/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9626941
>get ahold of American McGee, who loves what he's seeing, he asks if you two can fill this out into a full 32 on its own, so that it can be published as a full double bundle with Evilution
>absolutely!
>build and edit levels non stop for four months, arriving at the name "The Plutonia Experiment"
>without the constraints of the others, you and your brother are now free to be really ambitious and to make something far more novel, cohesive, and challenging
>through a mix of the desire to make something really tough and interesting for someone who has already beat Doom 2 on UV, but still wants something further and greater, and good old healthy sibling rivalry where you 'get' each other through increasingly demanding encounters for when you playtest each other's maps, it shapes up to be a truly visionary gauntlet for the seasoned veterans of the game
>the encounters are harsh and clever, your thorough understanding of the monsters and weapons of the game lets you put them to use in ways which the iD Software guys themselves never thought to
>as the deadline is up, they thankfully think it's perfect and don't ask for any changes
>Evilution and Plutonia then gets released together as the Final Doom bundle, which comes with a new .exe to run the game on Windows 95, which allows for higher resolutions and increases static limits to accommodate some of the excesses which the original game couldn't quite handle
>it's quite a hit and well loved in the fandom
>in fact, Plutonia is frequently regarded as the far greater half, sometimes even the best part of the Doom games, it's a milestone which continues inspiring people for decades
>putting Plutonia in your portfolios, you and your brother get picked up for some gigs, Milo is hired by Barking Dog Studios for the game Global Operations, while you go and join a company started by a big fat guy who worked on the extended .exe, named Gabe Newell, and you start work on a game which would become known as Half-Life

>>9137204
>imo doom 2 walked so plutonia could run
Pretty much.

>despite being really brown, plutonia's maps are FAR prettier
Both Doom 2 and Plutonia are pretty brown, but I think Plutonia just uses textures in a more interesting way, both original Doom 2 ones and their new ones. It also changes the visuals a lot with the new sky textures, and there's lots of earth tone brown/greys with a bunch of green foliage/moss stuff which there's no equivalent to with Doom or Doom 2.

Plutonia is full of homages to iD's original Doom and Doom 2 levels, all over, but you don't necessarily notice most of it on a first playthrough because of how transformative it is with gameplay and visuals. A few are really obvious, but there's many places where you'll just ponder a location or visual for a while, until it hits you just what part it's based on. It's a neat kind of 'remix' that way.

>>6121360
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLomyK5TWFU
This one, because this is actually really hard to do, especially continuous.

Plutonia was the hardest levelset published for Doom, and Nightmare difficulty was a difficulty setting added in a patch of the first game, mostly as a joke response to people complaining that the game was too easy.
Nightmare difficulty, aside from having the highest monster count, will alter monster behavior, mostly by making them attack much more frequently (this makes shotgun zombies worse than ever), the Pinkie demons will run and bite at twice the speed, making them far more threatening, etc.
Since the monster behavior is altered, this means that the way encounters are set up in levels might just not be playable, as the monsters will do things the author of the map doesn't expect them to normally do.

On top of that, 30 seconds after a monster is killed, it will resurrect, which means you can't ever clear out an area to establish any kind of foothold, you can never get max kills, and secret areas or detours aren't always viable as they are either not worth the extra time spent going for them as monsters get up again, as you'll come out using up what you find real soon, in spite of the difficulty doubling the value of ammo pickups.
This difficulty, though not actually intended to be played seriously, is actually suitable for doing a speedrun, because the only actually viable way to play it is to fight your way to the exit before you get overwhelmed or run out of resources.

Couple all of this with Doom's faux RNG tables, which can be vexing enough for just a normal speedrun, and you've got an incredibly challenge this guy takes on with some ridiculous pro plays.

>>5793582
Good geometry, but in Plutonia, those big gray or brown flat and smooth bricks weren't commonly used (if at all?), the visual calls for much rougher and smaller bricks like these.

A general guide to stone and bricks for Plutonia is that it should usually look like the kind of surface which would be extra uncomfortable and maybe even slightly painful to lean against. Some occasional moss and vines is suitable too.