Quite a lot has been done on the mod in the last month, most of which are broken up into two parts: gameplay mutators coming in the next update and changes to the structure of Annihilation Nation.
Gameplay Mutators
I've put in a fair few of these to spice up gameplay for those that want to go beyond the standard difficulty select. Most of them can be found in Mod Menu->Mutators, which now replaces the Misc. menu.
ALWAYS PICK UP AMMO - If you run over an ammo capsule with a weapon that either has full ammo or doesn't use ammo at all, the capsule will go down your list of weapons and fill the first one that it can.
WEAPON/NANOTECH GROWTH - These two break apart the Throwback Mode mutator into its constituent parts. Disable one or the other to disable that particular XP type, or enable Throwback Mode to shut them both off.
MONSTER BEHAVIOR - Fast Monsters is a dumb way to ramp up the difficulty. Just double their speed? No thanks! I only keep it in the mod on high difficulties because those are meant to be for the masochists. This on the other hand, I feel is much more interesting. When set to Standard, monsters behave just as you're used to for those who played this mod before or even for those who've played QuakeStyle Unbound, my previous project. When set to Aggressive however, monsters will take on one or more of a number of buffs: faster movement (not as bad as Fast Monsters), quicker attacks, stronger projectiles, stealth, etc. It's not for nothing though, as playing with aggressive monsters offers a 20% bonus to all Nanotech XP, rounded up.
These next two mutators are only accessed when starting a new game. I had to make them this way, as making them toggles like the others would thoroughly break the mod!
LEVEL SCALING - Don't you just wish zombies and imps were still a threat by the time you've leveled yourself up a bit? Finding monsters too squishy late-game? This setting is for you! When activated, monster damage and health increase as you level up your weapons and Nanotech respectively. By the time you've maxed out everything, monsters will have 3x health and deal 2.15x damage. As an incentive, playing with this setting active means weapon XP scales equally to monster health!
ITEM SPAWNS - This allows you to determine whether weapons and gadgets spawn into maps as the standard G-Boxes, offering new gear in a determined sequence, or as randomized capsules offering a specific item. I put this mutator in as a fun idea branching off from the Annihilation Nation overhaul. This randomization doesn't show gadgets in the video, but I assure you they do come up. Part of the reason for their absence is that the chance of a blank spawn increases the higher difficulty you play on. Each difficulty in the list is numbered 0-8. That number is multiplied by 16 to get the chance of a blank spawn. I was playing on Up Your Arsenal, #7 on the list, resulting in a 112/256 or 43.75% chance of blanks.
Annihilation Nation Overhaul
The original setup for the arena campaign turned out to be more and more clunky and awkward the more I thought about it. Too many key items to juggle in really weird ways. Too many tiny maps to put in. It just wasn't going to be fun to make. On top of that, it began to feel like a half-hearted middle ground between linear and non-linear design. With that in mind, I decided to completely scrap the concept of a semi-sequential arena in favor of turning Doom into a Metroidvania!
The player will still begin in a lobby, but it'll be much smaller than the old one and contain only a single teleporter. Upon entering it, the player's N60, Bomb Glove, and Helipack will be taken away, along with their increased jump height and ability to doulbe-jump. From here, it's exactly what you expect from the genre.
Each weapon, gadget, and ability is placed throughout the regions of the game world using the capsules seen above. This means should the player disable randomization, it will have no effect on these maps.
Each region is made up of at most three maps - primary, secondary, and boss - and connected via map-to-map teleports. Themes of these regions are the same as the old Annihilation Nation maps but have been renamed to better fit the style of game (that is, to be more descriptive than showy).
To keep things fair, many of the challenge modifiers such as level scaling will not apply to the bosses of this campaign. I intend for these to be long battles, so tripling their health would be unreasonable.
Finally, I am tossing around the idea of a New Game+ and have included the idea in the mod's documentation, but it may or may not become a reality. We'll just have to wait and see.
Apart from this, there's not much to report on for the time being. Just a few tweaks and bug fixes here and there.
That's it for now. I'm hoping to have 1.1.2 out in Septempber at the latest. Stay tuned for that!
