Hi! I love Wolfenstein-themed stuff and shooting Nazis, and this scratches a wonderful niche.
I played through the first couple maps of Epic 1 with this, here's my impressions so far:
- The animated icon for the menuscreen is really cool! The difficulties being a simple "Genocide", "Homicide", and "Suicide" are also pretty good.
- The tracers could use a bump up. The missileheight and actual spark for the bullet are two different values, so you have a bullet and the tracer trailing underneath it.
- The sound for the pistol and shotgun seems waaaayyyy off to the left?
- The enemy variety as a whole is really cool! Not just nazis, but also cybernazis, cyberdogs, robots, and more!
- The weapons themselves overall, also pretty cool. Being able to dual wield everything, also cool. Sounds, cool cool cool. The STG-60 is easily one of my favorites.
- I was constantly running out of ammo. CONSTANTLY! I ended up going back to the pistols constantly because ammo was just running dry for everything else.
- In addition to this, there's a huge disparity in ammo types and what goes for what. What's the difference between high caliber bullets and low caliber? What gun do they go to?
- Explosion effects for the hand-grenade and grenade launcher are R E A L L Y P R E T T Y.
I think it'd be good to really focus a lot on ammo balance--the value of how much ammo it takes to kill an enemy vs how much ammo you get on pickups feels
incredibly skewed towards the enemies at the moment. I ended up running out of everything except the explosives halfway through Epic 1 map02, and it really seemed like the Barons/Knights replacements ignore explosive damage! There's a lot of stuff that could be checked here.
For example, the amount of per pickup compared to what you're usually supposed to get--vanilla Doom gives you about 100 bullets per clipbox, while here you get a meager 30. A little on the small side!
Likewise, maybe the enemies have a little too much HP/defenses? For example, the Hell Knight replacement has 600 HP, a whole 100 HP more than its Hell Knight counterpart, and also ignores radius damage! The Revenant replacement, the cyborg nazi, has 500 HP--200 more than the usual! This means you'll end up needing to use a LOT MORE ammo to take care of it.
Alternatively, perhaps the damage values are a little low? The weapons seem to use the basic "5" damage value for the weapons--but with enemies having higher HP and less ammo to go around for it, that means they require many more shots to take down!
...there's a lot you could do here, honestly. Either way, don't let this be a discouragement! We could always use more Wolfenstein/Nazi mods, and it's always super-cool to see more. Plus, I was a big fan of Arachnophobia, so I'm pretty excited about this too.
