Lord_Z

This time around we decided to take things back to basics, more or less. Who doesn't love a good ol' fashioned UAC tech base? We didn't want to just do that though so we came up with a setting that was a little different from the norm and also added a few Boom tricks to the environment. The map began life as a quick sketch on a whiteboard back in May. It was unclear how the idea would ultimately be used but it made sense to have it be a standalone thing. This project is smaller in scale than our previous collaborations and it serves as a bit of a break from the more intense designs. That said, we did have to pull back on the map's scope because of Boom's hard limits. Regardless, it was still fun to put together. Thanks for stopping by and I hope that you enjoy what there is to see here!

I'd like to try mapping for this. It sounds like an interesting challenge and it's certainly different from what I've done recently.

Thanks for letting us know. That sequence is finicky but I'll see if there is a way to adjust it. Which port were you using by the way?

Sorry for the delay!

It's here at last! The culmination of what we have been working on for almost 3 years in total. It's hard to believe it has been that long. The conception of this third part took place near the beginning of our work on IX2. Originally we were just tossing around ideas about making the series into a trilogy but it wasn't until further into IX2's development that we talked more about what to do with the overarching story. At that point we figured out exactly how a third part could fit in. IX3's development started not long after IX2's release. Originally IX3 was going to be a standalone release much like the previous two sets. However, we eventually took a look at what could be done with UMAPINFO and saw there was a way to define episodes. This made me wonder if we could combine all of the sets into one and, with a few more dehacked changes, that's what we did. That and the text screens allowed us to supplement the story we were trying to tell as well as add a bit more polish to the whole thing. IX3 was not an easy thing to finish and I have renewed respect for people who can put together full megawads. We actually struggled quite a bit with level concepts and designs, moreso than either of the previous two parts and, for myself anyway, more than anything else I have worked on so far. We kept going back and forth on most of the maps trying to figure out whether what we had built really fit with the direction this series had ultimately gone. It is certainly in a different place now than where we started with IX1. We probably have enough scraped concepts and chunks of levels to make up 2 or 3 additional levels. On top of all that were the technical challenges. Most of the new levels get fairly close to Boom's hard limits and one of my levels started to implode quite spectacularly (I'm guessing due to some sort of nodes bug or limit). I also find myself more worried than usual about other aspects of the maps such as difficulty and potentially confusing layouts. Some of the levels also have gameplay that's a bit experimental. However, it's hard to know whether or not we have succeeded with only the two of us as play testers. Despite the challenges of putting this project together, I am happy about how it has all turned out and I'm excited to see the project get released. As usual I look forward to hearing your thoughts and I hope you enjoy the journey!

I appreciate everyone playing through my map. And, yeah, I agree that it isn't really slaughter. I'm not the best Doom player so in trying to make something that was at least tricky for myself but also within the time limit, I didn't quite achieve what the map set was going for. Originally I did have a much larger map with a lot more monsters but it took a couple minutes just to walk through it without fighting. There was no real way to slim that down effectively so I ended up scrapping it and starting over again. Perhaps one more revisit would have been appropriate. Anyway, it's always great to see feedback and I hope that Bauul will announce a sequel project so that I can take another swing at it!

This was a fun little wad to put together! It's a little different than what most people are probably used to since it has an objective besides defeating all the demons. A tidbit about the map: it was originally planned to be quite a bit larger and the three main structures were going to be arranged around a central mountain. The idea was to keep it fairly open so you could see each area from the other two areas. However, when we started stitching our areas together, we completely decimated the segs limit for Boom, haha. Because of that, we had to scale back the whole concept and trim some detailing in order to get it all to fit inside one map. There's actually a pretty obvious way we could have saved a lot of lines but for some reason we didn't think about it until last night. Using things for the lights! Ah well, it'll be something to keep in mind for next time. Anyway, I'm still fairly happy with where we ended up but let us know what you think of the concept, layout, etc. Thanks for stopping by and Happy Holidays!

Congratulations, everyone! And thanks to the Cacoward team! You all did some great work!

Congrats on the release, everyone!

Thanks for playing! There actually isn't an intermission message, if that's what you are referring to. The map set is done after map 5 ends and then it'll just continue on to whatever is next in regular Doom 2. An intermission screen was something that I considered at one point but wasn't sure if that was something that could be positioned after any map slot you want. I didn't look into though since I wasn't sure how much it would add in the end. It is something I would consider adding to future projects though.

I'm glad to see there's an alpha for this now. Very cool! Not sure if it has been caught yet but I noticed in my quick jump through the levels that a couple of the names are misspelled. E3M2 should not have an 'e' in Mobius and E3M8 is missing an 'h' in Without.

Thanks for the play through!

Thanks a lot for the feedback, everyone! It sounds like we have a little balance tweaking to do so we'll take a look at that today.