Counterattack - Now on /idgames!

Ok I'm convinced, I'll do a release after I finish up MAP01 :). I don't think it will take too long. But if it does for some reason, I'll drop a 3 map test sometime soon. I could really use some good input because I get sick of replaying my own maps over and over and over :P

Fonze said:

Idk if I can hang on these, but if you need somebody to test easy mode I'd love to give the maps a few runs!

That would be awesome! I'm gonna shoot you a PM soon.

I've got another small update to post here. MAP01 is in progress as of a couple of days ago, though I'm still a tad bit burned out from working on MAP03 (I powered through the last bits of gameplay on it pretty hard). I did a bit of work on it today before I decided to switch to some graphic work. So I made a new statusbar:



I used STONE2/STONE3 as the base since I love that texture :P.

Also this is a quick glimpse of the start area in MAP01 (which is still in progress by the way). What you see is more or less what the texture theme will be, maybe with a tad bit more grey/silver and less tekgreen.

More progress!



Just toying around with texture themes here. The original plan was to go with lots and lots of grey concrete. But after playing around with that a bit, it was a bit too, uh, grey :P. So I mixed in some of those desaturated brown bricks and I'm really digging that combination so far.

Also the statusbar has been updated a bit, and is now widescreen friendly (thanks to Wildweasel for the tip there).

I'm a good 1/3rd of the way done with detailing, but its been going pretty slowly lately thanks to distracting real life stuff.

Looks great. As usual, these scenes look both recognizable (due to stock textures) and very surprising (innovative combinations thereof) at the same time.

Thanks rdwpa! I'm pretty happy with the texture theme in this one. It didn't come out exactly like I planned, but I ended up rolling with a texture combination that I quite liked.

Anyways, detailing on MAP01 is done finally!



It took longer than I anticipated thanks to being busy. The detail work is also a bit more extensive than the last map I worked on thanks to the tons of rocky background stuff I felt was necessary :P.

It should be a little bit shorter than MAP02 in terms of playtime even though this DB shot looks massive. So hopefully it'll be a good opener.

I'll get some new screenshots up once I finish up the lighting work.

Oh hey, another update. Lighting is done in MAP01, so have some screenshots!




As you might expect, gameplay stuff is coming up next. So it shouldn't be too much longer now :)

Fuckin' so psyched.

And here's Beta 1! I had hoped to release this on my birthday or on Christmas day, but oh well :P

Counterattack Beta 1

I've included a readme which should cover some of the minor details regarding this release. So please be sure to read that if you can.

Being that this is a beta, expect some bugs and half-baked gameplay in areas. I've spent a good deal of time testing and tweaking maps 2 through 4, but so far I've only had one tester give feedback on stuff (thank you Fonze!). So I'll be interested in hearing what everyone has to say :)

I'll be making updates to the maps as feedback comes in. In the meantime, I have a couple of secrets to work on which, hopefully, will be in the final~ish release.

Thanks everyone, I hope you guys enjoy the maps!

Oh damn yes *_*

Good God, how much trigonometry and calculus and other mathematical stuff I know little about do you have to do in order to make all these crazy angles that still have the textures lined up perfectly? Either way, wonderful stuff as always, even just halfway through the first map, 's'real nice indeed.

I'll probably edit some bug stuff into this later if I find any, or maybe make another post, depending

Hey i just finished map1 and holy moly, truly inspiring stuff. I'm still a bit dizzy from admiring all the beauty. I discovered 7/8 secret, the only thing i missed was the BCK and the corresponding parts of the map.
Personal highlights were the RK/Crusher and the BSK encounter.

The one and only tiny bug i spotted were 2 Imps stuck inside Caco's right next to the YSK door.

Looking forward to play the other maps soon.

Duuude. So far this is kinda like "I got tired of making Vela Pax so I'm gonna make Vela Pax". :D Very neat and inspiring. Not sure if you still watch demos (IIRC you had like motion sickness from these?) but here is a Map01 FDA for these who are interested.

Yessssss, gonna play this asap

Who's the man? YOU are the man!

i dunno if i'm just easily impressed, but every time i see any sort of maps that has decent detailing or includes zdoom features, i'm blown away. it doesn't even look like doom!

but really, this looks incredible! i'm gonna download and play it right away! :D

Thanks again everyone for the kind words, it really makes my day!

tourniquet said:

The one and only tiny bug i spotted were 2 Imps stuck inside Caco's right next to the YSK door.

Good catch, thank you! There might be more of these on the lower difficulties in MAP01 since I haven't tested those settings yet at all. Same goes for COOP placements across all of the maps.

Memfis said:

Duuude. So far this is kinda like "I got tired of making Vela Pax so I'm gonna make Vela Pax". :D Very neat and inspiring. Not sure if you still watch demos (IIRC you had like motion sickness from these?) but here is a Map01 FDA for these who are interested.

Yea these are pretty much just Vela Pax maps, but a tiny bit smaller :P. Thanks a ton for the demo, I'll watch it as soon as possible! I do get motion sick from watching them sadly, which sucks because I enjoy watching them. I can usually get through 20-30 minutes of one before I start getting nauseous though, so I watch them in small batches.

Still on map01 and already enjoying it more than Doom 2016 on my new rig.

Now that this is finished, Get Back to Work on Vela Pax!

Good lord these are amazing. Your mapping skills are truly out of this world Mechadon.

I've got FDAs as well if you or others are interested. I died in what I think is the finale in the fourth map so that's a DNF but other maps I manage to finish in one go.

The only bugs I found were the stuck monsters in map01 that tourniquet reported and some interesting lift behavior in map03 (at around 27:40 in the demo). Got a bit lost in that map as well, the switch in the lava was rather hard to spot.

Hoping for some Long Veinen Maxes™ (and maybe even a map01-map04 run) when this is finalized. :D

Here is a group of demos for all 4 maps:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6hewwqh4oum4d8h/Counter%20Attack.zip?dl=0

Here are my vods for maps 02-04. You can see the dumbest death of my life which causes a rage quit on Map 04.. but I came back to beat it.. hence 2 vods.

Vod for maps 02-04 (did not stream Map 01):
https://www.twitch.tv/mrzzul/v/110500675

Vod for Map 04 completion:
https://www.twitch.tv/mrzzul/v/110500916

Awesome, thank you for the FDAs Veinen and Killer5! So far I've been able to get through Memfis's demo and MAP01 of Veinen's demo. That's all I could stomach for today :P. But I do have a list of things to tweak and fix on MAP01, so that's good! I'll definitely be watching every demo that's posted here, no worries.

Veinen said:

Got a bit lost in that map as well, the switch in the lava was rather hard to spot.

Gotcha, I'll see what I can do to make that switch stand out some more. I need some way to coerce the player into jumping into the damaging lava pit. What I'll probably end up doing is brightening up that switch and then moving those radsuits to a location where they are more easily viewable.

MAP03 in general is more puzzle~ish in nature too, which I think may be an issue for some players. It's inspired a bit by E4M6 and I was also trying out some different ideas. Hopefully its not too much of a pain to play through though.

sgtcrispy said:

Now that this is finished, Get Back to Work on Vela Pax!

Yes sir!

Finally beat this. Took my sweet time. I've really enjoyed this episode. Thanks for making it!
I hope you will be able to complete all Vela Pax maps by the end of next year. :)

Still on my way through this. Didn't find PG nor BFG on my first playtrough of map 2, was constantly low on ammo and barely made it through the final enounter with SG/CG/RL only. Seemed like i missed 50% of the map so i gave it another spin today and ended up with 5/7 secrets and enough proper weaponry to handle all encounters.

I still haven't figured out the intended way to get the YK but i was able to rocket jump from this position and get inside this section. Probably not intended.

The only other thing i've noticed is that you can grab the secret Cell charge from below via the small ledge.

Do you mean the YK in map 03?

Nope, i'm talking about Map02.

tourniquet said:

I still haven't figured out the intended way to get the YK but i was able to rocket jump from this position and get inside this section. Probably not intended.

The only other thing i've noticed is that you can grab the secret Cell charge from below via the small ledge.

Hmm, that's a little alarming. I dunno if I should spoil it, but the path for the YK basically starts at the nukage/SSG area. Maybe I need to illuminate a part of that path better.

Both things you mentioned are definitely not intended. The Cell charge secret should be easily fixable, I think (I'll just get rid of the 32px high brick step there). For that rocket jump, are you jumping into that alcove that opens up?

Hm i was assuming, it would be somewhere around the nukage area but apparently i overlooked it. I performed the rocket jump from the position in the screenshot straight onto the wall the arrows pointing at. Didn't seem like i broke anything since i was able to finish the map without issues.

Oh hahaha, I didn't see your red arrow in the screenshot until you mentioned it :P. Your essentially just doing a really big shortcut there since the route your on while on that ledge ends up dumping you onto the YK route (all of the routes in these maps kind of intersect and do weird things anyways). As you can see from that brick wall to the left, I attempted to fix this in an earlier update since you could just SR40 that jump before.

I guess the question now is should I leave that shortcut in for speedrunners or not. And if so, should I make it harder to do.

I'd say leave it in, it's not a very rewarding sequence break anyhow and it doesn't mess with all the Vodoo/trigger stuff behind the scenes.

Ok, will do tourniquet. I did pull the wall forward just slightly, so it might be just a tiny bit harder to pull off now. I haven't been able to do it myself yet so if I broke something cool in the next update, let me know and I'll revert it.

@Killer5
Hey, I just wanted to say thank you very much for those streams and FDAs! I'm glad I decided to watch the VODs instead of the demos, because your commentary while playing the maps was exactly the kind of feedback I was looking forward. I watched the entire first VOD in a few chunks today. I haven't checked out the completed MAP04 yet, nor have I watched the FDA for MAP01 yet either. But I will do that soon.

I've already made some changes to those three maps and they'll be in the next update. I figured I'd blab a bit about the maps and your thoughts, so I'm curious to hear what you think, if that's cool.

MAP02:
I don't know if anyone in chat answered your question, but this is the map I made for Joel's contest. I made it pretty quickly since I got a week late start on it, so its the smallest and probably least detailed out of the bunch. And after I finished up MAP01, I realized that it was probably the easiest of the bunch, though I wanted to wait and see what other players thought about that before doing much with the gameplay. Actually partially why its the easiest map was because I didn't want it to be too overbearing for Joel :P

I agree that the presence of the BFG definitely breaks this map. Now that I've seen some demos of other people playing it, this probably needs to be changed. You can actually get the BFG right before going through the exit without triggering any kind of secret. But you found the early BFG trigger so that trivialized most of the fights.

I'm still thinking about how I'm going to approach this since I might end up beefing up some of the traps and incidental fights in a couple of places. Most likely I'll replace that early BFG with a Plasma, and then possibly replace the second BFG with an Invuln or Megasphere (also I'm probably going to tweak that second secret so its either harder to find, or there's some sort of trap associated with it).

MAP03:
I've said this in this thread already, but this map by nature is definitely more puzzle~ish, so I wasn't too surprised to see you get a bit lost in places. I generally don't make maps with complex puzzles like this and I'm still not sure I did a great job with this one (the fact that the map is semi-non-linear compounds this). Also there are still a few things about this map I'm not terribly happy with and I was hoping I'd get some feedback in those places.

About the blue key, the idea was that you'd see the BK door right after knocking out the Archviles in that circular room, though it just depends on how players approach that next fight (they might run off into the Chaingunner alcove and get locked into the blood field fight, thus missing the BK door). I'm hesitant to remove the BK and replace it with a switch because there's not a great location to place it; the logical end to that area is the blood field fight, and placing the switch out there kills the locality a bit. I think what I'm going to do is place some BK indicators on the other side of the door (viewable from the lava pit room) so the players see that the door in question requires the BK before they see the actual BK (putting it in the player's head that they need to find a BK).

The Cyber + lava Caco teleports was neutered a bit when I added those stars/lifts near the Manc platform. I added those stairs as a shortcut back up to the previous area, and also as a way to deal with infinitely tall Imps below (you can get to the upper ledge area before even waking up the Imps, in which case it become awkward to deal with them at that weird angle). So now you can camp on those stairs in relative safety; the ones that spawn in at the Cyberdemon switch aren't nearly as threatening since there's lots of room to deal with them and fences to block them off. So I'll see what I can do to make those fights more entertaining.

I hate the exit fight, and I meant to make note of this in the readme that came along with the beta. The exit fight was originally going to be totally different, with it teleporting you to an arena. But the map was getting kind of big by the time I got that far into it, so I compromised my original idea. I kinda like the idea of having a Cyber come down the bloodfall in the center, so I'm going to try that first.

I'm also concerned about the BFG in this map. I'm afraid it might cause another MAP02-like situation since you can grab it kind of early (it just requires the YK, so you can plow through the rest of the map with it). Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I'll place it on a pedestal which requires the BK. So then it'll still serve its intended purpose and also give the BK another use.

MAP04:
I gotta say, I wasn't expecting that death :P. I'm not sure how much I can say about this one since I haven't watched your second demo yet. I will say that it was a bit frustrating to see that you didn't notice the entrance to the BSK arena (inside of the derpy demon head's mouth). I attempted to fix this in my internal builds a while ago by placing a Pain Elemental behind the door that opens, but its a bit too far away to hear it wake up, I think.

I am curious what you think about the BFG location (since I'm kind of apprehensive about them after MAP02). The fight that you get the BFG in is designed for the BFG. But beyond that, it could neuter some of the fights, and I think you touched on that in the stream. This is a problem in these maps because I put a lot of emphasis on the Plasma Gun being the power weapon for most of them (that's why SSGs aren't readily available), so there tends to be a lot of cell ammo scattered around. That just feeds into the BFG play and I can see that wrecking some fights if you get it early. I'm considering removing the BFG in favor of an Invuln and throwing in a ton more monsters in that fight, and then moving the BFG to the final area of the map.