Design

A few days ago, I finished up this map I have been working on for my latest side project, Vela Pax. And lemme tell ya, it is a beast of a map. Once I got the layout done and started working on gameplay and thing placements, I had to fight with the 65536 SEGS limit the whole time. It was somewhat of a pain, but in the end it didn’t hurt the detailing or gameplay of the map. This map took me just over a month to finish (breaks and laziness included, of course).

The name of the map is Substruct. It’s the third map out of six in the Vela Pax episode and it’s detailed and themed in a techbase/industrial setting. It will be the final techbase-style map before you start to delve into more gothic and hell themed maps in the latter part of the episode. The map is somewhere between medium and hard in difficulty and it will probably take the average player over an hour to finish in it’s entirety. The gameplay is about as non-linear as you can get; you can run around 95% of the entire map without having to open up areas and do things in any order you wish. Although because of this, certain routes may be easier or harder depending on where you wonder to and what weapons and items are available to you.

As promised, here are the final screenshots for Substruct:

From this point I will be working on Jimmy91’s CC4 map and some Supplice-related stuff (namely some graphic and DEHACKED related things). I want to finish up the CC4 map before I move onto anything else with Vela Pax. I’m hoping it won’t take me very long to do.

As far as what’s planned for the future construction of Vela Pax, I’m planning on doing my update and expansion of my recently released speedmap Dominion of Madness next (I’m going to rename it for this, but I’m not sure to what at the moment). It will be the 5th map in the episode and will get a face lift, probably a hefty number of new areas, and maybe some gameplay flow changes. If you’ve played the original map before, or if you want to give it a spin now, I’m really looking for some more feedback on it’s gameplay as a whole so I can reflect it on the updated version. I will eventually be looking for some dedicated testers, so let me know if your interested.

I am somewhat pleased with how my non-linear approach to Substruct came out. For the remaining maps, I’m thinking I will inject some more of this non-linear, open-ended style of mapping, although maybe not to the same extreme extent. I’d also like to keep the playtime to an average of 30-45 minutes long, although longer wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing in my book as long as the map is interesting enough to keep the player engaged for that length of time. I’d also like to try and not get so blasted close to that SEGS limit again, but knowing me I will probably go nuts with those other maps just like I did with this one . Theme-wise, it’s basically being split up into two mini-episodes; techbase for the first 3 and hell for the latter 3. Although I’m planning on having them varied; for instance, MAP01 will be very techbase while MAP02 will start to get into more heavy industrial. MAP04 is planned to be a sort of city-scape slowing being taken over by hell while MAP06 will be your garden variety Hell with lots and lots of red, lava, flesh, and copious amounts of demonic hordes. This is the plan right now anyways :wink:

Lastly, I got my Wads in Progress page up for Vela Pax, so check that out if your interested. Thanks to everyone who has commented and helped me out so far! I’m enjoying myself working on this project and I hope that will be a reflection of things to come for Supplice