[Release] Shadows of The Nightmare Realm - Updated 16 November 2023

[Remilia Scarlet]

@MysteriousHaruko The Youtube playlist is up, check the original post ^_^

[elderdragonbrasil]

I will study that "Cyberdemon2" stuff later. Really liked that behaviour. 

[Remilia Scarlet]

It's an extremely simple edit :-P

[Fonze]

6 hours ago, YukiRaven said:

Actually just one trigger, the raising of the secret exit teleporter along with some Wickeds that spawn around it ;^)

 

I also apparently can't English despite being a native speaker XD

Heh, yeah I figured I didn't need to say what it should be, but at the same time why do something half-way? Lol.

 

I actually didn't understand what you meant when you said this, but looking at it in the editor now I see; that's an interesting way to discover the secret map, heh. But I can't follow the script quite far enough to see everything that is happening... I never found any spawned Wickeds there (nor did the count increase) nor did I find a physical teleporter... I must be misunderstanding what happened.

[baja blast rd.]

Some thoughts as I play. I did map01 yesterday and map02 today. Hopefully this is helpful. 

 

map01

 

- That silent teleporter effect was very seamless. Nicely done. Digging the visuals and atmosphere.

- The fast little melee monster feels like it's too small for the amount of HP it has. I'd expect a monster of that size to go down in two, or even just one, SSG blast, but it takes three. I actually like the amount of HP it has from a gameplay standpoint, but visually it looks out of place.

- I'm not sure what the second (fire-shooting) lost soul variant that appears adds that the one that fires the circular rings doesn't. I mention this because the custom bestiary might verge on being a 'R667 grabbag' if too many superfluous monsters are added. 

- I really liked the trap in the lava area, imps warping in around the red brick switch. Ended up fleeing into the room with the baron, which was pretty exciting. I guess I see the point of that baron. :) 

- The creepy flying monster is pretty awesome, but seems a bit too weak for how imposing it looks, and also the art style doesn't mesh all that well with the Doom assets.  

- The 'your fate is sealed' announcement is campy but I guess it works. :D 

 

map02

 

- Early gameplay here is very camp-oriented. Either because there are lots of custom monsters and I'm not sure how they work yet so there's an incentive to play it safe, because rooms fill up with meat and force you out, or because of lots of hitscanners. map01 had some element of this too, but whereas the traps in map01 were often surprising (like the imps around the switch that pop out before you hit the switch, or the pair of doors that are linked, so opening one gets you flanked by monsters from the other), these are a bit more predictable, save the very first trap. 

- In the first outdoor area, I initially wanted to leave two of those monsters that fire fast blue fireballs alive, but they are serious blabbermouths and eventually used freelook to kill them because they were annoying me. :D 

- The underwater fight near the blue skull key is really awkward -- having to either fight underwater where you move very slowly, or pop into the water and take a popshot and then pop back out. Didn't find this one pleasant at all.

- I'm basically swimming in ammo at this point (90+ shells, 200+ bullets), so I don't think the PEs in the hallway add much. 

- I must say I like all of the new monsters introduced on this level in gameplay terms (again), but yeah, it's a bit weird having the dark bishop alongside the floating alien head thing alongside the stock Doom monsters. 

- I liked the trap right before the blue key door. The baron paired with the two lost souls, not so much (non-threatening frontal combat in a map that has had a bit too much of that already). I also liked the switch encounter with the manc + two chaingunners + mysterious floating things. 

- The arena fight with the stealth archviles was fun. Yeah, the idea of using stealth archviles is silly, but it was exciting. :D I think the archons of hell have way too much HP for their threat level, however, maybe twice as much as they need. The one on the ground was not a big deal, but cleaning up the two turret ones felt like it took too long. 

- There's a doorcamp fight needed to enter the area with the red key and its accompanying sidequests. Doesn't feel necessary. 

- I liked the exit fight, with the cyber + two archons + mastermind. It did feel weird that the cyber couldn't target the archons. Even though it would trivialize the encounter, it doesn't really look right. 

- Despite the early predictability of traps, there were more surprises by the end. 

 

[Remilia Scarlet]

Interesting thoughts!  I don't agree with them all, but it's nice to see what others think.  I make maps for myself (if others happen to like them, awesome), and I don't like most of the gameplay tropes that have developed in the Doom community over the years, so my maps are inherently designed around what I enjoy.

 

Anyway, the monsters were carefully chosen for various reason - the Rictus (the flaming lost soul thing), for me, tends to be a bit confusing because of all the fire it spews.

 

Things that you say "don't look right" are what I was going for.  Remember, these are the Doomguy's dreams, so having a variety of styles is perfectly acceptable - dreams don't always make sense.  Plus the Grells, which are the slime-spewing things I think you were talking about, look hellish and D&D-like to me rather than alien.

 

The Satyrs are intended to be very tough melee fighters.  I go for "higher HP" instead of monster counts, 'cause I usually don't like huge number of enemies.  Personal preference.

 

As for the underwater fight, I just grab the plasma rifle from the little hole and attack with that.  There's more than enough ammo to take out all of those enemies before you need air.  In fact, I never come up for air there until I get all the items and kill everything.

[DoodGuy]

You really like flying annoying cunts that can withstand a ssg blast!

[Varis Alpha]

just a sidenote, but the FLAC link on your website leads to a copy of Doom Remastered, and not the SOTNR soundtrack!

 

i just finished playing through this, and i enjoyed it. it's visually striking, and the architecture is pretty bizarre, which fits the tone well, alongside the music.

 

i did have a couple gripes with it altogether though, most notably some of the trial-and-error traps were annoying (dropping into lava, being instagibbed by a crusher), mostly because of them not being the most obvious. i feel like there could've been at least some stairs or a teleporter in the lava pits to get you back to high ground, and that instadeath crusher just made me cheat altogether because of how cheap it felt. i also didn't realize that the teleporters in the boss arena was how you were supposed to beat it at first, it could be made a bit more obvious (or maybe i'm just blind and oblivious to these things.)

 

aside from those chief moments of frustration though, i liked it! it was a bit short, but enjoyable. i'm gonna try and find the secret level tomorrow, i'm curious as to what it is. and download the soundtrack too (when the FLAC version is up that is :P)

[DoodGuy]

Just finished it, I was kinda dissapointed with the ending, but hey, good wad, nice music and architecture.

 

P.S. fuk archons of hell

[ZeMystic]

This is easily a 10/10 so beautifully done, all of it fits so well and works perfectly. Please never stop making maps.

[Remilia Scarlet]

I don't plan to ^_^  But I do plan to take a long break from Doom and focus on Quake instead.

[Nine Inch Heels]

Any word on when this is available on the archives?

 

Nevermind... I fail at reading...

[Misty]

1 minute ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Any word on when this is available on the archives?

It is in archives already,check first page. 

[R1ck]

I'm a pleb for playing it on easy mode :I my shit piece of junk with GT610 had a hard time running it below 40fps. Love the atmosphere love the art that I hate; spectres in dark places. hates that blood spitting skeletons.

 

9/10. this should be an insta-cacoward :D

[Dragonfly]

Played through on Normal difficulty and  I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I felt a couple of moments here and there were cheap (mostly on the 3rd level, such as the instant crusher, and weird gimmicks all round (I do understand this is a nightmare realm of sorts, so I'll let you off :P) but aside from those minor inconveniences I enjoyed it all the way to the end. I didn't experience the secret level, so perhaps a second play through is in order eventually.

Lighting was fantastic, the music was also brilliant. I feel this could be a valid contender for a cacoward this year! ;)

[Remilia Scarlet]

Glad to hear it ^_^

 

The secret level isn't anything special, and was an afterthought thrown in for nostalgia.  Maybe I'll do something with it someday, though.

[Phade102]

I'm not sure if Yuki can answer this, or anyone else, but is the lighting in this wad done via acs scripting? or is it something that can be done in gzdoom builder? I only seem to be able to get coloured fog, was wondering if there was another trick O.o

[Misty]

5 minutes ago, Phade102 said:

I'm not sure if Yuki can answer this, or anyone else, but is the lighting in this wad done via acs scripting? or is it something that can be done in gzdoom builder? I only seem to be able to get coloured fog, was wondering if there was another trick O.o

I should stop being stalker,but you can get light effects in sector mode and with scripts too in gzdoom builder. Also you can create dynamic lights too. 

[Phade102]

9 minutes ago, MysteriousHaruko said:

I should stop being stalker,but you can get light effects in sector mode and with scripts too in gzdoom builder. Also you can create dynamic lights too. 

Yeah i've played around a bit, I can get a nice glow effect, was just wondering how some specific lighting effects work. its hard to explain. i'll figure it out.

 

 

I dont mind you stalking me ^^

[Misty]

10 minutes ago, Phade102 said:

Yeah i've played around a bit, I can get a nice glow effect, was just wondering how some specific lighting effects work. its hard to explain. i'll figure it out.

 

 

I dont mind you stalking me ^^

Easiest way is load maps in gzdoom builder and study them,how everything was made. 

[leodoom85]

GZDB-Bugfix, especially in UDMF, allows Doom 64 colored lighting as well as glow and of course, different types of light like phased, static, substractive and additive light things. For the colored lighting and the glow effect, you can go to the sector properties and play it with the options there :)

[Remilia Scarlet]

It was all done in GZDoomBuilder (and -Bugfix, which I only discovered three weeks ago), but I never used any of the Doom64-style glowing sector lights.  To edit a sector's color, hit "K" while pointing at its floor in visual mode.  Pointing at the ceiling probably works as well.  Hitting "K" while pointing at a light thing is how you can adjust those.  That's probably the easiest way if you're like I am.

 

For all the levels I started with a base sector light color, and a fade color if I wanted fog.  A few sectors would have their brightness changed as-needed, mostly to emphasize lights or outdoor areas, but otherwise a level is the same brightness throughout.  Everything else was done with normal Light things and additive Light things.  Only a little bit of ACS was used to turn on/off some Light things, and for the lightning effect on level 3.

 

Levels 3 and 4 were actually very, very dark and were lit almost exclusively with the Light things.  It wasn't until much later that I realized this provided a look closer to what I was aiming for, so the other levels had a higher base sector brightness.  If I was lighting an area with an overhead window, I would usually use lights with a radius of 256 or so and stack multiple copies of them vertically at different heights.  This gave me a lot more control over the spread and the shadows than just using one light in the middle with a very large radius.

 

The lightning was done with Light things that had RGB values of 0, 0, 0 and 0 intensity.  Each one had a tag of 5280 (which has no special meaning in Doom, I just chose it because it's my hometown's elevation).  There was then a master lightning ACS script that would call one of five other scripts, chosen randomly.  These five others were programmed to flash all things with a tag of 5280 in a certain pattern with the thunder sound coming a certain amount of time later.  You can see the source code for it if you open the pk3 in SLADE, then open the maps/corax03.wad file in a separate tab.

 

Here's an example from the third level.  I have full brightness turned on in the first screenshot, where you can see a bunch of light things.  Not all of those are active - some were for the lightning effect.

 

 

 

All of that is done with lights.  And a few things that had GLDEFS :-P

[Phade102]

Wow Yuki, thats...absolutely amazing. I would love to make a map as atmospheric as that. ill have to practice. thank you for that awesome explanation!

[Dragonfly]

@Phade102 - you would genuinely be surprised how easy it is. Using these dynamic light objects add so much to a map that your architecture can be of lesser quality and the map still look good as long as the lighting is crafted carefully. What you see here in SotNR is not only good lighting but good texturework and architecture, which makes the whole entire mapset much better.

[Phade102]

3 hours ago, Dragonfly said:

@Phade102 - you would genuinely be surprised how easy it is. Using these dynamic light objects add so much to a map that your architecture can be of lesser quality and the map still look good as long as the lighting is crafted carefully. What you see here in SotNR is not only good lighting but good texturework and architecture, which makes the whole entire mapset much better.

I agree absolutely!

[Tracer]

Oh yes.  I have been eagerly awaiting this release.  I will download it after dinner and send you an in depth review.

[Kotzugi]

I hope this doesn't count as a necro, just wanted to say that I really enjoyed this, it is incredibly atmospheric (music, sound effects and graphics all combine very nicely), hard mode is quite hard but not ridiculous. Last map I had to cheat at the you-know-what parts, I'm sure there is a solution but couldn't figure it out yet. I actually really liked the ending which I think was fitting with the dark theme. Perhaps the boss could have been a bit bigger though. I'll stop here since I don't want to spoil.

 

Interesting additions to the bestiary although the new monsters tend to be a bit too small. Other than that I think they're mostly good. Not completely convinced that the Hexen monster is necessary, although something like that would still fit with the theme.

 

Someone has mentioned the existence of (mostly lava) pits where you just drop in and don't die, I think it would be more realistic if those surfaces did damage.

 

Someone mentioned that the voices are a bit camp or cliché or whatever, I like them though since they add to the atmosphere.

 

Love the music. Make more!

 

9/10, Cacoward material.

[Varis Alpha]

i was going to download the soundtrack, but it seems like your site is down right now?

[Remilia Scarlet]

It is, it'll be up again soon.

[leodoom85]

The soundtrack is great for the mapset. It's really immersive, so props to you Yuki :)