Foreverhood Gameplay Beta Test

[skadoomer]

As some of you may or may not know, I built a little mod called Foreverhood a few years back. While aesthetically pleasing, I always thought it could use more game-play stuff than just re-skinned Hexen weapons and friendly monsters.

So after tooling around for the past 7 months, I’ve got a pretty solid test build that I need feedback on. When you work on something long enough, you tend lose sight of what works and what doesn’t. Rather than hunt down the old crew that tested Foreverhood the last time, I’ve decided to just do an open beta.

So here is the deal, this beta uses doom monsters, weapons and levels to test the effectiveness of what I’ve built. In essence, it’s playing doom with different rules (see below "features").

Because it’s a beta, there are print messages that will output to your screen that track the internal functions. Stuff WILL break (though I’ve done my best to make sure it doesn’t), and NOTHING about the art is even remotely final. It’s also worth noting that because of some fundamental differences between Foreverhood and doom, the game play doesn’t balance quite right.

What I’m looking for in terms of feedback is what you used and what you didn’t, what you think worked well together and what felt odd or wrong. Telling me it sucks or its awesome does nothing to help improve this project. Hopefully you’ll be able to see through the crap to what it is I’m hoping to achieve with this.

Heres the skinny of what to expect:

• Player leveling system:
  Your character will grow in level as you kill monsters. When your exp fills up, You will get a display icon that you have a new point to sink into active/passive abilities. These include things like an increased amount of health that you can carry or increases in the amount of damage your weapons can do.
  
  
• Leveling Weapons:
  The more kills your weapons make, the more powerful they become. All weapons have 7 stages of power, so your most frequently weapons become more intense over time.
  
  
• Chargeable weapons:
  All weapons not only level up much like you do, but can be charged by sacrificing ammo. This allows you to deliver more powerful shots from the weapons later leveling stages. The more you charge your weapon, the less shots you will have to make with your charged ability, so make them count.
  
  
• Mouse driven stat screen:
  All the information you have on whats in your inventory is contained on a mouse driven series of screens where you can explore your inventory in more depth and even configure game play options. (given that a lot of this is crude stuff created with a scripting language, hopefully this ability will help please some of the crowd). You'll have to configure a keyboard in zdooms options to see this screen.
  
  
• Visual weapon selector:
  Use a scroll mouse to bring up the weapon selection screen. Its spiffy, but you'll have to configure a keyboard in zdooms options to see this. I recommed mouse wheel up and down.
  
  
• Magic and health reserves:
  Right now there basic rip-off of the sub tank of Megaman X. When your health or magic is full and you collect more health/ammunition, these store it for future use.
  

This has been outfitted for use with Oblige, but can be played with the DoomII levels and vanilla compatible maps. It isn't compatible with other weapon mods or monster pack or anything of that nature (take a peek at the decorate code for a hint at why). Its been tested with latest zdoom (ver. 2.2.0) and gzdoom (ver. 1.1.04), but not the SVN builds so good luck with that.

Download

ACS Scripts Source

Leave feedback. I plan on doing a second revision that cleans up some of the back end code so i'll address any issues that are found.

Screenshots, for good measure:

[Creaphis]

Awesome. I'm glad to know that Foreverhood is still being worked on, and a system like this would definitely fit in with what I remember of Foreverhood. However, the Doom weapons would definitely not fit in, but I assume you're planning to add your own yet.

(No energy to playtest, sorry.)

[Bucket]

Well, this came out of nowhere. Sounds interesting.

[skadoomer]

Creaphis said:

However, the Doom weapons would definitely not fit in, but I assume you're planning to add your own yet.

I took the valve approach this time around and designed a game play centered around the origins of what i was modding from. This way i can build a sense of what works and what doesn't so i don't waste time building resources for elements that don't work or fit.

Its actually pretty fun to see if you can survive an oblige episode with this mod.

[BigBearBurp]

Looks good overall....

BUT

any chance of a Mac friendly port?

JB

[esselfortium]

BigBearBurp said:

Looks good overall....

BUT

any chance of a Mac friendly port?

JB

This is a ZDoom wad. If you're using an Intel Mac you can use Boot Camp to run ZDoom in Windows to play it. Otherwise, no.

[alien8]

Downloaded it and played a bit on an Oblige map (which embarassingly enough kicked my ass). I've found a few bugs that I can't seem to replicate, though. Is there a command line switch to get ZDoom 2.2.0 to spit out a verbose log?