My first public map (Limit-removing)

[KVELLER]

I've spent the past week working on a short-ish map (5-10 minutes) that should work on any limit-removing port (it was supposed to be vanilla-compatible, but the final arena causes a visplane overflow). While I've been playing Doom for most of my life and I've messed around with Doom Builder before, this is my first public release, so temper your expectations!

Different skill levels are implemented and difficulty should be somewhat above Doom 2, though lower than Plutonia.

 

SCREENSHOTS:

Spoiler

 

 

 

DOWNLOAD

Tested with Crispy Doom and GZDoom (w/compatibility settings)

Edited August 21 by KVELLER : Updated map with minor bugfixes

[Degree23]

An interesting map for sure.

 

- I got to the SSG fight and barely had enough Shells to take down the AV, let alone the other monsters here, yet when I came out of this fight, a cupboard had opened up with 40 Shells and some Bullets. Some of this ammo is definitely needed for the Blue Key fight so I would move at least one box of Shells to the SSG location.

- There was a HOM or two in the first crushing ceiling part with the Barons and Imps. (Can't seem to get a good screenshot at the moment - thanks Windows 11!)

- Some of the areas are just enormous with not much to fill them in and it creates a lot of running for no real purpose. They could probably be half the size and still give the feeling of being enormous. (Or put in another 1000 monsters and make it a SlaughterWad!)

- The final fight was really fun. Again the room is enormous though, with very little happening in the first third of the room, so it also could be a little bit smaller.

 

Overall for a first map it was a great job!

[breadmachine]

Fun map, nice job!

 

I really liked the teleporter that takes you through rooms from the IWADs, and the last fight was fun as well-- the minimal cover in that large room had me scrambling to avoid the archies while also dodging rockets. Well done!

[VeryRandomMan]

It needs a lot of polishing, but for a first map, it's good

[Turbulent]

Interesting and unique. Do you have any inspirations for your mapping style?

[Zesiir]

A decent map with a cool concept. I really liked the initial techbase area, you nailed it well with the choice of music and

the environment to create atmosphere, leading up to the Archvile encounter. Like others have mentioned I too ran out of ammo there, though I

realised after that one should escape back a bit and find the alcove that has opened. Then you can resupply.

 

There were some good details around the techbase area too, like the room that had stacked floor tiles, or the subtle hints of Hellish influence

like the inverted cross, hole in the tech wall, etc.

 

The cavern area felt rougher though, less detailed. I expected to get ambushed once I grabbed the Chaingun. Though that ambush came later.

After that the area with the enormous ceiling crushers, I didn't immediately understand I was supposed to run, though since you're low on ammo

at that point I suppose there's not much choice. Evil to place a crusher in the small corridor at the end, I did not expect that.

 

The second cavern area is big and empty, and not very impressive. Once you reach the teleporter, you get teleported around a fair bit, around some

very similar areas from Ultimate Doom. It's a nice callback, but I think it would've been better if you had not copypasted them straight from the

original IWAD's and instead recreated them yourself. Some frown on that kind of thing here.

 

I'm working on a Megawad myself that takes the player back to some earlier UD maps, though I've recreated those from scratch and added my own

touch to them to make the maps feel more thought-out. It's worth doing.

 

The final end fight in the absolutely massive marble room was fun, though I ended up running out of ammo so I couldn't kill the Cyberdemon.

Couldn't hurt to sprinkle some more ammo around the place, perhaps. I found 1/3 secrets, but that's cool. Getting the Rocket Launcher early

was very useful. I liked that I could go back and explore the map at any point.

 

TLDR: Decent map, difficult in parts. Coud use some polish and balancing.

 

I found some minor issues;

 

Spoiler

 

I noticed that quite a few alcoves have misaligned textures, you can fix this by checking the 'Lower Unpegged Texture' or

'Upper Unpegged Texture' boxes, or both. It'll align them so they match.

 

 

This monster teleport cell is visible on the automap.

 

 

 

[KVELLER]

14 hours ago, Degree23 said:

- I got to the SSG fight and barely had enough Shells to take down the AV, let alone the other monsters here, yet when I came out of this fight, a cupboard had opened up with 40 Shells and some Bullets. Some of this ammo is definitely needed for the Blue Key fight so I would move at least one box of Shells to the SSG location.

 

1 hour ago, Zesiir said:

Like others have mentioned I too ran out of ammo there, though I

realised after that one should escape back a bit and find the alcove that has opened. Then you can resupply.

 

Yeah, it was a bit of an experiment to try to force the player to run away first to then get the ammo. Mixed results, I see :P

 

 

15 hours ago, Degree23 said:

- Some of the areas are just enormous with not much to fill them in and it creates a lot of running for no real purpose. They could probably be half the size and still give the feeling of being enormous. (Or put in another 1000 monsters and make it a SlaughterWad!)

 

1 hour ago, Zesiir said:

The cavern area felt rougher though, less detailed.

 

The second cavern area is big and empty, and not very impressive.

 

After finishing that whole wing of the map, I honestly figured it would be better off getting cut, but I wanted to make sure it was actually lower quality and it wasn't just me being burnt out.

 

 

1 hour ago, Zesiir said:

Once you reach the teleporter, you get teleported around a fair bit, around some

very similar areas from Ultimate Doom. It's a nice callback, but I think it would've been better if you had not copypasted them straight from the

original IWAD's and instead recreated them yourself. Some frown on that kind of thing here.

 

I'm working on a Megawad myself that takes the player back to some earlier UD maps, though I've recreated those from scratch and added my own

touch to them to make the maps feel more thought-out. It's worth doing.

 

I probably should've, in hindsight, but it was mostly a throwaway idea I randomly had. I didn't have much time to finish the map either, so some things evidently are more low-effort than they should be. 

 

 

1 hour ago, Zesiir said:

Couldn't hurt to sprinkle some more ammo around the place, perhaps.

 

I kinda like being stingy with ammo haha. In this case it's more than enough if you rely on infighting somewhat, though to be fair I only realized that after running out of ammo myself during my first test run of the map.

 

 

1 hour ago, Zesiir said:

I noticed that quite a few alcoves have misaligned textures, you can fix this by checking the 'Lower Unpegged Texture' or

'Upper Unpegged Texture' boxes, or both. It'll align them so they match.

 

Ohh, I was scratching my head trying to figure out how to align those before assuming it was a vanilla limitation, so thanks for the tip!

 

 

12 hours ago, Turbulent said:

Interesting and unique. Do you have any inspirations for your mapping style?

 

Not exactly. I'm working on an indie game and wanted to make this map as a sort of test bed to make sure the ideas I have that I think are good actually are, and gauge how the ones I'm mixed on are received. This is why the map is a bit of a hodgepodge of different ideas, themes and gimmicks.

[Degree23]

59 minutes ago, KVELLER said:

Yeah, it was a bit of an experiment to try to force the player to run away first to then get the ammo. Mixed results, I see :P

 

There's no indication that there's going to be extra ammo anywhere though, so it's not something I think people are likely to realise on a first playthrough.

 

54 minutes ago, KVELLER said:

I kinda like being stingy with ammo haha. In this case it's more than enough if you rely on infighting somewhat, though to be fair I only realized that after running out of ammo myself during my first test run of the map.

 

Because of the nature of that final fight, you could do with placing another 100 Cells there and maybe removing some Rockets if you didn't want too much ammo around. Because I saw the AVs before I started firing, I used both BFG blasts on the three of them but that did leave none left for the Cyberdemon, and usually taking that on without a PG/BFG in most normal maps tends to be frowned upon now. I had a good amount of infighting so it wasn't too bad in my playthrough.

 

If you hadn't said this was a first public map though there's no way I would have thought it was.

[DrRock]

As mentioned before, the big rooms ended up too spacious. Was overall playable and the traps were not too bad to deal with. Keep it up.
 

ZDoom 2.8.1 demos (includes FDA and finished playthrough):

techcavehellbase_drr.zip

[KVELLER]

2 hours ago, DrRock said:

As mentioned before, the big rooms ended up too spacious. Was overall playable and the traps were not too bad to deal with. Keep it up.
 

ZDoom 2.8.1 demos (includes FDA and finished playthrough):

techcavehellbase_drr.zip

 

Thanks a bunch for the demo! It's kind of surreal to see someone else play something I made.

 

As an aside, I uploaded a new version of the map with better texture alignment and without the pesky lines that weren't supposed to show on the automap. I couldn't catch the HOMs mentioned by Degree23, though.

I probably won't modify the level beyond that, and definitely not in any major way (I'm sick of it by now...) If I make another map in the future, I'll definitely take into consideration what I learned here, and I'll try to make something that isn't so damn linear while I'm at it.

 

Thank you to everyone who played and left feedback!