rdwpa

You're going to want: - Screenshots and/or gameplay videos. - Better formatting. (Feel free to copy the contents of this spoiler. I didn't change any of the words.) - A file that can be confidently downloaded. Glancing at the contents, that zip doesn't look like it's meant to be unpacked -- so it should be named with a .pk3 extension to signal that definitively and make sure no one inadvertently unpacks it. Read this page on organizing pk3s properly. The tips in this post will certainly be of use. My overall recommendation would be to focus primarily on getting help organizing your post and file better, and then seek feedback on the mod itself afterwards.

Everyone likes different things. You aren't the target audience. Etc.

Maybe you can get Jake Paul to play this. Just remember to D.A.B. (Doom All Boisterously) on them haters!

December 10th of the previous year onward.* Late-year releases from shortly before that are welcome too.

Played UV continuous. I found maps 01-03 more dangerous than than 04-09. Health pickups are sparse, hitscanners are abundant, and being blindsided by a shotgunner can take away a lot of the healing available. Never quite got into a truly perilous situation, but I felt I at least had to concentrate. After that opening stretch, continuous play allows resources to snowball, and I became a marching death machine with lots of ammo, often taking >100 HP and full green armor into the next level, despite usually finding only around half of the secrets. 08 was the easiest of the bunch, 25 monsters that are little match for a continuous load out. (In retrospect, the map title and music, along with this presentation, feels very tongue in cheek.) In 09, I immediately got suspicious and Despite that, I still enjoyed that middle stretch of maps, by focusing on exploration. It's just that the balance felt . . . unintentionally lenient in light of 01-03. Thinking about exactly why, the backpack secret in 02 (amazing music here btw) is a substantial part of it. Backpacks are quite powerful in continuous play, and this one is both early and easy to spot. 10 felt like a return to the expected difficulty curve, particularly due to the use of archviles, and 11 was a fitting closer. In another thread, you mentioned that a mix of obvious and less-obvious secrets was intended, but a small handful are too obvious imo. The degree of obviousness I'm referring to is best captured by 05's secret green armor, the one a short run from the red skull key -- it's honestly harder to miss than the key. :P On the visual front, this was nice to see, a mix of an oldschool vibe and ethos coupled with a modern polish and well flowing layouts. Authorial voice is evident.

I see that school let out early today.

People who hate silly threads.

On 21, that one has a seemingly obvious trick to skip the map. It also didn't immediately strike me as being a trick: viewed from a distance the switch looks parallel enough to the edge of the platform that 'hit switch -> run into teleporter' presents itself as a logical sequence -- likely not for progression, but certainly for a possible secret.

10: FAT32 Silly map. Had some fun racing through this one. 11: Infinite Loop A fun one. One recurring element of Doom 404 is roaming monsters that can control a lot of space. This shows up in many forms, from small groups of monsters that waltz across the map to greet you all the way up to hordes and swarms, like Infinite Loop introduces. Another element is that routing makes a big difference in difficulty (which is quite atypical for maps that are comfortably easier than hardcore slaughter stuff). That is something I enjoy because Doom maps are part action, part combat puzzle to me. The 'survival' route in this map actually happens to begin just about identically to the 'quick UV-max' route: loop around and grab all the stuff on the periphery, including that crucial secret radsuit, and then empty lots of rockets into the gasbags that have now bunched up. All of that is pretty safe. The main difference is that in the survival route, you can take it easy after entering the blue key door, as I do in the video below.

Nice use of a pair of contrasting colors. I spot two general things that can be quite useful here: 1) More willingness to play around with architecture and other structural features that essentially change the contours (and perceived structure) of the room. The way the insets and metal slabs all preserve the initial contours leads to a generally underwhelming presentation, given how reserved they are. 2) More attention to the neatness of feature transitions. Bigdoor as it is currently used doesn't look right to me. There are also doors and detailing slabs that cut abruptly at at points in the GStone where they really shouldn't. (And on the subject of contrast, the third shot could benefit from a different ceiling texture on the highest one, to improve the 'legibility' of the scene. It would also break up the big uninterrupted stretch of green.) I'd offer 50 Monsters m27 as a vanilla map with a couple of similar general properties as your WIP -- two primary colors (for architectural features + a third for highlights, which in your case is the sky) and a preference for orthogonal design* -- that does #1 and #2 well and looks good. You can see how the architecture ends up pretty much defining the spaces, rather than acting as a fairly reserved form of garnish for them. *I was tempted to point towards a very strong adherence to the latter as a problem with the shots above too, but I think that is misleading.

The presentation is a serious obstacle. First, the download link for Bloodworks is marked by 'Download Zdoom 38.cab + /Legacy version' rather something more intuitive such as 'Download Bloodworks.wad'. So that means you have to find this explanation buried in a wall of text in order to want to click that link. Luckily I skimmed and got there quite fast. Even then I was still hesitant to do so, because 'Zdoom 38.cab + /Legacy version' look like things I definitely don't want. (I would assume that a big chunk of the 1679 counted downloads are by bots.)

Here's a pistol start FDA with no deaths if you want, since I hadn't played that map yet. In the middle there is a section where my screen starts freezing a bunch, and I take a bunch of damage from barons (lol). I expected a lot worse from the description. :P Every path should be survivable. Anticipating the design choices helps -- for example when a trap is sprung late you sort of know it has to populate other areas too, because it wouldn't make sense not to. d404_20_rd_fda.zip Bonus pacifist. No need to survive 90 seconds or get 30 kills. :)

Most maps, historically, haven't cleaned up their automaps outside of a few typical exceptions that generally always get cleaned up (sky walls on the periphery of the map, for instance). That applies to very noteworthy projects too. It is only very recently (no more than about a year) that lots of projects are doing this. Personally, I respect it, but I don't value it too much as a player, so I'll never invest my energy in that direction as a mapper unless it's requested for the 'house style' of a certain project.

Comments on screenshots: Overall it looks awesome. Looking forward to playing this.

On that note, I suspect we are already living in what the '20s will be remembered for: a 'professional-grade' approach to project conception and management being more common, and the resultant high-polish mapsets. Valiant, Sunlust, and Ancient Aliens, just to name a few, are modern classics of the later-half of this decade, and we have a lot of very polished episode-length sets and megawads out this year or slated for the next couple. Lots of them have at least as many new assets as a partial conversion would, and a few are even completely new games. The sheer frequency of stuff at this level of professionalism has certainly been on an uptick in '18, and I'd expect that to define the coming decade. This does hinge on the efforts of the limited number of people willing to put the effort, but there is no reason to believe it will die down -- particularly with what is still in the pipeline. Unless Linguica kills Doomworld. In the slaughter scene, Ancalagon will get into mapping and make New Gothic Movement 3. TimeofDeath will emerge and say 'haha, I'm really Mechadon's alt' (they both have said they get motion sickness while watching demos!) and win all of the Cacowards. Death_Destiny, Insane_Gazebo, and Huy Pham will all come back with crazy good stuff (and Huy Pham with a novel delivered via wad text file, and an animated series in a secret).