Going Down

[mouldy]

Something sinister is lurking in UAC headquarters. Grab your gun, head to the roof and shoot your way down through the building to get to the bottom of the mystery.


06/11/14 UPDATE: Final version now on idgames:
DOWNLOAD LINK last updated 22nd August 2015

This is a doom 2 megawad - boom format, complevel 9. Each map is a floor, each floor has a lift, each lift needs a key. You’ll work it out I’m sure, just keep going down.

These are small, fairly hard maps with high body-counts, and gameplay I would describe as “chaotic-evil”.

Features:
New music
Difficulty settings
Generous carnage
90 degree angles (don’t worry it’ll get more abstract later)
Toilets

Have a go and see if you can break it, there are lots of weird triggers and places you shouldn’t be allowed to get to, so do your worst.

The maps have co-op and deathmatch starts, though I've not changed the gameplay or tested multiplayer, so enter at your own risk.




enjoy

[Tristan]

Excellent! I'll download it tomorrow! :)

[Devalaous]

Looks like Hellbound :D

[obake]

These are some really nice screenshots. I especially like the first one. Such a lonely, yet foreboding city...

[Walter confetti]

looks really cool!

[mouldy]

By the way, when i say they are small maps - some of those screenshots pretty much show the whole map... The idea was to make a megawad you could play all the way through in an afternoon (and to give me a realistic chance of making 32 maps before I got bored).

obake said:

These are some really nice screenshots. I especially like the first one. Such a lonely, yet foreboding city...

heh, you won't feel so lonely when you get to the roof of that building.

[Memfis]

Very mushroom inspired music, I like. :D

[NaturalTvventy]

This is sweet. I love the concept of going lower and lower in a building. Very clever.

[dobu gabu maru]

The maps are short, sweet, devious and a ton of fun. Definitely worth a playthrough for those that want beautiful bite-sized battles.

[Dragonsbrethren]

mouldy said:

By the way, when i say they are small maps - some of those screenshots pretty much show the whole map... The idea was to make a megawad you could play all the way through in an afternoon (and to give me a realistic chance of making 32 maps before I got bored).

Cool! I loved Zone300 because of this, I'll definitely check these out later.

[Demon of the Well]

Fan of 'Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold' at all, Mouldy?

Playing it now, will have some FDAs if you want them in a bit.

[plums]

Hi, played the first 6 maps. No demos; after The Eye and you describing these as "fairly hard" and "chaotic evil" I thought I might need to be able to save at will. Seeing how short the maps are, I should have been OK, though I was certainly glad to have my ammo carry over always.

In general, I like the feel you have here, it's got a refreshing sense humour not usually found in a lot of maps, but still has actual gameplay, and a number of nice very setpieces. The lightning-flash intro screen was quite clever, and I like the hard but not too spammy (yet?) fights.

The music is quite nice and sounds distinctively yours, and as much like the soundtracks for your animations as I would expect General MIDI to be able to get. I did have to cycle through a few soundfonts to get one that sounded like all the instrument levels were balanced - what soundfont / MIDI synth do you use for these?

Quick notes on invididual maps:

01: Nice intro level, pistol fights are nice sometimes as long as they don't drag on too long, which this one doesn't. Surrounding buildings were a great idea, they create a sense of space which can be reused through many levels that looks infinitely better than just some plain walls or long-stretching water.

02: "Realistic" furniture doesn't usually do anything for me, but it fits in with the not-so-serious vibe. Lots of nice ambushes, the windows make it hard to find a safe spot.

03: Starts to get a little hard here. Good action alternating between stealthy crawling and chainsawing demons. I was worried it would get too mazelike in places but I was always able to find my way around just by wandering and hitting switches

04: Monsters coming in through the windows in swarms are well done. This floor feels a bit wider vertically. However noticing these things makes me wonder how much you're going to stick to the theme through the remaining maps, and how much variation you'll be able to squeeze out of it. I'm a ways from getting bored yet, but I think if there isn't at least a few levels with some long vertical movement by Map 30 things might feel a bit stale. I suspect you'll be able to keep it interesting though.

05: My favourite of the first 6, this was a great execution of a time-travel level. Everything from the visuals to the puzzle elements fit nicely. Having both the SSG and a backpack in one secret area seems like a lot especially in continuous, but these levels seem like they expect you to find pretty much all the secrets. One possible bug here: after everything else was done, I was still 4 kills short. A bit of no-clipping to the east revealed 4 cacodemons in a conga line, infinitely teleporting.

06: Visually this is the most unique so far, with an impressive amount of detail packed into such a small space. I would have liked to spend some time just looking around the room at the end but there were too many corpses to get a good view of anything. The teleport section is a well-placed variation. Starts to get a little monster-spammy here, not my personal preference, but you did warn that there would be a lot of things to kill.

Looking forward to playing the rest shortly!

[Demon of the Well]

Okay, here you go: FDAs (skill 4)

The music's persistently self-aware tackiness wasn't to my taste (certainly fits the concept though, especially for the intermission screen), and map 02 didn't feel right to me, but other than that I thought it was wonderful. Tiny little maps generally aren't really to my taste, but these are just so damned bloody I can't help but revel in them. The amount of variety, both in gameplay and in setting, that you've managed to wring out of the simple floor-by-floor concept deserves high praise as well. I didn't manage to break anything, although I saw some minor visual glitches and what seem to be some non-fatal map dysfunctions in a couple of places, most of which should be obvious from the demos. Some brief map-by-map comments...

Map 01: Nice opening shot. Building's not as tall as I thought it would be, but I guess that means that much more of the final WAD will have a subterranean setting. Not a lot to say here...some folks will probably resent the pistol usage, I don't mind. Didn't like the way the marine has to reach through the guard railing on the elevator to activate the switch (any OSHA representative would run screaming into the night on seeing that), but of course that's a minor nitpick.

Map 02: A bit wonky. Acting like a wiseass and saving the blur sphere 'until I know I need it' ends up causing me some pain, but I still make it. My main thing here is that movement feels really artificially restricted--I understand why I'm not allowed to leap through the windows, but I think I ought to at least be allowed to climb on the desks. A ton of combat takes place through windows here, and there's almost no ammo other than what you get from dead zombies, leading to an ammo drought for me most of the way in, hence my various mournful attempts to grab dropped weapons off of the desks. There's some strange shenanigans with the 'water cooler', not sure what was going on there.

Map 03: There are only a few ways to make maps that are little but tangles of narrow, orthogonal corridors with stuff in them interesting, and this is one of them--own up to it entirely, making no attempt to disguise it. The melee play's a nice change of pace, and I like that there's a spiderdemon who essentially exists for no reason other than to be telefragged. I balk at him initially, and eventually realize that I'm coming back to the start point before I turn back to deal with him....get a little confused there for minute with the lifts, but that's my fault, not the map's. Only occurs to me now that I watch my own demo that I could've used those barrels to kill some stuff.

Map 04: Man, my aim sure did suck on this one. Nothing much to say, other than that this is the map where I started to really get into the WAD, entirely on account of how hilariously violent it gets. Oh, my habit of trying to 'use' most discrete computer consoles (gained through years and years of playing PWADs) pays off here, I guess.

Map 05: Neat time-travel concept. Some of the texture alignments/transitions (particularly on viney textures) in 'the future' are pretty naff, but looks good other than that. It takes me a couple of minutes to figure out the puzzle--I dunno, maybe using a two-switch setup on that column (one to raise/one to lower) would make the course clearer to the player (or maybe I'm just more slow-witted than average). The wandering I do after I get the key and return to 'the present' is me looking for a few monsters that apparently never teleported in.

Map 06: A bit garishly sector-laden, perhaps, but sort of suits the mood. I suspect it might be better to move the soulsphere that sits on the mainframe a bit so that it doesn't block the stairs, and I definitely feel that the teleport to the cyber-reality or whatever it is should work once only. Infinity-tallness might make the last battle a bit sloppy, but there's not a lot to be done about that, I guess.

Map 07: Dead Simple map, but at least there's a twist, + 147 bonus points. The spiderdemon really doesn't work all that well here--just not enough space for him--but I guess he keeps you from bombarding the revenants from the good angle behind the reception desk.

Map 08: 'Hunted' map, more atmospheric/cinematic than truly threatening. I see some texture mismatches (I think I react to one of them in the demo) in this one. One of the viles also never appears; in this case I'm not sure if he's actually stuck outside the play area or if I just didn't trigger him somehow, but I couldn't go back and look for him because the elevator can't be left upon re-entering it.

Map 09: First death here, shit just starts snowballing and gets way out of hand eventually--I love it! Very symmetrical, but it works well for this combat setup. No complaints at all about this one--I like libraries, I like shadows, and I love hyperviolence, and this one has all of those.

Map 10: A map where you can just look at an area and know bad things are about to happen--and they do, more intense swarm-based combat here. When I found the secret I thought 'well that's pretty stupid' but then I was glad that cubbyhole existed all of 30 seconds later, heh. Sounds like there was at least an imp stuck outside the map, but there where so many arch-vile resurrections I got well over 100% kills anyway.

Map 11: Another cool theme, and a second death. Foreknowledge helps a lot on this map (not something I personally have a problem with). The hell knight/barrel/lift setup seems a bit bodged-together and prone to malfunction, but it's not anything that breaks the map. The cyberdemon is well-used here; always warms my dead, Doomed heart to see him made scary/intimidating again.

Maybe I've understated it, but this is really, really cool, dude. Can't wait to see what kind of settings turn up in the other 21 maps. Finish this off to the same standard as this first episode, and this will probably become 'the' tiny-map megaWAD in my eyes.

[plums]

continued!

07: Here's where i'm really seeing how much harder pistol start would be. Which is fine, it's nice to have different levels of challenge. Surprised to be at ground floor already. With such small levels a Dead Simple style map seemed inevitable, but this throws some nice surprises.

08: Crates and Archviles, the quintessential Doom level? Really nice scripting, I'm sure the timing of many of those AV appearances wasn't just a coincidence. In GZDoom I could see some AV hands through the big wooden boxes sometimes, like the one in the NW corner of the main room; don't know if you can move them around at all, or if it's worth trying to accomodate non-Boom ports even. Was still one AV hah-hah-hahing around when I went into the lift, annoying that I couldn't go back out to look for him once I stepped in.

09: OK, I take back the part about not being monster-spam heavy. That's OK though, there's more than enough here to keep me interested. However the staggered way in which the monsters appear in this level made me inclined to wait around for long periods of time, because wasn't playing for speed at all. Also, there are places where you can hear the lifts in the monster closets, like along the East wall. These levels haven't used sounds like that intentionally yet, AFAIK, so I'd consider that a minor bug of sorts.

10: And here's where the difficulty starts getting a bit much for me on UV. One more level in this beta, so I'll stick with it, but for the next one I'll be sure to go on HMP instead.
One problem with having a difficulty that starts out pretty tame but ramps up continually is that it can be a bit hard to gauge how hard the later levels are going to be. But that's a pretty established Doom convention, and you did say it was going to be hard.
A thing with large monster-teleport sections where they come in somewhat randomly, like in this map, is that their difficulty can vary quite a bit based on the timing of the archvile.
While a bit less flashy than some other levels, I really liked this level in terms of visuals/architecture. It's got a real boiler room feeling to it.

11: Imp crushers! What a terrific section of this map, the atmosphere is fantastic. Convincingly gory. Gameplay was a nice change of pace from the previous levels, and also quite a bit easier, espeically with that secret and carryover ammo. Whether that was the intent or not, I don't know, but I thought it was fine despite being the end of the episode.

Eagerly awaiting the rest, and also hoping that some people make some good speedruns to watch.

[mouldy]

excellent, thanks for the feedback guys

plums said:

05: One possible bug here: after everything else was done, I was still 4 kills short. A bit of no-clipping to the east revealed 4 cacodemons in a conga line, infinitely teleporting.

Cool, looks like the teleport isn't entirely in the correct sector, nice find.

plums said:

08: In GZDoom I could see some AV hands through the big wooden boxes sometimes, like the one in the NW corner of the main room; don't know if you can move them around at all, or if it's worth trying to accomodate non-Boom ports even.

hmm, i'll check that out, haven't noticed it in zdoom. Might be tricky to fix though..

plums said:

09: there are places where you can hear the lifts in the monster closets, like along the East wall. These levels haven't used sounds like that intentionally yet, AFAIK, so I'd consider that a minor bug of sorts.

Thats a good point, I've been a bit lazy in that respect. Also think you are right about the last level being a bit easier maybe, though playing continuously is probably a factor there. I'm not too worried though, I wanted there to be ups and downs in difficulty as its more about the journey than the challenge in a way. Knowing that last map well you can even grab the invul and power through the whole thing before it wears out if you are quick (and dont mind leaving stuff alive).

Now to watch demon of the well's fdas with a cup of tea...

[plums]

Watching Demon of the Well's FDAs (nice playing!), I'm catching all sorts of visual details that I missed, like the decaying Sergeant corpses, or the burning outside buildings on Map05. Love it! I also noticed that on the elevator switch, the green and red lights leak through a bit, using texture filtering with a GL port. You might want to move those linedefs in 1 unit closer, if you don't want to bite the bullet and just edit some textures.

[mouldy]

Demon of the Well said:

Map 02: My main thing here is that movement feels really artificially restricted--I understand why I'm not allowed to leap through the windows, but I think I ought to at least be allowed to climb on the desks. A ton of combat takes place through windows here, and there's almost no ammo other than what you get from dead zombies, leading to an ammo drought for me most of the way in, hence my various mournful attempts to grab dropped weapons off of the desks. There's some strange shenanigans with the 'water cooler', not sure what was going on there.

Yeah, unfortunately I have stuff popping up out of the desks so they are out bounds. I could change that to silent teleporting maybe.. The water cooler releases some bonus imps when its destroyed, just for a laugh really :)

Demon of the Well said:

Map 05: It takes me a couple of minutes to figure out the puzzle--I dunno, maybe using a two-switch setup on that column (one to raise/one to lower) would make the course clearer to the player (or maybe I'm just more slow-witted than average). The wandering I do after I get the key and return to 'the present' is me looking for a few monsters that apparently never teleported in.

I was very interested to see how obscure that puzzle would be, I thought about adding another switch like you say but sometimes I think the more switches you add the more confusing it can get. Was fun watching you work it out though, could really spot the moment when you twigged :) Those missing monsters shall be fixed presently.

Demon of the Well said:

Map 06: I suspect it might be better to move the soulsphere that sits on the mainframe a bit so that it doesn't block the stairs, and I definitely feel that the teleport to the cyber-reality or whatever it is should work once only. Infinity-tallness might make the last battle a bit sloppy, but there's not a lot to be done about that, I guess.

The thinking behind the soul sphere placement was that I didn't want to plunge people into a surprise battle without it. I could move it to inside the cyber space, but it also helps serve as a focus of where you are meant to go in all that garish bling, so I dunno.. That teleporting back into cyberspace is well annoying, it will still happen with W1 teleports cos there are 4 entrances, I'll see if I can do something about that...

Demon of the Well said:

Map 07: The spiderdemon really doesn't work all that well here--just not enough space for him--but I guess he keeps you from bombarding the revenants from the good angle behind the reception desk.

yeah that mastermind is there to cause chaos with the monsters coming down the stairs (he doesn't cope well with being swamped in prboom though), what I like to do is save a manc to last and then unleash everything at once and use the spider as a meat shield. Not that it works all that well, but it is entertaining.

Demon of the Well said:

Map 08: 'Hunted' map, more atmospheric/cinematic than truly threatening. I see some texture mismatches (I think I react to one of them in the demo) in this one. One of the viles also never appears; in this case I'm not sure if he's actually stuck outside the play area or if I just didn't trigger him somehow, but I couldn't go back and look for him because the elevator can't be left upon re-entering it.

Nice texture spot, dunno how I missed that. The vile you missed (probably the same one plums missed) appears if you go back in the room with the medkits, as a punishment for people who make mistakes. If you are good at dealing with archviles though its not a tough map really, just a change of pace before the shitstorm to come. I did wonder if the lift locking you in would annoy people but there you go..

Demon of the Well said:

Map 11: The hell knight/barrel/lift setup seems a bit bodged-together and prone to malfunction, but it's not anything that breaks the map.

heh, that trap was a bit of an experiment. The best results seem to be if a monster sets it off by accident. A lot of these things are designed to be a bit unpredictable, mainly so I don't get bored playtesting.

Demon of the Well said:

Maybe I've understated it, but this is really, really cool, dude. Can't wait to see what kind of settings turn up in the other 21 maps. Finish this off to the same standard as this first episode, and this will probably become 'the' tiny-map megaWAD in my eyes.

excellent, glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the FDAs, very entertaining!

edit: I've fixed some of the issues and updated the link, so some of your demos won't work properly any more. Just mentioning that in case anyone else is watching them.

[mouldy]

plums said:

I also noticed that on the elevator switch, the green and red lights leak through a bit, using texture filtering with a GL port. You might want to move those linedefs in 1 unit closer, if you don't want to bite the bullet and just edit some textures.

I'll have to look into that. I might eventually do a new texture for that lift button, seeing as it is something you will see a lot of during the game I should make it a bit more iconic really.

Also you asked earlier about midi sound things, I think I use a default microsoft one - the best results for me seem to be fmod in zdoom and portmidi in prboom. Fluidsynth seems to make it sound a bit arse, and I don't know about any of the others..

[Magnusblitz]

Not really my style of gameplay (tons of enemies jam-packed into tiny rooms) but I gotta say, I really dig the theme and execution here. Each level feels like an office building level but still has it's own theme, so it's fun reaching the end of each stage and finding out what comes next.

Do we get to fight the CEO of UAC at the end? I remember seeing someone suggest that a while back ("fight through UAC headquarters and fight the CEO at the end") and this reminded me of it. :)

[Vermil]

Operation Body Count Doom!

That said, the first couple of levels didn't really grab me, but afterwards, well, changed my mind. That also said, as has been mentioned; I am intrigued as to how you'll get 32 maps out of this.

Kind of odd though that you have Doomguy start in front of the building and then have him go up to the roof, only to then go back down inside the building.

[mouldy]

Magnusblitz said:

Do we get to fight the CEO of UAC at the end?

heh thats a good idea actually, not sure how i would pull it off though

Vermil said:

I am intrigued as to how you'll get 32 maps out of this.

Me too...

[plums]

Hi I'm posting in this thread a lot, hope that's OK :P

Co-op is completely unplayable, because you can't leave the elevator once the doors close. The main changes in co-op are that weapons (apart from those dropped by enemies) stay but can only be picked up if you don't have them already, and that if you die you respawn on your player start from pistol start BUT the level doesn't reset. So if you die here, you're stuck in the elevator.

In PR/GLBoom+ you can use the parameter -solo-net to play a one-player game with co-op rules, that can help playtest maps in co-op. ZDoom probably can probably do something similar, haven't looked into it though.

I don't know if any of your levels will break beyond that. I suspect Map 8 will have problems. So will any voodoo doll death tricks, other than death-exits, since the dolls don't respawn. In general, don't worry about preserving any of a level's "flow" in co-op, just make it so the players can kill stuff and then leave, without getting stuck. If you really need to be clever about things, you can have P1 voodoo dolls that are single-player or multi-player only, to change the level geometry in different ways depending on the gametype being played.

MIDI: thanks, I would have assumed you'd go for a fancier MIDI setup since Windows' GM sounds so raw, but I guess it's a good baseline.

EDIT: if most of your levels are OK in co-op but a few are too much trouble, you can spawn an MP-only key in the starting area as way of saying "move along". Keys stay in co-op too, and in deathmatch players never need keys.

[mouldy]

interesting... not sure I can think of a way to fix that, the reason the door can't be opened from inside is so you can't open it after the lift starts going down, which is a purely cosmetic thing anyway...

I'll have a think about that

[The_MártonJános]

mouldy said:

Features:
New music
Difficulty settings
Generous carnage
90 degree angles (don’t worry it’ll get more abstract later)
Toilets

You, sir, have just made my day. :D
'll try later.

[Vermil]

mouldy said:

interesting... not sure I can think of a way to fix that, the reason the door can't be opened from inside is so you can't open it after the lift starts going down, which is a purely cosmetic thing anyway...

I'll have a think about that

Use a player 2 voodoo doll, that runs over a trigger at map start, that reveals an otherwise hidden repeatable use switch inside the elevators, that opens the elevator doors?

[mouldy]

Vermil said:

Use a player 2 voodoo doll, that runs over a trigger at map start, that reveals an otherwise hidden repeatable use switch inside the elevators, that opens the elevator doors?

That is a grand idea.

[plums]

mouldy said:

interesting... not sure I can think of a way to fix that, the reason the door can't be opened from inside is so you can't open it after the lift starts going down, which is a purely cosmetic thing anyway...

I'll have a think about that

Another possible solution:
You're already using a voodoo conveyor for the lift going down exit, right? If you add a Door close-wait-open linedef with a long enough wait on the conveyor, you won't be able to open the door until the wait is up, by which point you should have exited the level. It means an extra sound effect but should otherwise work I think.

Extremely crude example: http://www.mediafire.com/?hkyg731dyrl279m
Try the door-cube, then press the switch, then try the cube again.

EDIT: you've probably already got the door-close linedef on the conveyor, just change it to close-wait-open.

[mouldy]

plums said:

Another possible solution:
You're already using a voodoo conveyor for the lift going down exit, right? If you add a Door close-wait-open linedef with a long enough wait on the conveyor, you won't be able to open the door until the wait is up, by which point you should have exited the level. It means an extra sound effect but should otherwise work I think.

Extremely crude example: http://www.mediafire.com/?hkyg731dyrl279m
Try the door-cube, then press the switch, then try the cube again.

EDIT: you've probably already got the door-close linedef on the conveyor, just change it to close-wait-open.

heh, that totally confused me, but I think I've got a solution now: i'm using a multiplayer flagged barrel on a conveyor belt that triggers panels to open in the lift, revealing door opening switch and exit level switch (behind a yellow key door), so that way there should be no issues with voodoo dolls not appearing if players leave the game. Its a bit ugly but should work (and I can test it on my own)

[plums]

Sorry, I should really know better than to type things like that when I'm in a rush. Because it's such an easy fix, and more importantly to prove I'm not a bumbling idiot, here's what I did to make Map02 of your wad co-op friendly:

-The inside linedefs of the elevator door (linedefs 2686 & 2693) were flipped, changed to type 114 [SR Door Open Wait Close (fast)], and given sector tag 9. Now players can leave after they respawn.

-On your voodoo conveyor used for exiting the level: linedef 2729, the one that closes the elevator door, was changed to type 16208 [Generalized Door (W1, Close-Wait-Open action, Fast, 30 sec wait, no monsters)]. This has the effect of making the door inoperable by any means until the 30 second wait is over, and the voodoo doll will cross the exit linedef long before that. (Any door closing type should do, as long as it's a close-wait-open action and not just close and stay closed.)

That let me test it out with -solo-net, intentionally dying often to see what breaks. The one problem after that was the yellow key room. If one player goes in there, and dies before hitting the switch, the players are locked out of that room. Easily fixed by making the door openable from the other side.

If that is still unclear then it's a sign I need to get more sleep, but I can also upload my fixed version of Map02. (I don't like posting modifications of people's stuff without explicitly knowing they're OK with it.)

Then you should maybe read http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1103401#post1103401 and realize just what a hassle proper multiplayer support is with voodoo conveyors :( . Perhaps it's not worth it, and you should just stick a big "use at your own risk" warning in the text file. I don't want to be responsible for this mapset being unfinished by bogging you down with multiplayer problems! :P

[Katamori]

After a quick look, it's strongly promising! There'd be even possible that I'm gonna LP it asap.