rdwpa

The screenshot is basically the wad in its entirety: a small outdoor area with some detailing in the center. Is indeed an accurate simulation of a rock; it sits there and does nothing. Bundled with an mp3, apparently titled 'sad song', which you can listen to while you lament the few minutes you wasted downloading and playing it.

Map 21: The Abyss This is probably the spookiest map yet. There's the huge vertical scale, a stark and hostile environment with all sorts of ledges and pits. Then there's the more expansive X-Y scale too -- you can see Moonblood's typical way of creating areas, the way it uses shapes and architecture, but it's all blown up in scale by a factor of 2 or so, making it feel like the work of a malevolent force imitating the typical settings. Then there's the way the low monster density (even for the standards of Moonblood) fills, or doesn't fill I should say, those spaces. Areas feel lonely. Monsters, even the cyberdemon, feel tiny compared to the locations they are found, which makes you feel small by way of comparison. Add somewhat unconventional texture and color combinations -- Plutonia rusty brown, prominent reds, some green, a purple sky -- and add that spooky music track, reminiscent of e2m4, and you get quite a chilling atmosphere. The unforgiving gameplay is something I can manage, but coupled with how terrifying it is, I didn't want to do a video. This is a map I'll study, though, for how it creates vistas. :)

@MrCacod3mon, you can quote parts of posts by highlighting a section and clicking the 'quote this' popup. Deleting stuff from the quote also works. As does using the @ feature, as I did here. It's not the best idea to quote enormous posts in their entirety, which I'm just pointing out in case you ever do it in a thread that has value.

mYfIrStLeVeLxDxD.wad

Map 32 UV-Max in 4:53 aa32-453.zip

:)

A7MAD, just a heads up -- you seem to have 'Counterflix' adware inserting itself into your quotes.

Map 07 UV-Max in 7:20 ng207-720.zip

Map 20: Moonblood Gateway The indoor areas feel like typical Moonblood stuff, but there was a lot more attention than usual given towards designing a rich setting. The rocky hellscape where the gateway resides has more in common with map32 than anything so far, suggesting it was designed (or substantially overhauled) closer in the process to when maps 21-30 were made. The dual teleporters at the start are a compression of Moonblood's approach to non-linearity. One gives you a much softer time than the other, but the more dangerous teleporter gives the observant player a chance for an early BFG that can be used for essentially the whole map, making the options a trade-off between speed and security. As far as skips and stuff go, there is one here too, but success rates are quite low, probably 1% or so. You need that pesky chaingunner to cooperate. I try to straferun as much as possible over the cracks in the ground -- damaging floors don't hurt you when you are on a 'step' between two damaging floors. In this run I took only one damage tic in the first area, which was quite surprising.

What did the fix happen to be?

Please don't fix any of the fun skips! :)

Map 19: Obstructed Zone One of my favorites in the set so far. What really gives this one its luster is that the first fight is essentially optional, thanks to the megasphere. You rush for the BFG straight away and go from there, and the map is quite fun that way. Survival is quite likely, it's only staying near topped-off from the megasphere that is in question. A lot of mappers like to make sure the player 'follows the itinerary' so to speak, but I really like it when the first fight can be skipped in some way, at the expense of being thrown into another fire. Haha literally . . . because archviles. :| So making this fight more or less mandatory by tying escape to a series of switches instead of just one would have weakened the map considerably. You don't get the SSG or RL until later on in this route, and I'm a big fan of the quirkiness of the early weapon distribution: BFG supported by the berserked fist, single shotgun, and chaingun. You don't see that too often. Megasphere starts in maps like this (attrition being more of a danger than any quick knockouts, the first fight and the cyberdemon aside) a rarity too. It works smoothly here because your health will inevitably dwindle down to a hundred by the last fights and it's not like you can top off again, so the difference is whether your armor is green or blue, nothing that can potentially trivialize the map. The ending is pretty memorable with a cyber fight followed by a reclamation of caves from a crew of loitering imps. The imp spam reads as off model for Moonblood -- but yeah, mowing down fodder can be fun too, not every single monster needs to have a strategic role. Secrets are somewhat useless, as seems to be the norm.

Gave it a spin yesterday (got through in 40:00 without saves, essentially an FDA past the first few areas). Didn't see it as time well spent. It's a lot better than the original version but still quite bad due to the preponderance of 'meat in front of thresholds' fights. Probably the most egregious was a fight with a lot of cacos (and a few HKs) that are rocketed through a 64-wide doorway. The layout isn't well suited to fights bridge between multiple areas, because connections between said areas are often doors or narrow openings. If you aren't planning to tweak the layout quite a bit, I'd suggest culling as many door-campable groups of pinkies and mid-tiers as is possible -- reducing their numbers drastically or replacing them with less grindy low-tiers. The success formula for a layout like this is essentially to space out lock-in fights or in self-contained arenas throughout the map (such as the last fight, as an example) and to use the more complex/open areas for lengthier fights if possible, but to use as few monsters as you need to in the campable areas based around corridors and small rooms, unless you are giving the player lots of weak fodder to mow down. (Lots of pinkies to be chainsawed/punched counts more as 'meat' than 'weak fodder'.) With frontal combat, less is often more. In the tekwall tunnels with strobing lights, for example, do you really need each small chamber packed with an identical group of revenants and imps that is camped in the same way? Probably not -- just a low-tiers for flow in each cavity is all you need. Ideally not identical ones. This part would be bad either way, though -- moving around those hallways just isn't fun. I didn't feel like anything in the map warranted saves. You had one archvile warp-into a room without cover at a non-obvious trigger location -- it was neither the switch in the room nor any of the objects. Since I was unprepared for it, I tanked a hit (at 100 HP with blue armor) and was left with quite a bad taste in my mouth, but objectively that wasn't dangerous. The map also has an early spot where one has to descend into a very tall pit with pinkies in it. Said pinkies can bite you freely as you drop, and you can land in a bad spot and theoretically get chomped to death. I was lucky and took 25 damage or something. I was tempted to save at the shotgunner crate part to eliminate the tedium of having to go all the way back around after falling, that's about it. The image of all of those shotgunners on all of those crates is a quite a funny one, but picking all of them off doesn't make for good gameplay.

Eh, it depends on how densely one works too. A map that takes 40 hours of work can be done in a week or two if you have enough free time and energy and you are really inspired. It could also take months, hell, years, if you are busy, start and stop a lot, or happen to run dry with ideas for at times. And don't be misled, as many have been, into thinking anything done in a short span from start to finish is automatically a 'speedmap' or anything done over a long interval is automatically a polished and labored effort.