Hey kid, you like text file commentaries?

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Extra Info
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Stare into Death and Be Still is a 4-map MBF21 challenge WAD, originally
started as part of NaNoWADMo 2025 (a challenge where mappers create a WAD
from start to finish within the month of October). You may notice I didn't
finish it in October, and you may also notice that MAP04 is a 75 minute
UV-max and start to suspect that those two facts might be somewhat related.

Truthfully, by challenge WAD standards, SiDaBS isn't all *that* hard for
the most part, but I was still aware enough of its most ball-busting
moments to need to pop disclaimers everywhere. If I marketed this as
something normal and a casual player stumbled into MAP04's final fight
they'd have the right to wring my neck, so consider it as me doing my due
diligence.

Yes, the WAD and all its maps are named after songs by the death metal
band Ulcerate. Outside of using their song titles as a stepping-stone for
my imagination, there's no other connection.

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Story
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The afterlife is diseased.

All your people had the same vision that night, and knew in their hearts
it was true. Creeping tendrils of violet pestilence enveloping the realm
beyond, seeping rot into the sea and skies and turning them to poison. The
eternal works of your ancestors fumigated, now little more than hollow
barracks as the disease wracked their souls, transforming them into
horrific, mindless monsters, alike to soldiers marshalled for some unknown
war.

The people panicked. Many turned to a paralytic despair, the eternal life
they had been promised now turned to a vicious hell. The cruel turned to
killing, taking gleeful opportunity in condemning their despised to
torturous eternity. The greedy turned greedier, demanding that their
desire for gold and silver be met in this life if it could not in the next,
taking them by whatever means necessary. The priests and shamans bickered,
arguing over the rites and incantations to ferry the dead that they had
used for millennia, ravenously searching through mountains of scripture to
find the way to protect them or to cast away the pestilence for good.

They could only think of one singular solution. And none had the strength
of will to attempt it.

Except you.

They were not reassuring companions, the pistol and warding charm you
bought with the last of what you owned. Even imbued with the greatest of
the mages' spells, you only had a few hours to work with, and you had but
a blind hope that you could claim better weapons from the dead. But they
had to be enough.

If you fail, you would become no different to the beasts that shamble
along those hallowed halls. If you succeed? Hopefully they would
remember you, and thank you for your sacrifice.

You steel yourself, press the gun's barrel to your temple, and begin the
lifeless advance.

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Map Commentaries
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>>> MAP01: The Lifeless Advance <<<
MIDI: "Submerged in the Sea of Souls", both ambient and combat forms
Build Time: 4 days

While making SiDaBS I committed the sin of making the maps in order (in
my defence, I was initially working under a time limit and didn't have
space to overthink this stuff), so MAP01 formed before I'd completely
nailed down the aesthetic style I was aiming for. I'd constructed myself
a palette of sorts beforehand with textures I wanted to use, but that's
only half of the equation, as shapes are just as important to the look
and feel, and I had to come up with that shit on the fly.

As a consequence, there's some stuff that this map does that the other
maps don't quite mirror, and there's a lot less substance in the combat
than usual as I spent my mapping time doodling to pin down a look, but
the latter also gets a MAP01 pass.

Speaking of combat, I actually had to rework this one a few times. The
original version of the map had no rocket launcher, handed over the BFG
at the end, and had a much worse final fight plus a fair bit of cheese.
Playtester advice combined with my worry that an overly SSG-heavy first
map would leave an inaccurate first impression of my combat in my first
solo release in 8 years made me reconsider that, and thank fuck, the new
one plays way better.

I originally wasn't sure if I wanted the tower at the end to be part of
this map or MAP02. My original idea had an entire diseased jungle section
between the main map and the tower, not unlike what MAP02 ended up being,
but then I realised how much time that would take and I almost scrapped
the entire idea, but I then realised I could fit the tower in by itself
and connect it to the map via a bridge. I originally wanted a fight on
the bridge but decided to let the view speak for itself.

The double-MIDI arrangement was directly inspired by EduardoAndFriends'
Crimson Horror. I really liked how Edz would sometimes start a map in
near-silence then have the music kick in once shit started to go down,
so I stole the idea. Or, err, sorry, "borrowed". He can have it back
if he sends me £100 after reading this.

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>>> MAP02: To Flow Through Ashen Hearts <<<
MIDI: "Ephemeral Riptide"
Build Time: 5 days

It just wouldn't be a project of mine without some non-linear key hunts.

This map pretty much sprung from an idea I had to cut out of MAP01,
as that map was already taking longer than I was comfortable with the
first map taking considering I had a month to realise the WAD initially
and I'd always planned on making MAP04 bigger than the rest.

The rocket launcher fight was explicitly meant to be a crash course in
my combat for those unfamiliar. The rocket launcher is a melee weapon.
Remember this.

The key fights are a bit easy, but I'm okay with that. It's still early,
and I wanted the difficulty curve to be more of a curve than a cliff.

Getting the penultimate fight into a state where it actually plays
somewhat well was a herculean effort, and to be honest I'm not even sure
if I pulled it off or not. In my first iteration there were cybies in
the mess that I put in there to infight, but if they didn't infight you
had a load of extremely annoying cleanup. I put out a load of rockets,
but people grabbed them for the key fights and had nothing for when the
fight actually began. Demons would constantly get stuck on the trick
bridge until I forcefully lowered it and blocked the high end off.

The final fight is a spin on the secret exit fight in taviow's Idumea.
Originally, there were only the vile waves, but the playtesters all
thought it was a bit anticlimactic and upon replay even I found it a
lot easier than I originally thought, so I decided to sprinkle in some
flyers to make the player have to pay attention to multiple things at
once.

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>>> MAP03: There Is No Horizon <<<
MIDI: "Citadel of the Shrouded Night"
Build Time: 7 days

I'll be honest, I took a lot of shortcuts in this one, and the result
isn't my best work. Pressure makes diamonds, but it also makes coal.
I have no idea how this map has nearly 30k lines, it's got the laziest
detailing in the WAD. Half the map is just solid walls. I struggled to
find a place in the map that looked good enough to use for the interpic.

The fights also just kept breaking. Like MAP01, I had to rework several
before release. One of the fights in the central arena would spill mancs
out of the waterfalls, but they'd just get stuck on them unless you were
attacking them directly, and why would you? Both key fights also needed
to be given some extra sauce, with me adding the roaming cyb to the blue
and the Sunlust MAP19 archviles to the purple. Oh yeah, that shoot switch
is also there because muumi managed to pacifist cheese most of the map.

The final fight fake exit was originally going to be a lot more
elaborate - I had an initial idea where the floor would collapse from
under you and you'd fall into the final fight arena - but once again,
time constraints reared their heads. Also I got lazy, and my brain was
protesting the pace of mapping I'd been maintaining so I couldn't
figure out the silent teleport trickery I'd need.

I also realise the kill count, which players tend to have on their HUD
nowadays, completely spoils the surprise, but oh well. I should've made
the secret harder to find so folks'd assume it's a secret fight.

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>>> MAP04: Stare into Death and Be Still <<<
MIDI: "What Do You Think You'll See Before You Die?"
Build Time: 6 whole-ass months (with some breaks in-between to work on
most of my Sewerlust contributions)

I need to stop saying "this is probably the biggest/hardest map I'll
ever make" because I end up lying each and every time, so I'll just say
this is the biggest and hardest map I've made so far as if there's room
to go even bigger from here.

It's the first time that I've had to switch editors to UDB (because
SLADE does not have sidedef compression before the 3.3.0 beta) before
all the mainline progression was pencilled out. It has 60k sides and
6666 demons on UV, takes over an hour to max in-game time with
foreknowledge (not that foreknowledge really matters with it being
fairly linear and having no secrets) and its final fight is easily the
single hardest fight I've ever constructed.

Truthfully, I didn't expect it to get quite this big, but I just kept
getting ideas and those ideas just kept getting turned into linedefs.
My original plan was to spend the remaining 2 weeks of October after
making maps 1-3 to make a map with maybe a 30min max time, but after I
lost hope in making the deadline due to an untimely wrist injury I had
nothing left to keep my ambitions in check and so the map spiralled
into shape.

A blow-by-blow of the map's construction would just tire all of us, so
I'll just focus on some key points.

First off, if the map feels exhausting to play, then I did my job. One
of my explicit design goals with the map was to make it feel like it
never ends. That feeling of grabbing all three keys and still having 2/3
of the map to go? Seeing the big fortress but being unable to step inside
for the next half an hour? Looking at the final fight arena and still
having 5-6 more fights to go first? That's what this map is about.

Second off, if you're a pile of gibs on the floor, that's also intended.
I explicitly designed the majority of the fights in the map to hit my
own skill ceiling. If some fights are easier than others, it's because
my skillset is weird. I'm apparently much better at ungodly BFG spam
relative to my other combat, that or I improved drastically over the
course of making the map, given how consensus seems to be the early-mid
stages of the map aren't that bad only for the last few fights to suplex
the player.

Third off, no secrets. My standard fayre making big maps is to pack a
bajillion of those things in - Sewerlust MAP10 has 15 secrets, Nova IV
MAP29 has 10 and used to have 16 before I unmarked a load - because I
like that kind of thing, but I made a conscious decision to buck that
trend and try something different. Considering how long the map already
is, I think I made the right choice, but I still lament the fact that I
couldn't use the water area above the big fight to the southeast as a
secret arena.

Lastly, I'm giving the final fight its own section because, for better
or worse, it's the bit everyone seems to remember. I designed it with
the idea of trying to evoke the map and WAD's very title - "stare into
death and be still" - as a concept for a massive fight. To address the
allegations that I'm evil and want my maps to kill the player in real
life, or that I put 'rewind-spam' at the end of an hour-long map for the
memes, I promise you that I was able to beat it without mid-fight saves
at least twice, and that every time I've died to it has been because my
mechanical skill in FPS has always been turbo inconsistent.

I agree that instant death is a harsh punishment for missing a platform
or being blocked on your crossing by a hell noble, but port devs haven't
added a damaging floor between 20% and instakill and if I balanced the
fight around 20pt hurtfloor it would've been even harder because then
death to projectiles would get you an awful lot more with less than 21
megas. I also agree that the invuln and good timing with it is necessary,
and that missing it makes the fight impossible, which is why I did my
damnedest to make it extremely visible by giving it and its pillar an
extremely contrasting colour. I also agree that someone doing a saveless
run can lose an hour of their day to one tiny mistake, but even
considering that I still believe a saveless run of this map would be
easier than at least a solid half of the newer Sunder maps, cheese and
all.

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Credits
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>>> Resources <<<

Textures from 32in24tex, plus repaletted portal textures from Hexen
Status bar was modified using Daniel's stbar04.wad as a base
Plasma gun sound by id Software, ported by the Eviternity II team

>>> Playtesting <<<

Primary playtesters: muumi, eater29, taviow
Fellows whose post-release feedback was valuable: Treehouseminis, stxvile
