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Fan mission: Mad's Mountain by Jesps (2010/07/31)


Jesps

  

57 members have voted

  1. 1. Gameplay: Enjoyment. Fun duration. Smooth flow, ect. Versus Bugs. Frustration, Boredom, framelag

  2. 2. Appearance: Vertical use, Visual pleasure, lighting, visual style, deduct bad texturing etc.

  3. 3. Story & Text: Story. Text. Briefing. Graphic storytelling



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Mad's Mountain

 

post-2221-128058654454_thumb.jpg

 

Mad's Mountain is a small map for the vertical summer contest 2010

 

A gang of thieves recently stole a painting from the Builders. My client, a collector wants that painting for his personal collection.

The gang's hideout is in some caves in a mountain, outside of town.

The painting can probably be found on the upper levels, along with some of the more important members of the gang. Including their leader Bryce the Mad.

Little is known about this Bryce, but he is said to be ruthless to his victims and gang members. Anyway I doubt he got his nick-name for nothing, so I should be careful.

 

I want to thank

nbohr1more,

Sotha, and

peispud

for beta testing the map

 

Download links:

http://rapidshare.co...untain.pk4.html

http://www.mediafire...madmountain.pk4

http://bloodgate.com/fms/madmountain.pk4 (thanks Tels)

http://www.mindplaces.com/darkmod/fmdetails.php?id=28 (thanks Fidcal)

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Great news!

 

Mirrored here: http://bloodgate.com/fms/madmountain.pk4

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Huurraay, next Contest entry! Normally I always wait until night to play TDM, and that would mean I have to wait couple of hours. But on the other hand, it´s not that sunny today, so there won´t be much light coming through my windows, hmm, that leads to only one conclusion... :ph34r:

-> Crisis of Capitalism

-> 9/11 Truth

->

(hard stuff), more
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just finished. I can say that building a terrain instead of buildings is much harder and you finished this fm in 8 days. Thanks to you I got my hope again on finishing mine for the contest on time.

 

Good ones: Nice lighting, lots of climbing, picklocking underwater is very cool too!

Bad ones: too much potions, and maybe another ambient music will be better, but this one is not bad. Nothing had spolied my fun.

 

 

 

 

thanks and voted! :)

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Feels like I've been playing an hour or so on slow and it's great fun. Progress is smooth with just enough to make you stop and think. I'll resume later.

 

Apart from testing I think this was the first time I used the Thief technique of surfacing gently through natural buoyancy. Always gives me a 'stealthy' feeling like in a movie when something horrible quietly surfaces behind the hero who is looking the other way. Well he would be wouldn't he if it surfaced behind him. :rolleyes: Anyways, now I know how the horrible thing feels. hehe!

 

I also noticed something else that gives me an idea for a feature if it works. I did try it over a year or so ago but couldn't get it to work so I assumed the physics didn't work that way but this seemed to contradict that. Anyway, I'll try it out when I get time but meanwhile keep it secret.

 

Also I got a few occasions of what I call the sideroom paradox in this FM. You are progressing along then see a side branch. Or is it? Maybe that's the main route and the straight route is the side branch. If you go too far you're not going to remember this side branch so you want to explore it first then continue the main route. But which is which? hehe!

 

Yes, completely immersed in this FM but must take a break. Stupid body wants feeding again.

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Very enjoyable. My only critique is that it was a bit easy on expert mode. I cruised right through and blackjacked everyone with ease. Not sure how long it took me, I forgot to check but it felt like 20-25 minutes.

Potions were unnecessary.

 

I did miss a little bit of loot though so I'll have to go back in and find it. If there was some where the baby spiders are then that was probably it.. I didn't bother with them.

I loved the climbable/walkable spider webs! :) Very cool.

I also liked the climbable electric wire :)

 

Ok, I have one more critique... with other FMs as well:

Spiders should not count as "anyone" (ie. Do Not Kill Anyone). I consider "anyone" to be living humans and anything else, including spiders and undead etc., should be free to kill on expert mode. Perhaps ""Do Not Kill Anything" is in order.

 

Edited by PranQster
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System: Mageia Linux Cauldron, aka Mageia 8

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Had the same problem as PranQster.

 

 

 

Good: Really cool climbable electric wire! It's curved! I also enjoyed stacking crates to grab onto the broken ladder. Great mission design, not linear at all. Only missed 90 loot.

 

Bad: Small pool of water with chest in it. It's hard to unlock and get the booze loot, because the space is so small you keep bobbing back up. Thief dude at the beginning - weird arms/body??? Ring on skeleton's hand in the web is a bit hard to frob. And finally, WTF is up with the seizure-inducing room near the top? XD

 

 

 

Rated Excellent/Perfect/Tolerable

Edited by jaxa
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Here's my view. It may contain some spoilers:

 

 

Gameplay: good. This really is a good mission and fun to play. Nice sneaking. Maybe a tiny bit too easy with all the darkness. The biggest down side with gameplay was that the mission is short.

Appearance: good. This mission is nice to look at. The geometry is nice and cave-looking as it should be and there was no lag or low framerate. Verticality was also used nicely. A lot of climbing. A slight downside was that the climbing got slightly repetitive, but since the mission was short and compact no problems here.

Story: tolerable. I though a lot about this. I wanted to give a good grade. But I simply cannot. Here's my thoughts:

There were a few readables bringing in atmosphere, but I couldn't get enchanted by the story. The readables felt a bit shallow in some way and couldn't bring the mission to life. But this is a simple matter, and it would not be a good reason to give only tolerable grade.

The biggest problem was that I couldn't get the feeling that the map is 'real'. Does Bryce routinely climb every single day a sparking generator cable up to his lair? Or simply jump down the hole in the ceiling of his room? The ladder to his lair is broken and the player needs to stack some crates to get up: a nice puzzle, but how does Bryce and his thug climb up there the same way every day? These made the mission locale unbeliavable (as in breaking of suspension of disbelief) for me and combined with the readables, I can only give a tolerable.

 

But if you're looking a short nice climb'n'sneak this is a good mission.

 

 

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Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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I agree to a point with Sotha, but I never find cave missions to be believable ( or overly enjoyable ) most of the time. The mission played very smoothly from start to finish with straightforward gameplay and enough mantling / side trackiing to keep things interesting. Usually with these missions I get frustrated trying to see where to go in the dark and overly difficult mantling - none of that here :) I did find the map a bit easy, but enjoyable from start to finish. Nice job in a short time.

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I had fun with this one too. Got stuck at the beginning, by the wired cage, got stuck off to the side, I moved the crate, had to reload.

 

The spiders, I couldn't believe I was able to.

walk on the spider web!

That just seemed a bit....odd.

 

The room you where the bridge is in, you also used it in your screen shot. You like mushrooms don't you? lol. Seemed a few too many, it started to look like wallpaper, and not randomly grown shrooms.

 

Good climbing, had to retrace my steps a couple of times, found the way to go. Could of been a bit tighter on the story end of things, overall, good job. :)

 

I am guessing the strobe light room is a form of punishment? Or does the dude go in there himself, and that is what drives him mad. hah.

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Huurraay, next Contest entry! Normally I always wait until night to play TDM, and that would mean I have to wait couple of hours. But on the other hand, it´s not that sunny today, so there won´t be much light coming through my windows, hmm, that leads to only one conclusion... ph34r.gif

 

 

Exaclty. I WAS waiting til nightfall, then I got some beer, it's not too sunny, couldn't wait.

 

I had lots of fun Jesps,

Cool atmoshpere, creative use of space, all that. Funny notes... Thumbs up.

 

Cool that the 2 released missions so far are so completely different, can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with.

 

----------

I had 2 issues:

 

1- the stairs in the loading pic were all black and the torches were blue when I looked through the black. Most likely I have a conflicting file in my darkmod directory as I work out of it too... Just thought I'd mention in case anyone else sees it though.

 

2- The hum on the grill lights is VERY loud. That's a Mod thing we need to fix I think.

 

So probably nothing mission related ;)

 

----------- what BA said

 

I jumped ;) but i died trying to figure how to get up the first time. I guess second, the 1st I killed a spider and failed. That should probably be OK even with a no kill obj. Or the objective should be 'kill nothing', not 'dont kill anybody'

 

 

 

there's a way to do that by team I'm sure, but I don't know how yet.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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I had fun with this one too. Got stuck at the beginning, by the wired cage, got stuck off to the side, I moved the crate, had to reload.

 

 

I got stuck once or twice too. But if you have the console enabled in your shortcut

 

"M:\Games\Doom 3\darkmod\tdmlauncher.exe" +set com_allowConsole 1

 

You can bring it down ctrl-alt-~ and type noclip, that'll let you fly through terrain (no cheating wink.gif ), get to a clear spot and type it again. You'll drop back to floor and have regular clipping agiain. Easier than reload.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Ahh thanks for that tip, I'll do that. :) Ohh one thing I forgot to mention, the *math* book. I laughed at that one. The more he drank, the worse his answers were. :D:P

 

I would recommend more use of ambients, not the same looping sound over and over. I ended up turning it down. Looping sounds drive me nuts after awhile.

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I even have bound 'noclip' to a key and I have to use it quite often the last time somehow. Even in Doom3.

 

Nice mission, but somehow I was in the blackjack-mood and blackjacked everyone except the first guard. :rolleyes: (and exactly this last guard blocked himself on the door as I wanted to get out, so I had to jump off the ladder into his dead angle and water the torch...) Some more or wider patrol routes would´ve been nice.

 

I too had problems with immersion due to the design inside. The climbing parts were nice, though, and made me praise the mantle-evolution in TDM damn often. I fell down only once, as I tried to climb up from a shelf.

Well, maybe these thieves are so happy with TDM´s mantle-function that they love to do that all the day. And the ladder could´ve been broken seconds before...

 

The Thief before the

cell with a builder in it

had no voice! As I watered the first torch, he came by but said nothing. And as I failed to sneak up on him he attacked, but said nothing. No word during patrol too. Someone else got aware of this?

 

There were some nice details like the

brain in the bowl, with fork in it. This made me laugh out loud. laugh.gif But this guy really was hungry! Two human bodies in two days? ohmy.gif

 

To climb the spider-web was really nice, and for me it´s OK to walk over the web. These are strong beasts that can make strong webs. Though I have to say that the noise they make is a little too loud, but that´s a mod-thing (taste-thing).

 

And I had a big laugh as I saw Mad Dog, äh, Mad Bryce, right? Because first I thought he is sooo mad, that he wears a little princess-crown on his head! :D Tis is a pagan-model, right? The pigtail could need some adjusting more to the back, me thinks.

 

 

I spent 1:45 hours in the caves and found 930 loot. I always try to spend most time possible and that is usually four hours, so that means the mission was too short! ;) Ok, I blackjacked everyone, that shorted it a lot. :unsure: I wonder where the rest of the loot is hidden...

 

And killing spiders is not allowed on Expert? But it doesn´t matter because there is nothing by the baby-spiders, right? (except the

route of mama spider)

I played on Hard and killed ém all! Undead and Beasts should be allowed to kill. Sometimes a Thief have/wants to kill, it´s nature of men... :ph34r:

 

Everything else that was said before would´ve been said now by me if it hasn´t been said before. (sounds horrible, I know :wacko:)

 

Only one thing: the shadows/ambientLight seemed a little too bright. (but again, taste-thing)

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-> Crisis of Capitalism

-> 9/11 Truth

->

(hard stuff), more
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Finished in about 1 hour 20 mins plus maybe 20 mins quickloads etc. so a decent length considering. I'll stick everything else in a spoiler just in case:

 

 

Most of what I was going to say has been said. The 'unbelievability' of it didn't bother me. I can accept that in some FMs more than others. Maybe because I knew it was done quickly as a fun mission. LOL to think of these thieves cutting away hundreds of tons of rockface to leave nice little stone steps jutting out. :)

 

Apart from testing I think this was the first time I recall having to stack crates to climb in a real FM. It is so many light years ahead of Thief both in stacking and climbing them after. Happy days but I always loved/hated those frustrating slippy dome crates.

 

Game flowed along nicely. I blackjacked more than usual - perhaps because of the reduced immersive believability I was treating it in a more light-hearted way. Although I got turned around a couple of times most areas were quite varied so always something different up the next climb.

 

Lighting was fine for me. Good use of water though maybe needed more murk on top to match underneath. jaxa: You can set neutral buoyancy by going into crouch mode.

 

I only just got enough loot right at the end on Expert. Glad there was another quick way out. I don't find it so much fun to retrace a lengthy route that would just be routine.

 

 

Overall a good value FM and a worthy contender.

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Great emergent gameplay!

 

 

During one of my early runs I alerted the two guards in the first big room and at the last second discovered the water for an escape route (only to escape to a cannibal... :laugh: )

 

Yeah the dark humor in this one is great. I got a chuckle from the electrocution room...

 

One thing that I think will continue to puzzle me is whether the drunken math notes are really a secret code for something hidden in the mission... :ph34r:

 

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Just finished and really enjoyed the

 

many twists and turns of the caves. Only part I didn't like was the spiders (I hate em) but were easily taken care of. Someone already mentioned your fondness? for mushrooms but appreciate that there were still enough shadows to get around. I did find that some of the guards weren't too alert but others were okay.

 

Thanks Jesps!

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