Soundless Mound: Demo Version [Update 11]

[Marisa the Magician]

A Silent Hill themed "short" map, and 1st place winner of Joel's Doom Mapping Contest II. Requires GZDoom 4.8.2 or later.



You wake up in an old apartment building. The way out is locked, and you must find the key.

Important things to know:
- Inventory management: In this demo, everything is handled through the inventory, including selecting weapons, make sure your bindings are all in place.
- Picking up items: Items must be picked up by pressing use, rather than walking over them. Resources are scattered all over the place, so explore as much as you can.
- Read notes: Notes spread across the map may contain important hints for your progress, don't forget to read them all.
- In-game saves: Though manual saving isn't outright blocked, it's still recommended to use the in-game "save squares" (totally copied straight from silent hill 2)
- Combat: Almost all enemies are melee-based and will deliver a lot of pain if you don't keep your distance.
- Graphics: They look like crap on purpose. It's recommended to play in 1920x1080 for the intended visuals (downscaling/upscaling is fine). The map uses some heavy shaders, so you'll need a fairly ok GPU to play (sorry, Intel users).
- Jumping/Crouching: They're disabled to stay in line with the Silent Hill imitation. Waist-high obstacles will be insurmountable.
- Cheating: Disabled on hard mode. Note that cheats may cause issues with proper function of the map, especially noclip.

---

>>> Download here <<<

Update history:
- Initial release: Submission to Joel's contest. Works only in 3.2.5. Full of bugs.
- Update 1: Patched to work in 3.3.
- Update 2: Various bug fixes and additions, requires 3.3.2.
- Update 3: Fixed crash after picking up the Pearl Key.
- Update 4: Various small fixes.
- Update 5: Fixed many texture misalignments (Thanks, Rachael). Slightly rebalanced hard mode. Corrected some enemy AI behaviour.
- Update 6: Fixes some minor bugs. Rebalances monsters once again. Cheats are enabled for Easy and Medium difficulties (with a warning for noclip).
- Update 7: Corrected some lines that should be blocking. Fixed an incorrect 3d floor tag. Yet more minor rebalancing. Fixed a floor lowering more than it should.
- Update 8: Patched up a race condition where one could activate a door while in a cutscene, causing monsters from the outgoing room to be activated during the transition.
- Update 9: Bleeding texture effect has been rewritten to take advantage of the new user texture support for hardware shaders. In addition there have been some minor fixups and code cleaning.
- Update 10: Quite a lot of changes! See the update post on page 6 for more details. Now requires 3.7.2.
- Update 10.1: Small hotfix for end of level stats displaying in the title screen.
- Update 10.2: Small hotfix for lingering ambient track when backtracking from otherworld 2nd floor hall to room 624 (incorrect track was started).
- Update 11: Final update with various QoL changes, bug fixes and compatibility tweaks.

Now that Joel's released all the contest maps I can finally give you all the initial release version (yeah I know it was dumb of me to not keep it). Note that it will only work on 3.2.5 and nothing else above it.

If you like my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

[R4L]

YES FINALLY.

Screenshots look incredible btw.

[ZikShadow]

Might have missed saying this before when I got this the first time, but magnificent job recreating the SH atmosphere in Doom!

The goods:
- The demo in itself was atmospheric, creepy, and had me anticipating danger at every corner. I particularly liked the dark light part, where you know walking the dark paths pretty much guarantees attacks from who knows where but you have to since it's the only path you can take, pure high tension.
- Most of the enemies fit the theme, and for the most part pretty fair to fight if done carefully, didn't lose too much health on my melee focused first run.
- The SH mechanic itself is recreated well; The red saves, fade-to-black doors, inventory, melee weapons that you can prepare before striking, it's all pretty good stuff.
- The puzzles are pretty balanced as well, nothing as obscure and mind boggling as SH's usual Hard puzzle difficulty shenanigans here.

The only complaints I got are really small stuff, more mechanic based than map ones:
- No difficulty settings, a premonition of difficulty changes that change more than the monster counts or just didn't want to bother with the settings?
- The inventory only has a single slot to see, might be tricky to cycle to the thing you want to use in the event that later versions increase the stuff that you can use.
- I wonder if it's possible to have the red saves use manual slots instead of autosaves.
- The pistol's rather underwhelming feel, like its not an actual firearm and more peashooter. The Goldeneye reload also feels off. I know that the sounds are ripped straight from SH + it's replaceable from my end, and that the pistol sprite itself didn't really have reloading sets, so it's not really a biggie.
- The melee weapons range confusion. I can adapt to it, but I still occasionally misjudge my aim from time to time when using the charge mechanic. The sprites themselves also often fools you, with the knife going more for the side slash than a forward thrust and the crowbar still looking too close even though the range is double the knife.
- Having the melee weapons move you when attacking plus the crowbar's not so crosshair dependent charge attack (I swore I aimed at a monster on my crosshair only to somehow miss them and have my back exposed for attack) adds some unwieldy feel to them. I'm guessing it's done to replicate SH's melee weapons oddities, but still.
- The door transitions feels a bit too slow. Again, a SH thing, so nothing to really worry about. Though it would be nice to have a skip button option for rooms you've already visited.

[Marisa the Magician]

- No difficulty settings, a premonition of difficulty changes that change more than the monster counts or just didn't want to bother with the settings?

Lack of time.

- The inventory only has a single slot to see, might be tricky to cycle to the thing you want to use in the event that later versions increase the stuff that you can use.

I didn't put a lot of effort into the HUD, so there's that. I'll definitely have this fixed up in the full TC (complete with pausing the action when it's being scrolled through).

- I wonder if it's possible to have the red saves use manual slots instead of autosaves.

Sadly it's not possible.

- The pistol's rather underwhelming feel, like its not an actual firearm and more peashooter. The Goldeneye reload also feels off. I know that the sounds are ripped straight from SH + it's replaceable from my end, and that the pistol sprite itself didn't really have reloading sets, so it's not really a biggie.

I'd definitely have gone with better sprites for the pistol but that's all I could work with at the time.

- The melee weapons range confusion. I can adapt to it, but I still occasionally misjudge my aim from time to time when using the charge mechanic. The sprites themselves also often fools you, with the knife going more for the side slash than a forward thrust and the crowbar still looking too close even though the range is double the knife.

These are also due to the sprites I decided to use, they're definitely not fitting for what I wanted.

- Having the melee weapons move you when attacking plus the crowbar's not so crosshair dependent charge attack (I swore I aimed at a monster on my crosshair only to somehow miss them and have my back exposed for attack) adds some unwieldy feel to them. I'm guessing it's done to replicate SH's melee weapons oddities, but still.

The crowbar is awkward to use for balance reasons, as its damage output is absurd when charged.

- The door transitions feels a bit too slow. Again, a SH thing, so nothing to really worry about. Though it would be nice to have a skip button option for rooms you've already visited.

Had I had some extra time to polish this I would have added options to toggle many things, including the low res effect, fake door loading times, and others.

[wildweasel]

I'm gonna say yeah, this has utterly nailed it. As has already been stated, though, I kinda feel like the weapons graphics and sounds don't really represent their characteristics.

[Kizoky]

I love the atmosphere of this mod, there wasn't a single mod that made me shriek (maybe Ghoul's Forest, but that is just plain jumpscares), the ambient sound playing in some of the rooms and areas gives you the creeps, and not to mention the wandering monsters, 3-4 times I had a heart attack because they were literally in front of the door after the black screen, and not only the appearance of the monster made me shit bricks but the sound they give when they see you.

Great work overall!

[ZikShadow]

(complete with pausing the action when it's being scrolled through)

Wouldn't mind seeing the option to have it not pause the game, I liked the idea where going in unprepared and fumbling around with the inventory midcombat (badly, anyway) can get you hurt or worse.

[Rachael]

I really love creepy maps and this one really hits it.

[BeatCrazed]

Oh baby this is a great year for doom modding. We've had a demo for Memoirs of Magic, EP 2 of Adventures of Square, Pillowblaster has shown off v3.0 of Guncaster (that will be coolio) and now Silent Mound :D

I've played through it (and had a lot of fun in the process) and I have some feedback for you:

When I got to the wired up door and used it (after finding the knife,) the dialogue said that I could use my knife to cut the wires. naturally I thought that meant attack the wires with the knife and I took a good 10 seconds to slash at it before becoming confused and using the door again to re-read the dialogue (which didn't work because it instead cut the wires cut-scene style.) I think it would be good if you could make attacking the door with the knife start the cut-scene as well as using the door the second time.

After getting the crowbar I expected it to be a tool in the adventure game sense rather than a weapon, and went back through the entire area before it trying all the stuck doors again. I think it would be a little more clear if the pickup message said something like "I can bust some heads with this" or some such, because I didn't realize until reading this thread that I had an apparently kickarse melee weapon which I never used.

In one of the cruel world sections (the one which mirrored the second floor, I think) I found a baron of hell which did nothing. Was that meant to do anything or was it really just a statue? I didn't feel like shooting at it or even near it to find out for sure, since I could just sneak around it.

I hope difficulty levels make it into the finished product. I finished the demo with 13 health drinks, all of the medkits I found (6, never used one :P) and 54 bullets. Some of that is from crawling every room after the boss before leaving the building, but yeah :P

The room before the boss was very creepy. Built up a good sense of apprehension .



Thanks for making this Marisa, I'm looking forward to the full version with bated breath.

[vitriolicv]

This is pretty great. 2spoopy. I did get stuck, thinking I have gone everywhere, but don't know where to go next, though. Some kind of journal or something might help.

[Marisa the Magician]

I think it would be good if you could make attacking the door with the knife start the cut-scene as well as using the door the second time.

The ZScript feature that would allow me to do this didn't exist in 3.2.5. (In fact, it wasn't until 3.3.2, released yesterday, that I could now do it the way I wanted)

In one of the cruel world sections (the one which mirrored the second floor, I think) I found a baron of hell which did nothing. Was that meant to do anything or was it really just a statue? I didn't feel like shooting at it or even near it to find out for sure, since I could just sneak around it.

That one is a bug. He's supposed to aggro as soon as you get close, but I must have screwed up something.

[Marisa the Magician]

Important announcement: An updated version has been uploaded, please redownload.

Notable additions:
- Knife and Crowbar can now directly activate their respective puzzles (GZDoom 3.3.2 addition).
- Range of melee weapons has been reduced slightly.
- Fixed AI routine of critters with AMBUSH (previously they wouldn't check sight until they heard a noise).
- Copied Strife inventory behavior so items can be used with a single press.
- Restored intended Crowbar crit behavior (squared damage).
- Doubled health of Bruiser Critter so it's more of a threat.
- Implemented easy mode, reduces enemy damage and health and adds more items.
- Implemented hard mode, increased enemy damage and health and removes a couple items here and there.
- Made shaders configurable.
- Flashlight now uses a spotlight.

[vitriolicv]

I'm getting a crash. Screenshot of console attached.

Screenshot_Doom_20180414_195552.png

[vitriolicv]

I just double checked, and this crash happens every time I

---

pick up the pearl key. Input seems to freeze, then there is an air raid siren, then it drops to console.

[Marisa the Magician]

Ah, seems the door script for the transition isn't triggered by the player.

Edit: Fixed it up, the file has been updated.

Edit #2: Update 4 is out. If you downloaded the mod after 19:45 CEST today you already have it.