After you hit the light-blue switch and go into the dark tunnel with the panel detached from the wall, and walk all the way to the end, it should wait a second then open up to the main waterfall room. If you get there and nothing happens, that's the bug. Man I was sure it was gone...
- Unfortunately combat in my opinion has to take a slow approach starting out. If I handed the player a large zorcher/rapid zorcher too early, they'll make mincemeat of the low and mid-tier enemies. I tried to provide combat in areas that would make the player vulnerable to ranged attacks (bwas) while dealing with immediate threats (melee enemies). Or areas where if you're not quick with your decisions you can get swarmed. It just kinda stinks that the commonus and bepidicus are just bullet sponges, but I didn't want to give up using them.- On E1M2, I think I know what's happening for you, you're trying to coax all the enemies from the big room into the hallway while you only have your mini zorcher. If you take the door adjacent to the big room and go down that path, you'll find a large zorcher and a better route to take out the enemies in that room. Strong arming your way through the big room with your dinky zorcher isn't the way I planned for players to go about the map.- If E1M2 is still too slow for you, definitely just warp to the other ones and check them out, they start off much faster since I give the large zorcher at spawn.
I can see why you find the perched armored bipedus fights annoying, but since they're the primary ranged attackers it wouldn't be right to have them solely on the ground because their attacks end up getting lost behind other enemies. But I do agree about the cyclopti, sometimes I used them just to have varied enemy types in a room but sometimes they would be there just to shoot. Perhaps changing out some of them with armored bipedi would be a welcome change.
The traps on E1M2 are vanilla since it's still the beginning of the map pack and the player doesn't have a full arsenal yet. I think some of the traps in the later levels can really mess you up
Also you mentioned how the AI gets caught on doors, I think some of the doors are flagged to block enemies. Some enemies are just going to have to be easier to dispatch than others.
Plus given the layout I had for the map it's tough to determine exactly where the player is and where spawning in enemies as a trap would be able to catch him off guard. I tried to do this in the large room by baiting the player with a commonus, but you decided to shoot at some enemies you hadn't taken out yet and triggered the trap while you basically weren't even in the room.
In the demo, I definitely saw the ammo struggle you had. Usually the ammo pick ups are laid in plain sight and you did a good job finding some of the obscure pickups but you missed one large zorch recharge that I think would've saved your bacon at the end of the level. What surprised me was that you ran out of mini zorch ammo fast towards the end; usually when I play I end up with 50-100 mini zorch ammo and enough large zorch ammo to get through the final fight. I front-load E1M3 with large zorch ammo so I didn't want to give the player too much to carry over into the next map, but if a couple more large zorch pickups will make a difference then I'll consider it.
I think a better change would just be making some of the pickups more accessible (not as hidden). In the main room I put ammo right in the middle to encourage the player to slice their way through the enemies and get the ammo, since they won't have enough to make it through the whole fight without it.
Also, for parity I'm attaching a demo I made playing through E1M2 on zdoom 2.8.1. Obviously I know the layout better and where the pickups are, but I did complete the map with no secrets without running out of ammo. Maybe you can analyze it and see what exactly we did differently. Thanks for the input!
75, you're right about it being inspired by Speed of Doom, E1M3 in particular was based off of one of the earlier maps in SoD. When you stopped in the yellow switch room and said it looked familiar, there is a very similar room in said map that I modeled it after. E1M4 was inspired by UAC Ultra, and E1M5 was actually not inspired by any single megawad.
At first it seemed you enjoyed the gameplay and traps, then you started to see some patterns and could tell when a switch would trigger a door and enemies would come out. I'm not necessary trying to hide the tricks from you, but it seems like you're looking for a surprise or trying to undermine the map when it comes to some of the traps. Which is fine, of course, everyone plays a bit differently, but that might be why you're not really into it.
That said, I'd hate to ask you to keep doing something you don't like doing, but I think there are significantly less traps in E1M4 and E1M5. Honestly I think you'll like E1M5, although it may be too long for you. It's up to you if you want to give them a shot, I'd say if you do just play some of the beginning of each to see if it interests you. Since you've already given me good feedback so don't feel obligated.
Even still, I've already thought of ways to rework some of the traps in E1M3 to keep you guessing
And since when does a trap have to make sense? You're a piece of anthropomorphic cereal fighting slime creatures with TV remotes! Plus I think that one almost got you, too
At that point you had good health and ammo, it was just unfortunate that you got whittled down in the end.
A couple more things, I was able to make some edits to E1M1 today based on your feedback. Some minor texture changes, but I also edited the outdoor section leading to the red key. I agreed that it seemed kinda weird, so I decided to turn it into a loading dock type of room. Indoors with a peek outside, I think it fits a bit better.
I also checked out those wads you suggested, some of them I liked and some I didn't like as much. I didn't realize it at the time but I played a little bit of Valiant at one point, and the first map is pretty remarkable with the locale and details but the difficulty is set pretty high from the get-go, which I think is possible because of the larger monster pool. I'll definitely keep this in mind though whenever I start mapping episode 2. The other wads I thought were okay but not my preferred style of play. I'm not exactly sure why, probably different reasons. Just shows our differences in taste, I guess. Yours I liked, it felt a bit cramped though. Definitely a vertical map, which is cool, and if it was made to release I think people would like it. It seemed like almost every enemy ended up being an armored biped, though, and if that map is supposed to be a pwad for TUCQ I think you could afford to turn them into gunners since Boingo gave them a ranged attack.
On a sidenote, your choices reminded me a bit of the Hell Revealed wads, which I appreciate but am not too big a fan of.
I think about it sometimes, isn't it strange that we were brought up playing the same wads but our tastes kind of diverged? To be honest I'm a little disappointed that my tastes are as specific as "Chex and Doom wads that are not like SoD" but there's probably not much I can do about it now. ... I'm a big fan of HR. It's interesting that you'd mention that, maybe there's two distinct styles of coop mapping here?
I hope I'm not getting too far off track
Too bad you weren't here between 03 and 08, I think that's when the community was most active.
75 registered in 2008, and I've seen him in some old forum threads, I'd say he was here for a good 3 years before the forum activity slowed down
Also out of the Doom megawads that have come out in the past, say, 5 years, what would be your favorites?