Mano Laikas: Doom2 megawad ready for playtesting

[nicolas monti]

Well, I'm back. I thought Erkattäññe was my last shot but I wanted to make more maps so here we are.
Mano Laikas is a full "classic" Doom2 megawad. Aesthetics are pretty simple, the themes vary from E1, E2, alpha and what I call "heteroclites" and my goal as for Erkattäññe was to make mid sized maps with moderate monster count so they can be completed in 10-15 minutes at best. Also I seem to have developed a style that some praise and some others hate (those who rate my episodes with 0/1 stars and give lame excuses for doing so) and I'm fine with that. You'll find some maps linear and some non linear, some maps with big height differences and some very flat (ressembling the early Id maps / 1994 wads).

Now on the gameplay, I want to know if you have some progression problems, if you feel that health or ammo is too tight at some point(s) or some trap is unfair /bullshit I'll make the necessary adjustments. This mapset also encourages the use of the rocket launcher (except for the cramped maps) because I didn't want this to become a SSG fest as it usually happens.
Also notifications about any bug as a missing texture behind a lift, a stuck enemy etc. is welcome. As always, sorry for my english.

Idgames link: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/megawads/manolaik

beta updates:

04 updates (almost final):
*Some cell cut on maps 14-19 and 27-29 and other minor ammo quantity redistribution.
*fixed possible HOM when lowering the lift after lowering the central bridge in map13
*map22: "linedef 485 action seems redundant to me. It just mirrors linedef 748. I think it would be better if that switch lower sector 96 instead, in case player made a loop for some reason."fixed (wrong tag numbers).
*map26: Two unmarked secrets fixed and arachnotrons + AV trap now has an indent for the player to take cover.
*map27: "the secret sector 117 should have monsters blocking lines on top. I found it because the elevator was activated by the revenant. Also nearby the linedef 635 (with a monsters-only teleport) redirects to the sector 117 which hasn't a teleport destination." fixed (wrong tag numbers).
*fixed lift on SW secret area of map31 leading to the red key and backpack added.

03 updates:
*Some few less cells on maps 05-08.
*Stuck arachnotron if teleported in map02 fixed.
*Secret "brokenable" if activated too early (when the platform still descends) in map08 fixed.
*"Hard to press" secret switch on map09 fixed.
*Easier pillar strafe-jumping on map10 and more identifiable lift on previous section
*Red key trap toned down on map12.
*Monsters unable to leave chainsaw room in map14 fixed.
*Empty secret on map17 fixed.
*Two "bleeding" textures on map20 fixed.
*Broken secret lift at SW area on map31 fixed.

02 updates:
* More impassable lines added on windows for various levels to prevent zdoom "super" AV jumping into forbidden places.
* Added several "hidden" and "secret" lines to secret areas (credit to Skepticist for explaining me how those properties work).
* HOM behind secret lift on map01 fixed.
* BK trap enhanced in map21.
* Some cell cutting out on several levels (a few) to prevent BFG abuse on continuous play, still pistol start friendly.

01 updates:
* Several impassable lines added on windows for various levels to prevent zdoom "super" AV jumping into forbidden places. (why you do this zdoom...)
* Map05's broken lift on pit and mispelled level's name fixed.
* 2 (false) slime trails on map01 and map10 fixed.
* 2 hanging bodies relocated on map19 due being on initially 0 units height sectors.

00 first version.














The maps:

Map01: Rehearsal
Map02: Akruuna
Map03: Matryoshka
Map04: Viluy
Map05: Dagaz und Nahtiz
Map06: Amethyst
Map07: Pasaulis
Map08: Vertical Damage
Map09: Bhogwos
Map10: Kuchean
Map11: Eudial

Map12: In Vitro
Map13: Yolowantre
Map14: Melan Aster
Map15: Ankaare
Map16: Venter
Map17: Defectum
Map18: Siaubas
Map19: Palsko Tekinne
Map20: Ruki

Map21: Tallaarne
Map22: Natsumi
Map23: Oberon Base
Map24: Krentauna
Map25: Deimologics
Map26: Astare Lakle
Map27: Turfanian
Map28: Cyanide
Map29: Chemistry of Sadness
Map30: Por Siempre

Map31: Ninety Four
Map32: Gamzatti

Edited June 23, 2020 by nicolas monti

[AnonimVio]

yes.


Going to play this immediately.

[Deadwing]

OMG, need to play this.

I fucking loved Erkattäññe :D

[baja blast rd.]

Pistol starts, UV, prBoom+ cl2, little or no saving.

Map01: I like how this starts out as "a usual map01" but deviates soon after, with higher-tier opposition and the SSG. Not a fan of the distant chaingunners in the upper room. Health was quite sparse early on, courtesy of hitscanners like that. HOM here: http://i.imgur.com/CeLM59O.png.

Map02: Cool vista. I like the wide-open spaces. This room with the strobing light is literally painful on the eyes:http://i.imgur.com/EkcWQtX.png.

[gaspe]

Cool! But this is for vanilla right?

[nicolas monti]

gaspe said:

Cool! But this is for vanilla right?

Vanilla, tested with chocolate doom exclusively

rdwpa said:

Pistol starts, UV, prBoom+ cl2, little or no saving.

Map01: I like how this starts out as "a usual map01" but deviates soon after, with higher-tier opposition and the SSG. Not a fan of the distant chaingunners in the upper room. Health was quite sparse early on, courtesy of hitscanners like that. HOM here: http://i.imgur.com/CeLM59O.png.

Map02: Cool vista. I like the wide-open spaces. This room with the strobing light is literally painful on the eyes:http://i.imgur.com/EkcWQtX.png.

Thanks, that kind of "HOM" happens too in some stairs on map10, I guess it's related to slime trails, I don't know how to fix that *-*

[baja blast rd.]

I had it in my latest level. Jiggling around the vertices seemed to help.

[scifista42]

It's a result of a node builder error, which happen with greater probability when a map's geometry is very irregular and specially when there are linedefs which are almost perfectly but not 100% perfectly collinear with each other, which is the case of your bugged linedef too - the nearby three linedefs are only slightly out of collinearity. Change the map geometry to make them perfectly collinear, and it will probably help once you rebuild the nodes.

MAP01 was awesome, looking forward to play the rest. Thanks for this!

[kmxexii]

very cool! judging by your post are you done with Reticula?

[baja blast rd.]

Map03-05: lol I'm loving all these CYBERS. I laughed so hard at the first one. So audacious.

Map04: Feels like an Erkattanne level with the music choice, which seemed odd/jarring around the more conventional music of maps 01-03 and 05.

Map05: This level seems pretty broken. There's a switch texture in the exit nukage pit that doesn't do anything. I guess that might be a troll and it's meant to be an inescapable death pit. I AV-jumped to the outdoor soulsphere secret purely by accident and had to IDCLIP out.

[dobu gabu maru]

Cool to hear! I'm a bit all Monti'd out right now but this is definitely going on my "to play" list.

[Ashstrodamus]

Finished map 01 and did some of map 02. Game play feels pretty balanced. Levels are huge, thus making the secrets harder to find. Not a fan of hunting for secrets and hit-scanners make the large areas a little tough/annoying, but all in all, so far I like it....a lot.

[nicolas monti]

rdwpa said:

I had it in my latest level. Jiggling around the vertices seemed to help.

scifista42 said:

It's a result of a node builder error, which happen with greater probability when a map's geometry is very irregular and specially when there are linedefs which are almost perfectly but not 100% perfectly collinear with each other, which is the case of your bugged linedef too - the nearby three linedefs are only slightly out of collinearity. Change the map geometry to make them perfectly collinear, and it will probably help once you rebuild the nodes.

MAP01 was awesome, looking forward to play the rest. Thanks for this!

Thanks both, I've managed to fix that in the two levels it happened without "desecrating" the smooth curves of those stairs :), fixes available on the next version.

rdwpa said:

Map03-05: lol I'm loving all these CYBERS. I laughed so hard at the first one. So audacious.

Map04: Feels like an Erkattanne level with the music choice, which seemed odd/jarring around the more conventional music of maps 01-03 and 05.

Map05: This level seems pretty broken. There's a switch texture in the exit nukage pit that doesn't do anything. I guess that might be a troll and it's meant to be an inescapable death pit. I AV-jumped to the outdoor soulsphere secret purely by accident and had to IDCLIP out.

The cybers.. Yep, BFG at hand too, to be fair!
Those 2 issues on map05 will be fixed on the next version, the nukage lift was something I forgot to tag, not trolling, at least like that :)
About the AV Jumping, I never thought they could raise the player at that height, it never happened to me at least in chocolate doom. But impassable lines will be present to prevent what happened to you.

kmxexii said:

very cool! judging by your post are you done with Reticula?

I'm done by now, I have some ideas for the next episodes of Reticula. Some ancient themes as I did for map06. We'll see, but it won't happen soon I guess.

[Salt-Man Z]

Yay, more Monti maps! (Still holding out hope for Favillesco 3, though.)

[Firedust]

YEEEEEEEES, downloading immediately, gonna play this for the whole weekend. Love your maps, dude. :)

[Superluigieth1]

Hey Monti, are you up for the challenge for Favillesco 3 using DoomEd?

[Shanoa]

I completed from MAP01 to MAP08 and stopped at MAP09. I gotta say so far it's a lot of fun, you have quite a...particular way of designing the layout and texturing, that said it makes it all the more interesting to play. I do love how large the playfields are.


If i had a nitpick, its the lighting from MAP08 but beside that, i look forward to play more.

[nicolas monti]

Salt-Man Z said:

Yay, more Monti maps! (Still holding out hope for Favillesco 3, though.)

I'm not seeing Favillesco 3 in the near future, Reticula maps 03 an 10 fit the E3 theme pretty well though. We'll see.

Superluigieth1 said:

Hey Monti, are you up for the challenge for Favillesco 3 using DoomEd?

After doing half of Eviltech with DoomEd I'd prefer to die before touching that software again, mostly due its crashes, not to mention using the calculator for some sector's height because of the lack of view mode. Favillesco E2M9 was edited mostly with DoomEd too, back in 2008 I think, so it's officially the first favillesco map.

Thanks to all for trying this new wad!

[Demon of the Well]

Yes, this is definitely going on the 'to play' list, you went a long way towards winning me over with your last release, and I'd like to see how you'll handle a truly longform WAD progression now that you've gained quite a lot of experience from your EvilTech days. I quite like the screenshots I'm seeing here, too--lots of big, tall, airy spaces with long views, just my sort of thing. I still see some histrionically ugly non-alignment in places, but surely I'll survive. ;)

[scifista42]

So far I've casually blasted through many of these maps as far as I could. Their artstyle and gameplay work perfectly to give me what I like in Doom (non-linearity, non-orthogonality, abstract semirealism, quirkiness, balance, "bright mood" even in dark maps...) and don't care about what I also don't need to care about (polish, strictness, "artificial" trope-heavy fancy-ness...). This is becoming one of my all time favorite wads for sure and will stay in my folder for such wads to occasionally replay for a long time to come. I specially like how you notably (even if maybe not fully) refrained from design choices that made your previous mapsets less fun for me than they could have been (unbalanced fights, lengthy repetitiveness...). The only flaw I find on this wad is that it reuses the same music which I already knew from Erkattanne, which I already knew from your Alpha Episodes, which I already knew from Eviltech. You reuse music from your own wads quite a bit too much.

[AD_79]

So it appears that I have to be that guy... I had a good look around this and, honestly, I don't like it in the slightest. It feels like 32 maps of the exact same idea, 32 maps of monti doing nothing but going through the motions, as it were. Every map I went through had the exact same gameplay ideas and the same generic blobby architecture. I can't say it felt "classic", it's more along the lines of lazy. And monti, we need to have a chat about your arch-vile usage. I've been criticized in the past for "arch-vile overuse" but this is just absurd. It seems every map has a load of viles used in very similar ways. I can't count the number of times I saw a vile (or viles) behind a load of monsters. Don't get me wrong, I like arch-viles! But this... this is dumb. Please tone down your vile usage in the future, and while you're at it, come up with some more inspired encounters and general design. Because this feels as uninspired and lazy as it gets.

Spoiler

There were a couple bits here and there that I more-or-less thought were okay (MAP07's layout and MAP30 appearing to do something different up until the point where it turned into a generic monti map + icon of sin are a couple of those rare moments).

tl;dr: Sorry, I don't like this megawad.

[joe-ilya]

Is this a parody of WOOO? What's with the huge flat bland areas all over the wad?

[SFoZ911]

Played the first three maps. Surprisingly more difficult than your previous work but I like it quite a lot. I also like the layouts and the general architecture but goddamn why the lazy texturing? Also cool music choices and skies. I'm enjoying it so far and I'm definitely looking forward for the rest of the maps.

[Deadwing]

I've played two levels so far and loved both. It feels quite different from Erktainne, with even more open spaces and encoraging Rocket Launcher used. I'm impressed with how you can do so much with so little lol If you're not careful, an encounter of few imps and sergeants can be quite deadly lol

[molten_]

I love your mapping style.

[Chris Hansen]

It's funny how some people get praise and cacoward nominations while other people get screamed at and gets excluded from projects for something that looks like this. Weird.

[scifista42]

I don't see anything weird, considering that:
1. Texturing/visuals aren't everything that matters.
2. People have different tastes and preferences.
3. It's possible for any and every map to get excluded from a project, depending on the leader and the policies of the project in question, and these policies don't have to be about some "objective quality" only, but about design style or map length or fitting-ness to maps already in the project, or anything. Nicolas Monti obviously approves his own maps in his own project. :)

[Chris Hansen]

Well of course. And I agree. But that does not make my statement any less true. If a certain someone had posted these screenshots it would not have generated a fraction of these positive responses. And that my friend is food for thought or still; just plain weird.

[Ashstrodamus]

Chris Hansen said:

Well of course. And I agree. But that does not make my statement any less true. If a certain someone had posted these screenshots it would not have generated a fraction of these positive responses. And that my friend is food for thought or still; just plain weird.

I'll tell you one thing, god do I hate his secrets method. That's a big thing for my wad enjoyment and a lot of success on FDA's depends on finding these obscure-ass secrets. The secrets I have found depend on walking over a line and then hunting for the wall opening, and I despise that. I do find the gameplay pretty balanced though.

[Salt-Man Z]

Chris Hansen said:

Well of course. And I agree. But that does not make my statement any less true. If a certain someone had posted these screenshots it would not have generated a fraction of these positive responses. And that my friend is food for thought or still; just plain weird.

Part (a lot) of that, though, is based on familiarity with the author's prior work. In this case, a lot of people really enjoy Monti's maps; he could have posted sans screenshots and there would have been near the same level of excitement.

I will agree about the secrets, though; I've just forced myself to concede the fact that I'll be lucky to find half of them, and leave it at that.