Terrarium

[EdgeOfChaos]

This is a fighting map I started a while ago. It's inspired by Monter2 and other similar games. It's a "dungeon crawler" type map, but you only fight bosses. You can choose which to fight and when - but the bosses are supposed to be quite difficult. Even the "tutorial" boss can kill you in an instant if you react wrong to his skills.

There are six heroes you can choose from: paladin, knight, healer, archer, assassin, sorcerer. Each play very differently. Hero attack and spells are custom made (no default attack). There are 11 boss options, but only 6 are coded (the ones in green).

It can be done in a group or solo (but some heroes are really bad at soloing). Estimated time to beat it is probably 1-3 hours depending how well you play. I meant to finish all of the bosses, but currently I'm not sure if I'll work on it again, so I'm releasing what I have here.

Here are some screenshots of arenas/bosses attacking

Hidden

Map is open source in vjass, you're free to do anything with it you want.

EDIT:
I forgot credits, here they are

Hidden

Myol33 - Inspiration/ideas
JetFangInferno - Flame Tornado, AnimateDeadTarget, EyeOfSargeras, HolyExplosion, FrostNova
JesusHipster - ChargeArcaneSpell, Rampage, WaterBlast,GatherSouls
~Nightmare - Assassin, Herald of Alteration
Daenar7 - Proudmoore, RunicSniper, Ankyloturtle
Pyritie - Fire Uber
ratamahatta - Holy Fire Slam
UgoUgo - Mega Heal
nhocklanhox6 - Point target circle
dhguardianes - Arcane Nova
Kino - Instant Whirl
xyzier_24 - Prismatic Wave
FrIkY - Arthas
Black_Stan - Blood Elf Lieutenant
67chrome - Succubus
iNfraNe - Water plane
IcemanBo - SuspendUnit
Tranquil - Great Lightning
Bribe - Unit Indexer
Razer!X - Blue Shockwave
Pyritie - Starfall
WILL THE ALMIGHTY - Ancient Explosion
Big Dub - UndeadTainter
nGy - BeamMissle

 

[n00b]

ok i played this on solo, just gonna dump my thoughts here

regarding gameplay:
- add a zoom command
- add free retraining tomes or something
- the moon was a cool boss, boomerang glaives is a pretty dank idea
- water elemental boss was pretty simple but challenging/fun, beat it on my first try by the skin of my teeth
- sometimes i'd still be poisoned even after the boss ended
- can you explain how poison counters work. just curious
- harmonic is a motherfucker, i never really found out how to avoid the attack that sends projectiles in eveyr goddamn direction, my only way of avoiding that was to cancel it via stun or to just run the fuck away and pray that i don't lose too much hp. wind flapping was very annoying but manageable (70% of the time), the move where he flies around the arena spamming fires pretty much fcked me every single time lol. In hindsight I should have just bought 99999 potions or something

regarding a e s t h e t i cs:
- harmonic's arena looks pretty bad, you should remove that dirt square in the center of the arena because symmetrical things tend to look unnatural as fuck. Symmetrical stuff should only be in man-made areas imo
- the 4 stalagmites in discount magic golem's arena form a perfect square and it looks unnatural
- the 'man-made' tiles in golem's arena also look pretty bad. It would look better if those tiles looked like they were buried under the dirt for that 'ancient ruins' look, but i don't think you can achieve that with this tileset. Imo just make the entire arena rough dirt, and sprinkle dirt/runed bricks throughout the arena
- straight lines tend to look bad, like the perfectly rectangular fires that surround harmonic's arena
- all of the arenas are flat as fuck, there should be some minor elevation differences in all of the arenas. For cheap and ez elevation variation, i usually just use the noise tool (don't overdo it) then smooth it out afterwards
- overall if you want some dank terrain ideas i would suggest going to the terrain board, there's some autistic savants there with godlike terrain and they make for some good references
- harmonic should have a flying unit shadow, not a ground unit; the shadow should also be as large as the unit's model
- the blue fires in harmonic's fight shouldn't have shadows
- the pure green/red lighting changes look really tacky; for instance, the combination of bright green effects and dark red lighting in nox's fight looks particularly nasty. imo the lighting should be more subtle, right now it's like "Fuck you everything is red now"
- the absence of sound effects on some of harmonic's projectile attacks was pretty odd
- you should add sound effects for when the player deals damage


ok im too lazy to write any more, yes most of my complaints were about the visuals cause im a fag

tbh you should continue working on this, there's not enough dank boss fight maps on wc3 and i also liked the fact that you can play it solo

anyway i got no complaints about the gameplay itself, its pretty FUN

 

[EdgeOfChaos]

Wow, thanks very much for the feedback!

Zoom command - yes, it's a must have.
Tomes of Retraining could be useful.
Those moonglaives are super dangerous . Especially cause the boss attacks extremely fast when in moonglaive range.
Water Elemental is pretty simple, yeah. The only cool mechanic he has is splitting on death. I guess I wanted him to be somewhat easy since he's boss #2 but he should really have some new attack.
Poison is bugged in the nox fight yeah (don't think any other boss uses it yet). Technical details of poison follow:

Hidden

Poison is a real array, indexed by the units' custom values. There's a periodic trigger which deals damage equal to poison's count, then makes it "decay" slightly by (I believe) multiplying it by a number below 1 and subtracting a small raw amount. The counter is set to 0 upon death. The reason it's bugged is because Nox's spells can still hit you after you die, so if he hits your corpse with a poison laser beam, you'll revive with like 700 poison counters, and you're fucked at that point. Btw the map in the OP is not protected/optimized, so you're free to check out any technical detail of anything.

Harmonic semi-spoilers:

Hidden

The big attack sends projectiles all around you, but not on you. In single player, you can just sit still to dodge. In multiplayer, it's supposed to be more of a concern to your allies around you than to you. The one exception to this is when you're standing nearby a wall. Then, harmonic's projectile will explode on the wall and standing still does not guarantee your safety.

Most of the challenge with Harmonic comes from getting him to lay his ice paths down how you want. The amount of ice paths dropped depends on his HP; at the start of the fight, it's only 2 short ones, but at the end it can be like, 7 arena-wide ones and 1 short one. He always follows this up with his Wing Storm, which can easily blow you into the ice paths he just laid down. In order to beat it, you have to make him lay his ice paths in a somewhat nice way. If, for example, he flies across the arena diagonally and cuts the size in two, you're in serious trouble.

And then of course when he drops to low HP he will use the egg. You can either interrupt the egg with a stun, or let him heal and then fight him again, since he only uses it once.

Harmonic is super hard right now. Nothing like Serrated Dragon is though; I don't know if you tried him, but he is insanely hard, and will likely be getting nerfed. Plus I have an even harder boss imagined right now.

Aesthetics:
- Ice arena's pretty boring yeah. I'll do something there..
- Hmm.. too natural? Would moving them just a bit to not form a square help? They are intended to be hiding spots against the boss, so I want something like that there.
- "discount magic golem" . I didn't really mean to make it so similar to magic golem - but when I made the animations, there was no other abilities I could think of . Honestly I think blazing golem is the most boring boss right now, though he is a "tutorial".
- I'll do rough dirt
- What would be better than the fire surrounding? Should the arena be a different shape? The flaming walls and shape of arena play a pretty big part in the fight.
- I tried to make a little elevation in the moon's and nox's arena. I can add some noise too.
- Good catch on flying shadow
- To be honest I don't know how to make the lighting subtle LUL. I set the sky color to like, the lightest red I could and then it was super dark ingame so I said fuck it. Took ages to get those to even work. I'll see what I can do about this, I do agree it looks pretty bad. Do you think the teal sky during the water bosses, and purple sky during the moon is okay, or are those too obnoxious as well?
- Sounds: yeah, I play wc3 with sound off which leads to all sorts of bugs with the unit sounds.. I should have real audio cues for some of the attacks. I'll do it sometime, maybe. I definitely feel there should be audio cues for at least Harmonic's different attacks: for example, it's somewhat difficult to tell apart whether he's using the big circular attack or the frost nova attack.

Again, thanks a lot for playing. You're definitely encouraging me to work more on it . Though it's been many months since I coded real content, have to get used to the code again. I have basically all the bosses imagined how I want them to go right now, though the final result doesn't always match what I had in my head

 

[n00b]

- Move the stalagmites so they're not a perfect square; also the stalagmites share the same model, have the same exact size, and are facing in the same direction, so change that too
- Harmonic arena should be 'irregular' for lack of better wording, i'm too lazy to explain so i just made a terrain mockup of what it should look like (see attached map)
- I would advise using fog instead of SetDayNightModels(), mainly because i've never really fucked around lighting models or whatever. Also fog is easier to edit on the fly to see how it looks in game
- tbh green/red fog really clash with the map, since you're using a tileset that is predominantly blue. I think golem's arena should use black fog because it's a cave; nox arena shouldn't have any fog at all; harmonic arena should be light-blue; moon arena should probably be dark blue or dark purple, the color you're using is more dark-magenta and it kinda look like ass

anyway the attached map has an edit of the blue fire doodad, i think it looks a bit better

havent fought sarrated dragon yet but i will soon(TM)

dodging an attack by not moving sounds very unintuitive, and i probably would have never found out how that attack even worked if you hadn't told me. You should somehow convey that the attack creates projectiles directly onto you, possibly by some very conspicuous effect that appears on the player, or just flat out telling the player by describing how the attack works in the boss description or something

Spoiler

yes i am complaining about unintuitive mechanics despite being the creator of the cancer known as ancient viper

 

[EdgeOfChaos]

Maybe I'll have indicators in the spots where the projectiles are gonna hit, just like the normal attack though that might be too ez. Though I think you could discover it by watching the spots where the ice hits (though the effect is really big and obnoxious so maybe not). It always seemed obvious to me where the hits were but I guess that's because I made it LUL

I copy paste things which is why the pillars look the same, will change that.

Thanks for the map - I will check it out tomorrow when I'm back home.

I will try out fog instead of daynight models. The day night models are always either nothing or super extreme - at least the way I made them which very well might be wrong. I did try to make a black model, but it was like, pitch black.

I've started doing some minor edits today. I added a grabbing attack for golem (he grabs and incinerates you) and target tracking for flame cyclone. And zoom command. Going to add a whirlpool attack for elementals, something else cool for Moon (perhaps a charge or jump), possibly something like an aggressive blink-strike for Nox, maybe some other stuff.