No Way to Go But Down

Alrighty! Taken a few rather slow, droning days, but pending any additional balance fixes, “Arrogant Erratum” and “The Kuras Stronghold” are both totally done. Much of the holdup was spent on yet more rebuilding–in the case of “Kuras”, since I hated my original “I’m fried and I want this done” ending, I built a new one with a bit more of a story behind it.

NewHouse has been coming in clutch with ideas throughout the entire process of building these levels. The “raining” part of the nail gauntlet was one of his ideas that he just couldn’t fit into another level, as was the “rook’s pawn” of the Blue version’s name. Similarly, he suggested a new ending at some point, perhaps using a panicky little mechanic of fitting the player into a tiny space he’s gotta fight his way out of.

Not to give everything away, but that’s implemented, along with a few more map callbacks and something else neat. A few days ago, he sent along a WAD of gold textures, things for King, which is the second episode in the trilogy after Blue. I love myself a bit of foreshadowing, and I love these textures (so warm!), so using some of his early King reference shots, I built the other half of the new ending in its style.

Part of the new "Kuras" ending, featuring gold textures
Here’s part of the rebuilt ending to “The Kuras Stronghold”.

At this point, there’s really not a whole lot left to do. Still gotta get fresh copies of the songs used, but, aside from the aforementioned balance fixes and some tweaks to undo a lot of the Blue-specific progs changes (things like respawning items, monster teleports, void knights since id1 obviously doesn’t have those), the standalone version frankly about ready to be packed up and released. (Of course, NewHouse will be tweaking a lot of this for Blue, I imagine, which is the other reason I wanted to release my own version–preserves the work I did as a sort of “director’s cut”.)

Afterwards, I still have my little map postmortem to write (which goes on the map download page), but what I’m most excited for is the WIP video I’ll be putting together for it. I gathered a ton of video and screenshots along the way, and I always kinda miss rambling into a mic about things only I care about. Stay tuned for that too.

The second cavern bit in "Kuras"
I’m still just really fond of this bit. It’s tiny, but it makes me think of Caverns in Goldeneye, and any inspiration I can take from other old 90s shooters is good with me.

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