April 17 , 2010 so far i have 8 levels for the smoking dog. i had a great idea for the titlemap, but i gave up on it and i decided to just focus on the maps themselves. i'm also not sure if i should keep the intermission screen, or do some funky transitions between maps. think of an album without any breaks, non-stop, continuous music. but do we really need intermission screens? the automap has all the information about the level for those that care. it shows how many secrets the map has, how many monsters are dead/alive, and it gives you the time. what else do players need? then again, not having an intermission screen would mean no funky intermission songs after each level.. :( back to the maps. i have more levels that would make this a 11? map episode. but those levels are horrible. it would take too much time to make them into something understandable levels with nice, non-confusing layouts. 2 1/2 are left over maps from hatomo. they are kind of finished, but they just so damn boring! :D i am not sure what the order of the levels will be either. i had two small maps [think map01 or map02 sized maps] that i merged into one. is not hard to see that once you play it, but they fit so well. i'm surprised at how easy it was to glue these mamas together. all maps so far are either medium sized or big ones. apart from the start map, there wont be any tiny map01 levels, and i really don't want to have the usual tech to hell progression, which means working like hell to change the look of a sewer level [think of a sequel to the chemical base, a map that i got the idea by playing richard clark's awesome sewer map]. and somehow i am getting used to the original doom music for them too. i really want to write music for these, but whenever i try and use a new song on the maps, they feel out of place and i just go back to the original doom songs. the same happened with hatomo, but i think i decided not to do it because it would have end up being a big file size? all i remember is having a lot of fun trying to fit damian's old midis into the maps. one thing about these maps is that even though this is a zdoom only episode, they where born as boom maps. its very weird and stupid, but all maps i started as boom maps, and then i made them into zdoom levels.its very stupid, but i find it that its much faster to do boom maps first. even though its much more work in the end. anyway, if none of this makes any sense its because i am too sleepy right now, and the new keyboard is too smooth and i cant seem to stop typing... April 4 , 2010 i have always been scared of DECORATE madness. it just looks so complicated, though i am slowly getting used to it, it still kinda weird for me. i guess if you know programming it might be easy to look at? i don't know. anyway, i managed to create new objects [decorative stuff, like corpses and flames, and so on] and i also made some new variations of the shotgun/pistol dudes and mancubus. its all copy & paste from the properties of the original monsters though. if it wasn't for the zdoom wiki, i dont think i would have had any of this stuff made! all the things i have done so far a pretty simple things. but for me, who happens to be very dumb when it comes to scripting and any other weird zdoom specific stuff, its pretty awesome when you have something like this figured out :) been having a lot of fun with the DECORATE lump, and ACS scripting too, though nothing mind blowing. just simple things like kill all the barons on the room to open this door, then kill this other monsters to lowe this and make this appear. map progress has been slow, but its not a bad thing. if would be pretty awesome if i get all of this done by the end of the year, but that's never going to happen. march 20 , 2010 click here for screenshots [opens a 1024x768 popup window] of the maps so far. there are a few more, but those i haven't touched yet, and some are too messy that i might not try to fix and use for this project in the end.
note - there are and will be [always] many spelling and grammatical errors. |