JonExMachina

Haven't made a map in quite a while, but seeing RAMP 2024 is happening made me want to cook something up and participate. The layout is done, combat is serviceable, but detailing is going to be painful. Thankfully, I'm on vacation and will have a bunch of free time next week, which may be enough to finish the map and submit it.

Congratulations, everyone! What an incredible year… Being mentioned in a Cacoward, especially in a year as busy as 2023, alongside a ton of talented newcomers who have put out some incredible maps and mapsets, is something I simply did not expect (or even hope for, to be honest), so, from the bottom of my heart, thank you all very much. You've given this humble Brazilian doomer a healthy dose of joy and motivation. ♥

After at least three months of testing, changing stuff, more testing, changing more stuff, feeling depressed over things not working, thinking this was a fool's errand, changing even more stuff, failing miserably and wanting to drop the whole experiment, I've finally achieved a palette I'm fully satisfied with. 55 slots reserved for vanilla-compatible fullbright effects, and the rest of the palette was changed to better suit the aesthetic I want my project to have. Heavily modifying the palette was a constant source of frustration, which made me understand why people usually stick to either modifying the safer ranges such as blues, reds and saturated greens, or just using the vanilla palette. Anyway, the worst part is over, and now I can focus on keep learning how to make textures. Here's a small bit of my work (except for BIGDOOR3, of course. Haven't made a decent door yet). Edit: Revenants now have a fullbright effect too. (STBAR is a placeholder btw)

Wow. :o

Just finished this and felt compelled to come here and say thank you, Snaxalotl, for sharing such a splendid megawad with us. The difficulty of the first few maps made me feel really confident and let my guard down, but quickly things ramped up and I got my ass handed to me in every possible way from map 16 onwards. Greatly varied layouts with beautiful use of texture and lighting, a kickass soundtrack and pristine combat, plus it shares its name with my favorite song by Deathspell Omega (which might have been accidental but is worth a few extra points anyway). Also, I love the way you do secrets. My only regret is not finishing it in time to nominate it in the Cacowards thread. Fantastic work, seriously.

+1 I'm usually not into slaughter gameplay, but the experimental presentation and the sheer beauty and weirdness of this one made me enjoy every second of it. Love how it plays with the perception of space and and other visual stimuli that feel a lot like hallucinations. Really glad I got to play this in time to nominate it here, and wish I could play it for the first time again. Edit: Also, using Schala's Theme is a dirty trick to make my eyes water.

Finally got around to playing it. Had a pretty good time overall and found it easy to love many elements of it, but there were some aspects I think could be reworked for a better and more cohesive experience. I'll start with the good: • Beautiful visuals, with lots of attention to lighting. You set your sights to a specific aesthetic and committed to it 100%; • A clean layout that, despite being linear, loops and coils into itself over and over again; • I love the sheer number of windows allowing the player to look into neighboring areas and wonder how they'll get there; • Really exciting encounters throughout the map (with a caveat I'll explain in the next section); • Excellent choice of custom monsters. What could be improved: • That section with the crushers can create unfair scenarios pretty easily, with the chaingunners being able to wreck the player's health while being hidden by the crushers. I believe a monster that shoots fast projectiles would work a lot better while potentially making the whole section more challenging, forcing the player to act fast or calculating whether they should tank the damage or try dodging and risk being crushed. I also can't say I love how the safe spots lower and raise on a set timer, but I'll elaborate on that on my next pointer; • I didn't see the final double chaingunner in the area mentioned above, accidentally climbing on him and being shot to death two times, which made me think I should be playing with the infinitely tall monsters option turned on, which in turn created a problem with pretty much every hanging corpse in the corridors. To avoid that, maybe the safe spots could lower enough for the player to fall on them and be unable to get out before they raise again, but not so much that the chaingunners themselves can become a platform for the player to stand on. 25 units would be enough for that; • The setup you're using for your teleporters has a huge chance of making encounters tedious, given how long it can take between each monster stepping over the teleport lines. To avoid that, you could rotate all the teleporters towards the playing area, and adding a bunch of zig-zagging teleport lines to the sectors that will lower. This way, monsters will teleport into the arena in a constant stream, and the chance of monsters being teleported post-fight will be very low; • Along with the point mentioned above, the switch to lower the barriers in some of the corridor fights can be hard to notice, especially when the player has a bunch of demons to shoot, is locked in said corridors, and has a radsuit whose timer is constantly ticking down. With the teleporter setup I mentioned above, the lowering barriers don't need to be so tall; • The progression in a few points can feel a bit obscure. That shootable switch after the Arch-vile is a good example of that. It overlooks the area where the player fought a bunch of chaingunners and a Hell Knight, kind of suggesting the player should go back there, but what it actually does is lower the barrier after the blue door. Maybe adding some barriers that funnel the player into the recently opened area could work, idk; • I was able to fall into a pit after climbing the platform ladder with sume Lost Souls, leading up to a shootable switch that opens the door to a Cacodemon. Since it gave me some rendering errors, I'll assume it wasn't intentional, as there was no way of climbing back up as well. Here's a gameplay video. Wish I could do it in a single sitting, but between having a lot on my plate lately and playing like crap, this is the best I could do in such a short time:

Can't play it right now (gotta work, eh) but I'm definitely giving it a shot tomorrow, hopefully with a gameplay video.

Thank you very much, Maribo! Awesome demo, as always. Yeah, this time I wanted to do something that wouldn't consume my life for weeks on end, so being able to start and finish a new map in pretty much two nights was a lot healthier than my previous efforts. When I finished my first map, I instantly started a new one in UDB, which was meant to begin exactly where the first one ended, but I didn't have a PC of my own back then and left it unfinished after drawing the first two areas. Maybe I'll finish it someday and make a small mapset (still very proud of my first map, especially because of its midi). An episode of small maps such as Stronghold is definitely happening now, though I still have no idea when I'll get to finish it. By the way, I came across a post of yours on cohost, and thank you so much for what you wrote about me and my maps. That stuff motivates me a lot, and I hope whatever I come up with next is worthy of being waited for. That was intended, yeah. That room had only two boxes of shells before I posted the map here, and a good part of the other ammo pickups before the blue door didn't exist either. At first I meant to force players to rely on infighting and save their ammo, but ended up deciding against it. This (final?) version incentivizes infighting while still giving enough ammo to kill every monster, but with little room for missed shots. The drop-down fight definitely rewards herding and infighting. The rocket launcher helps a lot, but it's completely optional (as secrets should be, way I see it). Thank you very much for playing! Thank you very much for playing and for the nice words, Somniac! Really glad to know you liked the music and mood (so many years waiting to use that song, haha). Thank you very much for playing and for the demo, Zahid. I'll keep studying my favorite harder wads in order to make more difficult encounters in the future. :D Yup! The shotty was blending with the water and was really hard to notice, especially given how dark the map is. That small platform makes it stand out a bit, and helps with backtracking after getting the SSG. Thank you for replaying! Thank you so much for playing, mate! Super glad to see you had a good time with this one (even the music, yay!). Really good job with the big fight, btw.

Thank you very much, Bri! If things go as planned, I'll try making more of these and compile them as a nice mapset. "It's a very cohesive brown…" "Cohesive! It's on the floor, it's on the wall, it's on the ceiling!" "It's a very robust brown, it's predominant." […] "All of the above: it's a blood carpet." […] "What about John Romero?" "Yesterday's news…" "Overrated…" "Tom Hall is the real genius at id." I'd call you blasphemers for the last one but I was laughing way too much. Thank you so much for the video and for playing my map, man. You people are hilarious and infinitely quotable.

Following the feedback I received (and a some stuff I experienced while playing the map a few more times), I decided to make the following changes: • Repositioned the shotgun to make it more noticeable; • Retextured some walls and changed some flats on the upper level; • Replaced the blue armor with a green one; • Made it easier for players to backtrack to said armor after getting the SSG; • Made it easier for players to get back to the RL secret after unlocking it; • Swapped a Hell Knight and a few Pinkies with Spectres; • Added a Mancubus to an encounter, and a Mancubus plus a few Revenants to another; • Fixed some texturing errors; • Some ceiling height changes here and there; • Repositioned the teleporter in the final encounter and added a proper flat to it (thank you, @Roofi!) Thank you very much! I do enjoy Plutonia quite a bit indeed, but haven't played Perdition's Gate yet. I've been doing a deep dive in wad history (I'm not very well-versed on it, to put it very lightly) and have just finished a few dozen maps, mapsets and megawads from 1995, so Perdition's Gate is right around the corner. Haven't played TNT in a few years either, so I'll take a look at Jimmy Sieben's levels to see what you mean. I tend to struggle when it comes to making exciting encounters with just the shotgun and the chaingun, so I totally get what you mean. Some Hell Knights vanished mysteriously and a few Spectres popped up in their place, so that might make some earlier encounters a bit more dynamic. Thank you for the amazing writeup, and for the video! It's always cool to see people playing on the original .exe. I have no idea why that tutti-frutti was happening there, as every sidedef there had the same parameters. Anyway, I ran the updated version in Chocolate Doom and it seems to be working as intended now. Thank you very much for pointing out the teleporter pad as well. Thing is, I made a lot of changes and additions to the doom2.wad I was using as the resource file in UDB, and had to change a few flats before uploading the map, missing that one in the process. :P That video was super fun to watch, by the way. I really like your deliberate approach, both to navigation and combat.

I promise you there are fewer hitscanners here, maybe 10 in total. :D Thank you! You're completely right. Truth be told, I wanted to get out of my techbasy comfort zone and make something a bit more medieval, blocked the whole thing out with BRICK7 and kind of didn't know what do do afterwards. I'll try adding some wood and marble as soon as I leave work.

Hello again, DoomWorld! This map is an experiment of sorts, an attempt at something more compact than my other maps, both in size and monster count, focusing on making an interconnected layout and more difficult encounters. Visuals are simple, mostly monotextured and not very detailed, and the map can be beaten 100% in less than 10 minutes if you're an average player. Depending on the feedback, I may focus on more bite-sized stuff in the future. Edit: Difficulty levels are not implemented. Compatibility level 2. Tested in DSDA-Doom, Crispy Doom and Chocolate Doom. Credits to @Not Jabba for the WFALL textures and @gtsgreece for the skybox. DOWNLOAD Thank you all very much for playing!