Well of Lost Souls

[MissBubbles]

Dive into the Well of Lost Souls and see the twisted past of these tormented beings come back to life...







(Originally posted over in my Episode 3 map thread)

Download here: (Updated on 3/15/2017) https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_...2ZuQ3Nic2s0MVE

Check out the readme for more information/how to launch.

I set aside work on my Runic maps for a while to scratch an itch I had with this Episode 4 themed map. Once again, I have gone for a classic " Quake the way id did " style, with strong influences from Sandy Petersen's visual and gameplay designs. According to the feedback I've gotten so far, this one is " effin' hard " lol. It may be a bit easier now that I've tweaked a few things, but I'll let you all be the judge. Feedback is welcome as always!

[talisa]

honestly i didnt find it very hard at all, even on nightmare skill

just played through it, took me 10mins with only 1death at the part where the ogre comes out of the trapdoor behind you after pressing the switch

fun map though, but short-ish... but you managed to make your map action-packed without resorting to dick-move traps....

.

the fiend in the narrow corridor with arches wasnt a very good choice though....
the tight enclosed space made the fiend defenseless cuz he constantly bumps his head when jumping at the player making the fight easy as pie


the water-trap was to obvious what you had to do and i ended up not finding the trap dangerous at all because of that

you also gave the player grenade-luancher waay early which made most of the fights to easy.
especially the shalraths were made easy to deal with by the fact the grenade-launcher was available right from the start

you perhaps couldve also swapped some of the knights out for hellknights on harder difficulties,
that wouldve helped to keep the map from feeling to easy on the higher difficulties


overall: short but action-packed fun map.... but the tight narrow spaces actually kinda work AGAINST the map here i guess

[MissBubbles]

Thanks for the feedback! I will consider relocating the Grenade Launcher, as well as upgrading some of the Knights to Death Knights. I can also adjust the brushwork in the hallway with the Fiend too, thanks for pointing this out.

The water trap wasn't really intended to be hard to figure out, it's mostly just there to put a bit of pressure on the player for a moment before being free to move around again.

It's hard to gauge difficulty as it can be very subjective. One of my friends, who is quite familiar with Quake, but does not play it regularly at all, struggled a lot with the map. My boyfriend, who is also familiar with Quake and frequently plays twitch shooters, also struggled with it a little bit, but he does not play Quake often either. I take it you must play a lot of custom Quake maps and know what to expect, so a map of this particular style must be trivial.

[Dutch]

<I'm reposting my post from MissBubble's other thread in the interest of keeping all of the topics of this map in one single thread>

Just played through on Hard, another fantastic map!

Pros:
* Very well balanced, just the right amount of ammo.
* Excellent monster placement. The ambushes were awesome, especially the second shambler emerging from the shadows and the fiend in the dark hallway. Also the last 2 fiends, you set a delay time on their teleport which was awesome. I thought I was home free when I dropped down from the sky room.
* The atmosphere was spot-on to an episode 4 map, and it looked a lot better than the originals. I can tell you drew elements from E4M2, and it had some pain maze and nameless city vibes as well.

Cons:
* Really, not any. There were a couple places I might have added a few more detail brushes, but I only mention this at all because I can't think of anything else to say.

[Dutch]

I also want to add that I agree with talisa about the hell knights, and fixing the hallway fiend (i forgot about his lack of mobility, I was too freaked out shooting everywhere trying to find him lol). But I think the water trap and GL are fine in my opinion. I don't like maps with a bunch of shotgun cannon fodder: I barely have the patience to plug an ogre with 8 shotshells, let alone a shalrath...if you feel the need to change it, maybe just swap it out for a double barrel shotgun.

[MissBubbles]

I also want to add that I agree with talisa about the hell knights, and fixing the hallway fiend (i forgot about his lack of mobility, I was too freaked out shooting everywhere trying to find him lol). But I think the water trap and GL are fine in my opinion. I don't like maps with a bunch of shotgun cannon fodder: I barely have the patience to plug an ogre with 8 shotshells, let alone a shalrath...if you feel the need to change it, maybe just swap it out for a double barrel shotgun.

I was actually thinking of doing just that - replacing the GL with the Double Barrel and finding a new home for the Grenade Launcher, possibly just swapping it with the Double Barrel's location.

Thanks for reposting your feedback in here by the way!

[MissBubbles]

Trying the map out with the DB at the start instead of the GL. So far, it feels more fun because you have to dance around the central column with the Vore instead of just fragging her right away.

I'm making adjustments to the placement of the zombies in the water trap as well in accordance to the delayed GL pickup. Without a reliable method of removing the zombies during the water trap I don't want players to get stuck on the lift. I'll wait until I get more feedback before I consider releasing an update with these changes though.

[talisa]

yeah that was mostly what effed me about receiving the GL so early on.....
that you could just straight-up murder that first shalrath so easily because you had the GL right away.

it takes the challenge out of the shalraths, if you can just spam them with grenades

.

regarding the water trap:
maybe you could move the water trap area in its entirety to later in the level and give the player the GL not to long before reaching the area?

[Blood Vengeance]

I'm glad that you've made another map, and again very old school style. About the feedback, I agree with Talisa about difficulty

[ArrrCee]

Awesome! I will check this one out soon.

[MissBubbles]

Alright here's a new version of the map and here's what I've done with it:

Download here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_...2ZuQ3Nic2s0MVE

- Monster placements have been tweaked across all difficulty settings. In brief, Hard has some new Death Knights, Normal has stayed mostly the same, and Easy has even fewer monsters now. I know nobody plays Easy but hey, it's there anyway.

- Item placements have been adjusted slightly to account for new map changes, the most notable being the swapping of the Double Barrel with the Grenade Launcher. The Grenade Launcher is now introduced after the cage trap, on the lift that had the Gold Key. The Gold Key now sits where the Double Barrel originally was, behind the Vore.

- Detail brushwork has been polished in various areas, particularly the hallway with the Fiend; he should no longer bump his head on the ceiling and also be able to follow you into the spike trap if he feels like it.

Hopefully with these changes it won't be too frustrating to have to hold out for the Grenade Launcher until after the cage trap, but I feel like the added intensity might make it more fun, and not to mention making the beginning of the level a bit tougher too.

[ArrrCee]

Now with power, internet and time back on my side, I present Well of Lost Souls on The Quake Grave! =)

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Iz7P0ixWdU[/ame]

[MadGypsy]

There is no doubt that MissBubbles has some pretty good mapping chops but, I would like to say, as an observation, that more attention should be put on lighting. I know first-hand that lighting is arguably the hardest part so, I'm not trying to criticize. The maps definitely have enough light but, the shadows are really sloppy (at least in the latest map). I also realize that some of the sloppiness is just "how it is" under vanilla quake settings but, not all of it.

I can actually give one very clear example. @ the 9:37 mark of Arcee's video there is a zombie on a fully lit wall but, the zombie is completely blacked out. I noticed other things but, I'm not trying to make an expose' of lighting mistakes for MissBubbles map. This is just meant as a "heads up" from someone with really sharp eyes for detail.

[MissBubbles]

Thanks for the playthrough ArrrCee! I appreciate you featuring my maps on the Quake Grave

There is no doubt that MissBubbles has some pretty good mapping chops but, I would like to say, as an observation, that more attention should be put on lighting. I know first-hand that lighting is arguably the hardest part so, I'm not trying to criticize. The maps definitely have enough light but, the shadows are really sloppy (at least in the latest map). I also realize that some of the sloppiness is just "how it is" under vanilla quake settings but, not all of it.

I can actually give one very clear example. @ the 9:37 mark of Arcee's video there is a zombie on a fully lit wall but, the zombie is completely blacked out. I noticed other things but, I'm not trying to make an expose' of lighting mistakes for MissBubbles map. This is just meant as a "heads up" from someone with really sharp eyes for detail.

Thanks MadGypsy! You're definitely right about the lighting, It's not my strong suit. When I got back into Quake mapping with TrenchBroom last year, I was very frustrated when it came to working with lighting. I understand that there seems to be quite a bit of depth to what you can do with the entities, compared to what id did which was simply just adjust the light value and that was it. For the most part, with this map, I mimicked how they handled things, occasionally adding delay to some of the lights. However, I don't really know what I'm doing , I just play with it until it looks good enough. But yeah, your point about the shadows being sloppy is true. In some areas they are intentionally left that way so I can hide monsters in them; a trick that Sandy often uses in his own maps. In order to do this, I had to leave the shadows a bit harsh in some areas to ensure that on everyones monitors they are actually hidden. From what I can tell, ArrrCee plays Quake with a much higher brightness setting than I do, which honestly does bring out a bit of the ugliness in my map's lighting. I don't want to sound like I'm trying to make an excuse for myself with that last comment, but when you play with your brightness up it doesn't really do the map justice.

It's something I would like to improve on in the future if/when I decide to move away from doing id style maps. But for now, I'm fairly happy with how the maps look.

[MadGypsy]

@make excuses

I don't take it like that at all. I know for a fact that light is a nightmare and it goes without saying that changing brightness will F up just about any map. Really, Arcee needs to adjust his settings, all those textures were washed-out in his video.

Personally, I think you are a really good mapper. That in itself is a huge accomplishment. Have you tried lighting with tyrUtils? It makes lighting much easier. I don't know if you use radiant but, if you do, I rewired the ent file to contain the entire tyrUtils set of options. Instead of having to hand type the switches in a custom box, every single one is already in the entity inspector and I even went as far as to include the docs for every option as well.

If this will help you I can search around for it. It is probably on my google drive. More thoroughly, I created an entire quake gamepack for radiant that is basically a "just go" solution for mapping and building with tyrUtils. I could point you to that instead if you like. Really they are sort of the same thing. One is the gamepack and the other is just the ent from my gamepack.

edit: woops I missed the part where you stated that you use trenchbroom. I don't think my ent will work in trenchbroom. Things may have changed but, a while back I tried to change ent/fgd in trenchbroom and I couldn't find anything that resembled an option to do that. However, if you know how to do it I can make things happen for you. If it's fgd I need to spin one up for you cause my fgd version is not for latest tyrUtils BUT, fgd allows you to make a code group and then simply reference it everywhere you want it so, adding in the new features would be super easy. I just need to append to one spot.

also... I don't know if you are aware of this but, there is also anti-light. I can't remember how to do it but, basically you can make a light that erases light. This means you could light your level properly and then the spots where you want to hide something you could add antilight and have more control over the influence it has on the whole. You should definitely play with this possibility if nothing else.