N0rdberg wanted there to be donuts. So there's donuts.

In my early days of playing deathmatch maps in DooM, I happened into servers running The Last Strike Deathmatch 2004. It's a pretty excellent set of maps and one map in particular I found amazing; map10: The Void. This was the first time I'd ever seen the trampoline/springboard function. In map authoring terms, it uses a feature called ThrustThing. I sat there with my mouth agape. "How the F?!"

The other year I had a map I finally deployed this ThrustThing feature in called Dystopian Playground. This map was an extension of an idea from my fake son, Curtis. What Curtis had done in Doom Builder is he created a tall cliff with a crapload of ammo and weapons. At the bottom of the cliff, he placed a nuts.wad amount of Revenants facing away from the cliff edge. So the idea was you grab a weapon and fire it at the edge of the cliff in the direction of the Revenants, they wake up and immediately launch their fireball rockets up at you. You step back and look up to enjoy the fireworks show. Genius! When I was revisiting this concept looking for something new to create, I figured those trampolines would make a great way to get around to try to avoid being tagged by Revenant rockets.

Well, it was fun for a little bit. I really did like the custom Revenant I made for this but then I started monkeying around with Monster Replacement Theory and found that the map was much better with hordes of Cacodemons instead. In fact, servers I've run in this configuration have probably lasted ten times as long as the original Revenant deployed ones.

Every time I play these days though, I keep saying to myself, "I need to re-do this map". The glaring (to me) issue is this damn skybox error. Most people probably don't notice it but to me, as a mapper, it sticks out like a sore thumb:

Yah, those two pictures are of the same error just shot from different angles and as you may or may not be able to see, the skybox background "bleeds through" where the flat surface should exist. In fact, the area immediately below it is a very useful landing location where a box of rocket ammo is located. So I see this error multiple times every time I play this map as grabbing that particular box of rockets is part of a sortof mail route I do in my strategy to cull the herd of monsters.

Obviously, having hordes of Cacodementals instead of Revenants without the use of the MRT modifier wad adds more reason to replace this map. Furthermore, I've evolved the Cacolauncher weapon since this map was made. Now, it's called the Master Blaster. It uses energy cell ammo instead of rockets. It shares slot 7 with the BFG instead of slot 5 with the normal rocket launcher. And in all of my maps of late, one obtains the weapon by first killing off a Carcinobus monster.

So I did a replacement map called Mo'Tanky Enemeesh. This was, by far, the most fun map (to me) that I'd ever created. And I played the living shit out of it for about a year. I also got some good reviews from actual players who joined my little server. One player commented on my use of FIREBLU texturing. Thing was, I didn't use the stock FIREBLU Doom texture. Rather, I had some liquid texture on the floor which I'd referred to as Electrolyte Solution and I doctored up some rock textures to show a "residue" of the liquid as if the basin, at one time, had more liquid in it than the player was currently seeing. But this one player's comment got the wheels in my skull turning again and I began the what-if scenarios for improved, richer liquid and residue rock textures. Furthermore, I had plenty of custom monsters which already matched this enhanced richness of color.

But I didn't stop there. I was missing the lava world of Dystopian Playground. There were plenty of custom monster assets from the, now stalled, Imaginate project which would fit in a new lava world map. For one, the improved Fyredemon which loses its head as a precursor to its ultimate death would work great in a lava world. The mini Archvile and Fyre Imps would do nicely as well. Therefore, I set out to make two maps instead of one but the overall open world geography theme would be shared between both of them. I've named the lava map, as well as the overall project, Character Assassination. The second map's name is Even More Tanky Enemeesh. I plan on adding more maps to this project in the future but since it took over two months to get these finished, I thought I'd better release something now so I can get back to actually playing my maps again.

Forgive the above screenshot's mix of two different liquids. That's an artifact of development. When I took the shot, I was doing some copy and pasting of sectors to adjust some vertices in other places. The lava liquid was my source for the copying of vertices.

In this world, the lava liquid is quite intentional and contrasts with the deep blue/purple sky. I never can have too many custom monsters and have added a Saucer Zombie as well as kidnapping the Hothead Zombie from the Imaginate project.

Saucer Zombies lose their ship and fall from the sky as one might expect gravity to do to them. Obeying physics laws, I know, how boring of me!

I've returned my purple Cacodemon, the Poisonberry Mental, originally made for the Mo'Tanky Enemeesh map. I'd been just doing another recolor when thoughts struck me about the real fun of this one would be to change the appearance of its firing sequence. The fireball oscillates between two differently diametered fireball frames as well as spitting out some gravity affected spittle at the same time. That extra drool isn't programmed to harm the player in any way but does wonders for adding more menacing appearance to an already fiendish looking foe. And recently I discovered that this extra drool is a great way for the player to find that he/she has one of these monsters close and directly behind them as there is a small amount of forward motion to this gravity affected energy drool. The player can now literally see over his/her shoulder!

Did I mention that things get blowed up? Things get blowed up real good!

Downloads: