[cl9] [/idgames] Black Diamond

[suzerduzer]

Black Diamond is a set of 5 boom-compatible maps set in the cavernous void of the sea. Uncover a forgotten civilization on your quest for the Black Diamond, a mystical artifact said to let its bearer see beyond death.

I started this project shortly after I began mapping and have had the first 4 maps finished for quite a while now.  After nearly a year of procrastination and avoidance of this set I finally am ready to release them. I hope you enjoy.

This mapset was primarily tested with DSDA-Doom, but should work fine in other ports as well.

Download:
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/a-c/bd2

Screenshots:


Music

map01 - Tristan Clark - Haze
map02 - Ribbiks - iwt
map03 - Stuart Rynn - Ocean Flute
map04 - Korp - Caged and Voidpilled
map05 - msx2plus - Nirvana
map06 - Korp - Interstellar Shopping
title screen - Shin Megami Tensei IV - Kiccigiorgi Forest
intermission - Shin Megami Tensei IV - Battle Over

Textures

32in24-15
quake
gothicdm
blood
hexen
color palette - coldpal by ReaperAA, item pickup palette tweaked by Maribo
afrit by espi, dehacked from scythe II

Old Version
 

Spoiler

https://www.mediafire.com/file/1rnpeii6toho5mo/bd_RC1.wad/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/ngmpmjfcnzkp5pt/bd_final.wad/file

 

Edited November 27, 2023 by suzerduzer

[myolden]

Just finished this, really cool set! The combat was snappy and fun and the visuals were very nice to look at. I did find a couple of minor things in the final map:

Spoiler

• The bars (sector tag 40) blocking the entrance of the BFG room are untextured.
• Sector 313 is set to damaging, I assume that's not intentional?
• The revenants in sector 7 are not set to ambush, so they make noise before they pop up to ambush the player
• There's some bleed in sector 21 near the start of the map:
  
  

 

 

[Matt Eldrydge]

Those screenshots look very nice, added it to my to-play list!

[suzerduzer]

@myolden Thanks for checking it out :) I should have these fixed for the final release.

[Ravendesk]

Neat set, combat and some visual aspects give me strong sunlust vibes, although maps definitely have their own visual identity.

Maps 03 and 04 were highlights to me. Great layouts, fun combat, they flow really well. I liked that they have rewarding secret fights, gives more options for routing.

Map 05 was the least favourite, incidental combat felt pretty dull (pretty much always it's shooting into the doorway/tunnel until everything dies) and I think GSK fight is just rng, but I might have missed a good strategy there or just was bad. Due to only having green armor there and taking damage being pretty much unavoidable, GSK fight seems to just be a quest to not get highroll missiles and to make cyber behave the way you want him to behave. Atmosphere and visuals were top notch however.

 

Here are fdas with saves on dsda-doom 0.27.2 - bd-fdas-raven.zip.

Map 02 is not fully blind, I had to restart the demo after doing the first couple of rooms to fix some dsda issues.

[slowfade]

Such a great set! Just oozing atmosphere and detail. You've got an eye for everything: texturing, lighting, shapes... Is this your first set?!

[Maribo]

Awesome episode. First four maps (especially the first two) are very Sunlust E1 gameplay meets early E3 aesthetics (Entering Aquatic Desert came to mind). The latter two start leaning even further into the aquatic part of the design, with the fourth being a full jump to the feeling of being in some kind of long-sunken ruins and underwater caves. Map05 goes off on its own and really serves as a crown jewel, no pun intended. Really glad you decided to finish and post these, we'd be worse off without them.

 

A minor nitpick: you use a lot of multi-stacked items in this WAD and picking them up flashes the thicker variants of the pick-up palette due to this. It might be a good idea to tweak them to be less intense, and you could even tint it to be blue instead of yellow to fit the theme if you wanted.

 

UV FDA playthroughs, -dsdademo format and v0.27.2 for playback - bd-maribo.zip

[LadyMistDragon]

Maribo is right! I guess since these aren't speedmaps, you might have hesitated to release them but these are probably better than almost all of the maps from the 2 other releases of yours I can remember!

 

 

[suzerduzer]

@Ravendesk Yeah I think I focused my attention more on the atmosphere in map05 then the combat calibration tbh. I'm glad you enjoyed the other maps, especially map04. I got so tired of making it towards the end I think it soured my opinion of it lol.

@slowfade I've made a few other short projects before this one but haven't been really active until the past month or so.

@Maribo I wasn't aware you could even alter the pickup flash lol. I'll have to utilize that in the future since I do love stacking bonuses and pickups.

[Tango]

those are some incredible shots!!

[Insaneprophet]

I really have developed a love hate relationship with this set. I love that pervasive blue. I hate tyson maps. I love the minimalist architecture. I hate ammo starvation. I love the attention to small details. I hate slaughter arenas. I love beating all of these different combat scenarios. I hate the save scumming Ive resorted to in a few situations. I hate that I dont really hate this set at all. I love that I really kind of do love this set. 😝

Thanks for creating and sharing this with us!

[Zahid]

29 minutes ago, Insaneprophet said:

I really have developed a love hate relationship with this set. I love that pervasive blue. I hate tyson maps. I love the minimalist architecture. I hate ammo starvation. I love the attention to small details. I hate slaughter arenas. I love beating all of these different combat scenarios. I hate the save scumming Ive resorted to in a few situations. I hate that I dont really hate this set at all. I love that I really kind of do love this set. 😝

Thanks for creating and sharing this with us!

same here 

ammo is limited esp didn't like the trap oriented fights...visuals are great though so as structure 

[suzerduzer]

I've updated the download with a link to what's probably the final version unless I find something seriously wrong with any of the maps. A link to the older version is available for demo compatibility. Nothing major changed, I just tweaked a few minor things that bothered me. Credit to Maribo for the adjusted item pickup palette swap.

@Insaneprophet I'm glad you've been able to soldier through regardless lol. I've learned a lot about difficulty calibration through designing this set and would honestly like to make something less difficult in the future. I tend to gravitate to designing harder arenas for some reason even without intending for them to be challenging.

[Thil]

Get straight into the action and never leave it! Some passages are tricky but it works!

All this in a very well used cavernous atmosphere which makes the map very nice.

[Blip]

Loved playing this wad, the maps were really short but pretty difficult, so you can't just breeze through them in a couple of minutes. The atmosphere and the music were on point.

 

Spoiler

You can run across this small platform and drop down to where the cacos come from in the first fight of map05, softlocking the player

 

Can't wait for the final release!

 

[Billa]

Beautiful wad, the gameplay style on UV is exactly my cup of tea. I got stuck on something invisible and died in 03: bd03o.zip Otherwise it was a beautifully smooth and agreeable experience, never got lost or felt a fight was unfair. Was a delightful surprise and despite the obvious Sunlust parallels I feel it outgrew its inspirations and became its own thing by the end.

[Denzel20]

Is it compatible with Lzdoom?

[Insaneprophet]

Yes, lzdoom is what I played on

[Bubbabooie]

I'm stuck on map05, but I want to say I really enjoyed this. Pistol start/no saves highlighted some surprising traps that made me gasp out loud. The maps look gorgeous to boot. Nice set!

[suzerduzer]

@Billa Looks like there's gonna be a final final version after all then lol. Thanks for pointing that out, it seemed one of the blue skull rock things was hovering over the edge of the pillar it was on. I think when I first started working on this I had like, just finished Sunlust on UV for the first time so that influence really crept over lol.

[Maribo]

19 minutes ago, suzerduzer said:

Looks like there's gonna be a final final version after all then lol.

Guess I'll tell you about a minor thing I discovered when recording demos this morning, then: in Map01, the mancubus in Sector 200 will fail to teleport in if anything is occupying the teleport spot since it never wakes up in the closet, you can fix this pretty easily by making it loop with a silent teleport to line action until he successfully teleports out, like this:

Spoiler

[nobleflame]

This set is incredible. I really love the aesthetic. Just on Map 05 now and trying to go for UVMAX. Looks doable for sure. Thanks for your work :D

[nobleflame]

I'm not having a great time with map 05 in terms of UVMAXing it. The fight in the pit with the revs, cybers and arachnos is pretty inconsistent. I've tried shooting the cyber to encourage infighting with the revs, hiding around the corner to bunch the revs up and running around like a madman and I can't seem to get it down. 

Any suggestions? 

[suzerduzer]

@nobleflame When I was testing it I found the most consistent method was to put yourself between the corner closest to the waterfall and the gargoyle pillar to avoid being shot by the cyberdemon while getting the revenants caught on the wall. Most of the demos I watched had people baiting the cyber into shooting the revs which I didn't find very reliable.

[nobleflame]

2 hours ago, suzerduzer said:

@nobleflame When I was testing it I found the most consistent method was to put yourself between the corner closest to the waterfall and the gargoyle pillar to avoid being shot by the cyberdemon while getting the revenants caught on the wall. Most of the demos I watched had people baiting the cyber into shooting the revs which I didn't find very reliable.

Thanks, man. I’ll give it a shot!

[fuGue_tv]

Tough little set. Did a full playthru with saves/rewinds, but I could see this being rewarding if you attempt single segment.

 

playthru video below

https://youtu.be/PzIqzSLE1Cc?si=59KjJk-iOu1SO0v5

[s4f3s3x]

This set absolutely crushed me on HMP - expecially those last two maps.

 

 

Gorgeous work.  Arena fights are not really my style - I might give it another shot on ITYTD. Love the aesthetics too much!

[DreadWanderer]

Looks beautiful, I definitely need to try this!

Edit: gave it a spin for the past hour or so. As expected, beautiful, but quite tough. Very tough in places I might say, some set pieces feel borderline sadistic. I definitely need to get better in order to fully appreciate some of the fights. I'm also a bit upset that I couldn't get all of the items in 2 or 3 of the maps, they appear to be completely out of reach. I assume that was intentional. Anyway, good job. Despite reservations, I liked it!

Edited November 23, 2023 by DreadWanderer

[suzerduzer]

The final Black Diamond release is finally up on the idgames archive, thank you to everyone whose shared their experiences with this set! (My older release, Mercurial Dregs, is also on idgames but I don't want to update that thread.)