packs personally but it's not overly necessary.

 

The yellow key moving about caught me off guard as I thought I somehow grabbed it and it didn't show on my HUD. XD

 

Only major complaint I have is that getting back with the yellow key is weird. You have to traverse through a fake wall. I only found it by sheer accident.

[kalensar]

 

 

That was a really good map and I had to save scum like mad on it. Lots of death in a few areas. Played on HMP.

 

Lots of twists and turns going through this quite literally. Navigating was quizzical but also pretty straightforward with just a little searching. Not going to lie, Im impressed I found even 1 secret in all of that. 

 

Overall, I'm happy to have played this map and I hope your next projects keep this type of tone, or go however you want to make them. You got a nice eye for level building in general and that was a very fun to play.

[Grizzly Old B]

On 10/7/2023 at 3:26 AM, Koaku said:

Love this map!

Also, the music is fire.

10/10

 

Thanks a lot, Koaku. You're making an old Grizzly happy! ;-)

 

Regarding the music track: I recorded it together with my neighbor Kai aka Growmatic Beats on the day before the deadline of the RAMP 2023 community project, for which this map originally has been created. The odd rhythm is based on a bongo rhythm I heard (and never forgot since) on a PJ Harvey concert in Hamburg, 1998. The time signature could be described as 35/8. This rhythm is later overlaid by a straight 4/4 beat (with 1 extra beat at some point to make it fit), so that we have a nice polyrhythm going on. I named the track “Time Consuming” after drummer Yogev Gabay's fantastic Youtube podcast about strange rhythms:

 

 

Edited October 10, 2023 by Grizzly Old B

[eharper256]

Grizzly Old B requested I playtest this one, so here we are, played with Walpurgis:

Claustrophobic Puzzle maps are definately not my usual fare, but this was an interesting enough romp. Personally, I'd say I'd like to see it a little widened and easier to move in, but obviously that wasn't the point (lol). I liked the Volcano the best, I get the feeling this section was a homage to Overboard, though it's a bit impractical to fight well in (and it has blue lava surrounding the actual lava when I collect the key). Note that my texture pack has a weird tendency to make some Crates look bizarre at times, which makes the level look a little worse than it should at points.

[thiccyosh]

I have to say, I underestimated this map. Seeing this was your second ever map I thought this was a 10 minute babys' first tech-base, but no. It was actually quite hard difficulty-wise. Seeing how you fiendishly placed barrels and snipers made this map fun to play through! Balancing and combat is especially well done here, giving the player enough resources to kill everything without making it an autopilotable map. Secrets were really fun to find too, though plentiful, I managed to find all of them.

 

This map has 90s' style written all over it due to your usage of lifts, 64 unit wide corridors, extensive use of nasty monster closets and the ability to not care about fancy mapping tricks and details. I'm a sucker for these 90s' maps and I am happy to see this style hasn't died. I cannot say alot about the visuals, the rooms itself are lacking non-blocky shapes and a bit bland to look at, leading me to sometimes confuse rooms. But that's how the 90s' maps were I guess. I did like the Caco island though!

 

As you can also see, I recorded a playthrough of the map. Don't worry about the glitching skybox, I completely forgot GZDoom doesn't like skies in software rendering mode. That isn't your map's fault!

 

And for some reason Youtube doesn't want to render this video properly, so in case you really want to look this playthrough in HD, you'll have to wait a few more hours (that is if the problem fixes itself...).

 

 

Have a nice day.

 

 

[Grizzly Old B]

On 10/10/2023 at 8:50 PM, eharper256 said:

I liked the Volcano the best, I get the feeling this section was a homage to Overboard [...]

 

Oh, to be honest, it wasn't intended as such (at least not consciously). The Doom-cute boat at the end however very much was!

 

Thanks a lot for your playthrough. Your Walpurgis mod looks great!

 

On 10/10/2023 at 8:54 PM, thiccyosh said:

I have to say, I underestimated this map. Seeing this was your second ever map I thought this was a 10 minute babys' first tech-base, but no. It was actually quite hard difficulty-wise. Seeing how you fiendishly placed barrels and snipers made this map fun to play through! Balancing and combat is especially well done here, giving the player enough resources to kill everything without making it an autopilotable map. Secrets were really fun to find too, though plentiful, I managed to find all of them.

 

Also to you a big Thanks for giving my map a try and for the nice review! I'm already curious for your thoughts about my 1996 map I sent you ... 😅

[princetontiger]

I'm always up for a tech base map.... and, wow! This pleasantly surprised me. I didn't have time to play through the latest RAMP wad, so I'm glad you singled out this one for a distribution. Great job, well done!

 

Really nice music, too!

[Arrowhead]

Hey, finally had a chance to try this!

 

This is a really great level. Extremely complex - a bit claustrophobic at times, though. Lots of little nooks and crannies.

 

10 secrets seems like a lot, but they are hidden very creatively.

 

2 main parts stand out in this WAD to me, (I've spoilered in case anyone else wants to play this):

 

Spoiler

 

1. I love when we hear the first archvile, yet have no idea where he is. Adds a sense of urgency to an already tough level.

2. The giant caco battle on that mountain / volcano thing was super cool. When I first saw it off in the distance, I had just thought it was added detail. Turns out you actually fight a huge battle there.

 

 

Really fun, try it, you won't regret it!

 

:)

[Grizzly Old B]

8 minutes ago, Arrowhead said:

2 main parts stand out in this WAD to me, (I've spoilered in case anyone else wants to play this):

 

  Hide contents

 

1. I love when we hear the first archvile, yet have no idea where he is. Adds a sense of urgency to an already tough level.

2. The giant caco battle on that mountain / volcano thing was super cool. When I first saw it off in the distance, I had just thought it was added detail. Turns out you actually fight a huge battle there.

 

 

 

Thanks for your nice review!

 

Spoiler

Are you sure you mean “first archvile”? Or rather arachnotron? The three (UV) archviles normally should only become active once you open the exit door.

 

[Arrowhead]

10 minutes ago, Grizzly Old B said:

  Hide contents

Are you sure you mean “first archvile”? Or rather arachnotron? The three (UV) archviles normally should only become active once you open the exit door.

 

Weird, I must have misheard. I could have sworn I saw my monster count # going up after I had heard that earlier in the level, but now that you mention it, I don't think I ever encountered an arch-vile separate from at the end...

 

Maybe I was just seeing lost souls increase the count? I don't know.

 

Actually never mind, disregard the arch-vile statement, I went back to the same place, and I'm pretty sure was an arachnotron, lol. I think a bunch of other enemies woke up at the same time, and maybe I misheard.

 

Regardless great work on this WAD. Are you in the process of planning anything else? I quite like this level.