A varied set of levels accompanied with a handful of beginners' training courses. Can you survive the Dungeon?
Map created by Steve. Mirrored here for archival purposes. Includes the source .rmfs the author originally released separately.
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|Dungeon Pack|
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A map pack for Narbacular Drop!
Information
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This pack contains a handful of training levels aimed at beginners and a set of main levels intended to appeal to a wide range of Narbacular Drop players.
Issues
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It is important to remember that the Narbacular Drop engine was completed in a short amount of time and is therefore prone to a few hiccups now and again... If you notice the game acting strangely (regular oddities are crates/boulders/turtles not appearing at the start of a level, respawning for no apparent reason, or not being able to move), just quit and resume play with your last-acquired passphrase. I suggest doing this anyway every two levels or so to maintain optimum performance on your computer.
Specific levels that I have noticed with problems are Rising Damp (boulder acting very strangely), Do The Twist (crate not appearing), and Ellem (crate or turtle not appearing). Quitting the game and starting up again has fixed all of these every time in my experience.
Notes
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Training finishes with a challenge in the Proving Grounds to see that you've learned everything!
You don't need to use the technique known as 'yo-yoing' at any point in this pack. Stopping you from doing so, however, would have made all the levels ugly and restrictive, so just try to refrain, ok? Good stuff. For those who don't know what yo-yoing is, it's where you repeatedly go through two floor portals to gain lots of height.
If you get stuck, most of the levels support the third-person camera that you can use by pressing '3'. A view from this camera might just give you the useful hint that you need to get going again!
If you're still stuck and even the third-person camera can't help, press 'h' and you'll be given a textual shove in the right direction. Be warned though! These 'hints' often just tell you what to do, so only use as a very last resort! You won't get any satisfaction out of completing these levels just by following the hints!
Some levels don't have any hints, or even a third-person camera! Stick at it, but if you start getting frustrated, pop along to the forums at http://www.nuclearmonkeysoftware.com/forums and we'll try to give you a bit of help :)
If you prefer to play using inverted mouse movement, press 'i' while in a level to invert the mouse.
Passphrases
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As a substitute for a proper save system, this pack uses passphrases, which can be entered when you run the pack. You'll be given a new passphrase each time you finish a level from the regular set (training doesn't use passphrases). When entering a passphrase, don't worry about capital letters, or even spaces, which means that 'This PasS PhRaSe' is treated the same as 'thispassphrase'.
Installing and Playing
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To install, extract this folder ('Dungeon Pack') to your Narbacular Drop directory.
To play, run the file 'Play.bat' inside the folder you just extracted.
Trivia
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I started making maps for Narbacular Drop a long time before the release of this pack, and I've spent a lot of time getting to know the engine and the way it works (mostly to find workarounds for various bugs and limitations). This pack includes maps from various points during my learning, and showcases a number of my discoveries along the way.
-Triple Jump changed completely from my initial concept into what it is here, and this is the earliest map in the pack - it started out with a different name, and I had intended to build a set of platforms of increasing height that the player would have to scale without stopping. This turned out to be quite tricky and the map was left alone while I found other interesting things, but when I came back to it, I was intrigued at the time by the translation of the player's movement direction when they travel though a portal, and that's how the second part of the level turned out how it is: You have to use your incident direction to direct your path from portal exits.
-Twisted took a long time to get right: there used to be hundreds of ways of skipping out parts that I intended the player to go through. While I mind this to some extent, I also didn't want the player to feel boxed into a single path of action. I at least wanted to set the player's path but for them not to be aware of it.
-Proving Grounds was a liberating experience, as it doesn't require a single method or a set of actions in a set order, so I was able to use many more dirt surfaces than I could in more restrictive maps, and had a good time building the architecture of the place. I really wanted to avoid it being just a big hollow cuboid with a task on each wall, so it worked out well that some challenges are best overcome by using various parts of the architecture.
-In Rising Damp and Attic Antics, I wanted to create functional maps that still had some sort of visual appeal - most of my maps up until this point were built entirely out of large rectangles - so that explains the inclusion of horned archways, vaulted ceilings, carved columns, highlighted trim, mesh gangways and a spiral staircase...
-Shafted followed on from this idea, but I also wanted to try making a level that was (even if only a little) more dynamic than usual, and after a lot of maps with 'test' in the title, trying out various ideas, the simplest achievable result was the bridge. A less prominent display of this experiment can be seen with either third-person camera ('2' or '3') when you enter the giant head after Proving Grounds.
-Pinball Wizard was a tricky task... the engine certainly wasn't designed with this sort of level in mind, and it ended up needing a complex set of 110 point entities to achieve the final effect!
Two well respected mappers decided to stop making levels for Narbacular Drop, but they had unfinished pieces left over from their mapping time. With Hank and Calabast's permission, I have included a number of these pieces to ensure that their effort hasn't gone to waste.
-The map Ellem (so called because of its filename, 'lm') is one of the planned levels from a pack Hank was part way through creating before stopping because of a continual increase in workload. It was intended to form one of the lower levels of a 'Demon's Tower', and Hank has allowed me to showcase it here. The large head that you go inside was inspired by another of Hank's maps, in which the player went inside a giant demon head. A number of other inspirational ideas that didn't make it into this pack have also been handed over, so you may be seeing more of his work in the future!
-Icarus is the original creation of Calabast, and was intended to be a follow-up to the ever popular 'the Quick and the Dead', involving some of his trademark crazy flying and midair portaling, but was never finished enough for a proper release. I added the parts at the end as per his specification and include the finished product here with his blessing. Be warned, though; it's certainly not the easiest level in the pack! One for the adrenaline junkies out there, certainly!
Make sure to check out both of these guys' great work available online; Calabast's innovative (and frankly evil) 'Walk the Line', 'the Quick and the Dead' and 'Walk in a Straight Line', and Hank's standard-setting 'Narbacular Drop Level Pack', all available from http://www.jeepbarnett.com/narbaculardrop/community/custommaps
At the same link above you can find masses of user-made maps for Narbacular Drop, make sure you give them a go! It's great to see what people have come up with.
Special Thanks
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Thanks to the whole ND team for creating the game in the first place. If it wasn't for your hard work, none of any of this would ever have happened. Thanks.
More specific thanks to Jeep and Dave for hosting and maintaining all the forums and user content, and for their help with any questions we have. It's great to see such continued dedication! Support them by purchasing the game they're currently working on for Valve, 'Portal'. Although I'm fairly sure you'd buy it anyway, since it's so awesome!
Special thanks of course to Hank and Calabast for letting me showcase their work. I'd hate it to have been wasted! Thanks for all your efforts in the past, and good luck with everything you go on to do.
Thanks to Kdapro for the 'Shaft Shift' manoeuver (the suggested approach for the middle part of 'Shafted'), and for testing the maps before release. Check out her fantastic maps and map packs too, truly unique stuff!
Thanks to all the other mappers and forum contributors, it's great to be part of your community!
Hope you enjoy the pack!
Steve
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