We interrupt this story about a lonely young man overcoming the fallout of his preventable breakup with his first love and his search for atonement to tell you the story of his friend, who after several years now feels ready to depart and move on from the community he's grown attached to.
Okay, now that we got that overdramatic crap out of the way, this next map is going to be based on water and ruins, using MWS and Centaur textures to produce a gloomy and torn aesthetic that hopefully goes well with the stage gimmicks we have in mind. By the way, I'm making this map with another person since they've been insisting on working with me for some time. Right now, we're gathering ideas for stage gimmicks to give off the feeling of a stage that's slowly falling apart as you play on it. So what that means is having 3d floors that can collapse and cause players to fall toward the bottom of the stage. Before I even begin imagining the layout, I always like to do "proof-of-concept" maps first that show my idea is possible. This was the case with more innovative maps such as High Tide and Ruby Queen.
Here is the concept map in case you wanna see what I'm talking about. So far, I've got good news and bad news regarding the proof-of-concept for collapsing floors. The good news is that floors can collapse just fine. The bad news is that players who get caught under the collapsing floor get stuck and become unable to move until the floor has passed through them or stopped moving. Now, the best remedy I can come up with is making the floors collapse quickly enough so that the player doesn't feel stuck for more than a quarter of a second. That still leaves the issue of getting the floor to rise again, since it's hard to get the invisible bridges to sync up with the non-solid 3d floors. I've tried using a scaling factor so that the bridge and 3d floor can fall at the same speed, but that didn't seem to work very well either. If anyone wants to suggest anything, then please post some ideas in the topic. Right now, the plan is just to get the concepts working together before putting them to use in a nice layout.
Also,
here's the music chosen so far for the stage. It's not exactly as exciting or raw like the other tracks, so I'm planning to replace it when I find something better. I just need a track that sounds sober but also a bit invigorating. Like "yeah this is my last map and the last time I'll see the community, but at least let me go out on a high note before I go" kind of music. Oh well, this might take a while.
April 13 UpdateUniversity and uncertainty has been eating up my time, but I'm slowly forcing myself to learn just enough DECORATE to make the stage I've thought about doing for a while now. So, the name has been changed because the aesthetic/themes of this stage remind me a lot of
Brian Wilson's song. In my head, since this is the second to last map in the pack, I wanted to go for a more somber and reflective tone with a stage that crumbes around me as I watch my memories and ideas literally breaking before my very eyes. So what does this mean? Earthquakes like in Ruby Queen, walls that can be destroyed, and statues of all my old friends that can be destroyed, along with flooding like in High Tide so it looks like the stage is being submerged. Now earthquakes and flooding is totally doable for me. Destructible statues is something I'm learning to do right now. The really annoying part is making walls that can be chipped down. If you want to know what I'm talking about,
here is a map that shows the concept I'm going for. And if you don't have GZDoomBuilder, here's a screenshot:
So with projectile weapons, the walls work exactly as intended. The walls flash white for a second, their ceiling is raised a bit, and you basically carve a nice little path for yourself. Now, getting the wall to detect explosive/AOE damage like with Crash Bomb/Rain Flush is where the concept falls flat on its face. I need an invisible object to detect the explosive/aoe damage and call on the script that raises the ceiling, but that's pretty much impossible unless I want a shootable actor with a 64-pixel radius, and that is way too fat for my liking. I'm trying to see if it's possible to make an object that is 8x64 pixels with a 192-pixel height so that it can be used against the wall without a problem. For now though, I gotta ask everyone: Would you be fine with a wall that only breaks from projectiles? Or should I go the extra mile to include explosive/aoe damage as well? All the other gimmicks should be ready for use soon, and the layout shouldn't take too long to produce. This is pretty much the only thing holding me back from starting the layout right now.
Also, before I forget, here's some of the statue sprites I plan to use soon:
Elec for Saviorsword, Colton for myself
Some debris once the statues are destroyed
I'm looking at the concepts I want to use, and I've settled on earthquakes and floods. I'm sorry, but making destructible walls that look nice is almost impossible unless I want to settle for retextured oil canisters. Of course, this is fine for me because the last 5 maps are meant to be about changing environments without player intervention. What that means is the stage changes around you, and you have to adapt to it. So with earthquakes, I'm changing up the formula from Ruby Queen and having terrain that rumbles and changes its height
at random to provide cover/steps/walls/peus to keep the stage consistently fresh.
To help demonstrate, take a look at this map I've posted on dropbox. What you'll see is a flat surface at first, followed by a sudden shift that creates new and unique terrain that can used for many different things. They could be the steps to a new path, they could be a wall that forces you to take a new path, or they could be a new path being cleared after a previous earthquake. Here's some screenshots to show what I mean.
Initial state
Variation 1
Variation 2
Variation 3
With my two stage gimmicks figured out, there's still the question of creating destructible statues like I mentioned earlier. The good news is that all the sprites have been produced and the only part left is coding.
Here's a dropbox link that shows the statue sprites I plan to use. They're different robot masters or old skins that remind me of old friends, and the idea is that you have to destroy these statues in order to get a powerful item or pickup. Yes, the Hard Man statue will be
hard to destroy. Yes, it will hide a very nice reward. Yes, it means something to me. Yes, I'm learning to just let go already, stop pestering me.
Expect me to take a break for Saturday as I celebrate my 21st birthday with drinks and friends, but expect a sign of work on Sunday as I finally work toward laying down the first sectors that will make up the penultimate map in this pack.
By the way, I changed the name of some maps because I wanted more names that reminded me of songs. For example, I'm naming my map "What Would I Want? Sky" after an
Animal Collective song.
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