Saturnine Chapel - Now on /idgames

[Steve D]

dobu gabu maru said:

I'll toss the double-lift hitting stuff as a compromise.

Yes!!!!!! I hope that means the panel on the second swith is permanently lowered after hitting the first switch. After all, keyboarders bump into shit and have a hard time with that stuff. I had to consult the map in DB2 to figure that sucker out. SteveD say, "Make fights hard, but progress easy." ;)

[durian]

Neat map! Some very cool aspects to the visual-design, especially all the synchronised light changes, and the inventive use of stock textures.

The one thing I'd suggest is tackling the slime trails - I spotted a fair few just having a casual run-around. They shouldn't be too much trouble to fix, though probably best to do this after you make any other geometry changes.

[dobu gabu maru]

Saturnine Chapel is now on /idgames!

Not too many changes here—got rid of the second lift in the snakelight room and tried my best to remove skips that rdwpa/Mr.Zzul found. I also added a couple "bonuses" (including a teaser for the sequel I'll probably never get around to making :P). Thanks again to everyone that played it and gave feedback!

Also if you enjoyed the visuals but disliked the gameplay, then I hope you look forward to PANOPHOBIA releasing some time this year, where I've been working closely with residential Lord of Chaos mouldy to deliver a megawad that both captivates and frightens, but is substantially more fun* to play.

_*hopefully

[Demon of the Well]

'grats on the release. Looking forward to Panophobia!

[Steve D]

I'm also looking forward to Panophobia. I know you've been working on it a long time, and with mouldy on board, that's a project I simply can't miss.

[koren]

Congratulations on the release. This is a remarkable map.

[Nevander]

Just got around to playing this. Amazing job, and hard even on Easy+ but then again maybe I suck.

My FPS got destroyed at the spawn area but in-map it was fine. I've always wondered what causes a map to tank FPS like that since I've played tons of maps with a lot of stuff going on and no noticeable drops (something like Holy Hell). Anyway, enough complaining about my suck ass frame rate.

I really liked those floating bookcases that had the light effect going across them. Lots of cool effects and the map itself was pretty eerie to play, I felt the theme for sure.

[mouldy]

Finally got around to playing this. A real bloody work of art mate! So many cool visual touches, I love the diagonal bookshelves, and the clever scenery mechanics.

Gameplay is not my cup of tea, as you probably already know. I played it on "normal" and its way too cramped/trial-and-error for my taste, I dread to think what the higher settings are like! I did like that fight with the moving platform though, once I had had died a few times working out what was happening and got lucky with a kind cyberdemon.

Dunno how you manage to churn out all these amazing looking maps.

[tourniquet]

Grats on releasing this work of art. Nice that you've added some sort of epilogue as second map, very cool scenery. I'm totally looking forward to Panophobia.

[Killer5]

Oh this is now on idgames? Sick. Looking forwards to more of your stuff.. really enjoyed this and your dmp2016 map!

[dobu gabu maru]

mouldy said:

Gameplay is not my cup of tea, as you probably already know.

Haha, yeah—this originally started as a DMP2016 submission but I didn't want to subject unsuspecting players to this kind of gameplay, nor tone it down, so it became an offshoot so I could more naturally control how people approached it. Plus it's kinda cathartic for me to make a map this cramped and rude every once and a while, as it keeps my killer-instinct out of a lot of my other stuff.

tourniquet said:

Nice that you've added some sort of epilogue as second map, very cool scenery.

That's not the only bonus I've added ;) Might need to peek around in SLADE

[Magnusblitz]

Cool little map, though 'little' obviously doesn't capture the complexity of it. I think my feelings are pretty similar to a lot of others... it's pretty damn amazing looking (especially the opening vista), and I think you succeeded in your aims on the gameplay of making me uncomfortable, but it's not really my preferred gameplay style.

The first time I missed the chaingun and died quite horribly inside the house. Next time, I made sure to use some monster infighting and cruised pretty easily until the 'dodge the fireballs and wait' area, which took me a few tries. The cyberdemon/moving circle fight is really damned cool, though I agree it can feel a bit RNG-ish with whether or not the cyberdemon decides to step in the way of the path or not (I was at 101 hp thanks to the berserk beforehand, but a lot of health gets burnt while waiting for the room to develop, so I didn't feel like I could really step off the path at all). After that the only fight that gave me trouble was the final cyberdemon, mainly because like Jimmy I came out of the rev/AV fight almost no health and any rocket splash killed me.

So yeah, not my style, but really cool for what it is.

[NinjaLiquidator]

I like the style of this, its like you were capturing someones dream. STEPx midtextures are looking good there. The renames/ change of UI, the fact that you left slots for middle key and weapons except 246 blank is also cool. Also bookcases falling down in map2 remembered me on bug in my own fps game that also happened on map1-map2 transition, when I deleted the static map model but elevators were left there so they kept going down in blank space :D I doubt it was your intention, but the similiarity was striking for me.

[dobu gabu maru]

Hey all, I was doing some Spring cleaning and found my original draft for the map.

 

 

The above is a loose outline of what I was aiming for, the encounters enumerated at the bottom left. This was back when the room where the PG is was supposed to be two separate rooms, the foyer had no set encounter (and was supposed to have chairs surrounding the RK), and the finale was designed to take place entirely in the floating bookshelf room. Naturally as I started to flesh the chapel out, plans began to crumble, especially since I was working with an extremely tight layout. I also completely ignored the texture and enemy limitation too :P Since the map is essentially "finished", I suppose I'll also do a quick post-mortem on it while I'm here.

 

As a lot of people pointed out, Saturnine Chapel is extremely belligerent, more-so than any of my other maps. My intention when I first started was threefold: 1) I wanted an SFALL sky, 2) I wanted the gameplay to take place inside a series of small rooms, and 3) I wanted the player to die more times than there were enemies on the map. I was originally going to submit it to DMP2016 but as Saturnine Chapel started to come together I figured it was too cruel to attach to a project where people already hate playing crappy & unfair maps, so I opted for a solo release. This let me expand on the concept a little more by adding custom UI graphics and adding some lore in the text file, intermission text, & boss death sfx. And most importantly, a solo release let me completely disregard any complaints about difficulty!

 

I don't mean this to sound like "my level is perfectly balanced and if you think otherwise you suck at Doom!"—since I intentionally sought to murder the player over and over, I wanted the look, feel, and message of the map to accurately convey that. I tried to craft something gloomy, something corrupt, something bizarre; I wanted players to feel uncomfortable playing it because they didn't belong there. This isn't your typical "demons have invaded" map, where you pick up a shotgun and blast your way to victory; here you're penetrating into a dead man's emotionally damaged unconscious, and the remaining scraps of his fraught mind will fight tooth and nail to keep this hallowed dreamscape alive. I know it doesn't translate well into gameplay befitting of Doom (I tried to make it somewhat fun at least!), but I felt that if a player could waltz into the chapel and emerge from it alive, then I had failed the central premise of the map itself.

 

Beyond that, there's a couple of strange visuals that I tried to keep logistically consistent. For instance, in this landscape all metal exists as living vegetation, whereas the pitch-black trees in the glowing sectors are aberrations that emanate decay. It was also pretty tricky constructing a building with stock Doom 2 textures while simultaneously refusing to use a lot of typical Doom staples, like removing most hell iconography and any/all signs of blood or damage from the Chapel (boy did I miss the ability to slap SUPPORT3 everywhere). The glowing bars I imagined to be benign shafts harvested from the black trees, which share some form of synergy with the chapel's texts (the bookcases in the floating bookcase room glow because they're attached to these shafts). Speaking of, it might seem nonsensical how/where some of the books are placed (a number of them are incorporeal after all!) but my main idea wasn't to construct a library but rather erect a monument built out of books to serve as reverence to the books. It doesn't matter that you can't open the tomes and read their poisonous scrawl; the chapel wasn't built to be used, it was built because the vile books had willed it to be, completely independent of any observer, curator, or architect. The dreamer Foslanp Lakob (whose nonsense name is an anagram for SFALL PANBOOK) was a spiritual slave to the tower, never its master.

 

Thanks once again to everyone that played the map; if I ever continue the MNENMA series, I definitely want to continue to explore the idea of broken dreamers discovering surreal & cruel dreamscapes (though perhaps I'll tone down the difficulty a tad). It'll definitely take years to make though, so don't hold your breath!

[NinjaLiquidator]

Thats cool, I was never thinking of giving my maps a story! Are you somehow logging mapping time? I wonder how many hours this took - my guess is like 30-40. I recorded a gameplay and I think your "die more than monster count" is checked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56zszdmGcek

but I would like somebody skilled to UV-Max this. It definitely deserves.

[Dragonfly]

1 hour ago, NinjaLiquidator said:

Are you somehow logging mapping time? I wonder how many hours this took - my guess is like 30-40.

I can tell you now it was very likely a lot more than only 40 hours. I wouldn't bat an eyelid if Dobu said 10 times that number of hours.

That was an interesting read @dobu gabu maru, thanks for the write-up, and again, thanks for the map too. Very entertaining. :)

[dobu gabu maru]

7 hours ago, Dragonfly said:

I can tell you now it was very likely a lot more than only 40 hours.

Mmmmm I think it probably took around 60? Manually adjusting a lot of the mechanical parts wasted a ton of time—like recalibrating those lights spiraling around the chapel three separate times, adding scores of "Floor/Ceiling Change Brightness to this Brightness" tags, creating a stupid amount of voodoo doll sectors to ensure everything happens simultaneously—but I'd say this didn't take too much longer than any of the other maps I've worked on. At least since I was working with a set amount of space the map couldn't spiral out of control... playtesting was also significantly faster than my larger 30+ minute maps.

[Dragonfly]

60 hours would be really good going. I have a habit of spending way too long play testing.

>Makes subtle change to ammo distribution, adds 3 or so enemies.
> Re-tests entire level again