Horalky (HORALKY.WAD)

HORALKY
by "Memfis"

In my mind the Russian Doom Community is perhaps the most tightly knit of all the idtech1 diaspora. Looking back through their history I see tons of little mapping competitions and many of these had their entries included in larger projects like Heroes' Tales or Whitemare. Horalky originated as a prospective submission to a "Grid 64 Contest" but Memfis didn't finish it in time. I'm not sure whether the project ever saw completion. At least, it doesn't look like it was uploaded to /idgames and I'm not willing to spend my time researching its fate on iddqd.ru. We have this, though. It's a MAP01 replacement and should work in any limit-removing port.

The PWAD has a tongue-in-cheek story about a wafer bar called Horalky. It looks like the Czech / Slovak equivalent of what I would call a Nutty Bar. I'm not familiar with the situation in 2012 but Doomguy heard that the corporation who manufacturing the bar was going to change its brand to Goralki. He hated the new name so he started travelling to their headquarters to protest but then he got lost and decided to just go home. It doesn't really tie into the action at all but I'm amused to discover that the Czech / Slovak brand never changed its name to Goralki. The Polish one did, though.

I'm not up on my RDC lore but I know of a handful of Grid 32 projects in 2008. The first of them was by the community and it was followed by Eternal's 32 Inch Nails. The former had an outtake and I've actually played it - Lainos's Object 32. The format is an artificial limitation; it designates where each vertex can be placed. Vertexes tell the engine the points at which the line(def)s begin and end. The end result is that if you drew a plane composed of 32 x 32 unit spaces starting from one of the vertexes then each vertex would fall on the places where the corners of the squares meet.

Grid 64 took the same concept but doubled the size. The organizers of both projects afforded a couple of important caveats for the authors and they give the visuals some much-needed flexibility. The factor of 64 limitation only applied to horizon and depth, allowing total freedom in sector height. The lines themselves did not have to adhere to the grid as long as they began and ended on it. Those two allowances thankfully prevent the level from feeling like some kind of cubist nightmare. Thing placement was not required to be on the grid, either, and thank God because I can only imagine how much more artificial it would end up looking as a result.

Horalky is a techbase map with a couple of important deviation that make it feel fresher than your average MAP01 replacement. There's a different sky, for starters - blue is so much more attractive than the stock one considering all of Doom II's brown and gray assets - and a new music track lifted from NewDoom Community Project II. Both of these go a long way toward differentiating your hot new single from an endless parade of user-created PWADs. The first makes for a more vibrant color scheme, at least in the outdoor areas. I suppose that there's some give and take in music selection because D_RUNNIN is such an old friend as so many PWADs have used it by default. You don't run the risk of using, say, an excellent Stewboy MIDI and inadvertently drawing comparison between your release and something with a higher community profile.

Horalky can't help but look clean because of the Grid 64 ruleset. Memfis has helped the appearance with some careful texture alignment. The care is most obvious in the metal panelling since a large portion of the level is clad in it but you can see it in other places. He also utilizes the upper / lower wall technique, which carves out a small alcove and then draws the ceiling and floor together so that you can have both a top and a bottom texture for a single "wall". The clearest instance of this is the computer console in the room at the west end of the crusher hallway since such a detail is usually inlaid into a wall at a slight depth.

Another neat thing about the design... The author put some good work into worldbuilding. The potential of diagonals allows for plenty of lightcasting and you'll be running around to too fast to see whether or not they make perfect geometric sense. Horalky ends with you walking into a new section of the map, at this point a trope of Memfis (seen in Kurogane and Beware of False Prophets) that gives Doomguy an imagined life beyond the exit teleporter. One of the bits to really stick with me is the southeastern window. It looks into a gap between your building and, presumably, an opposite one and the other side has these enormous open panels through which you can see falling water. There's just something about the implied megastructure that tickled my imagination.

I really enjoyed the way in which the level plays. It's a nonlinear key hunt, requiring all three in order to open the exit. You should have every weapon except for the BFG before the end. Most of the threatening monsters are chaingunners and mid-tier mobiles like revenants and Hell knights. Mancubi are used sparingly and sort of approximate minibosses. The pain elemental and arch-vile each have one cameo but I can't imagine either being all that scary unless you are severely underequipped... which, I admit, is a perfectly reasonable scenario depending on your taken route.

I don't mean to make Horalky sound like a difficult map. The combat takes a relatively straightforward approach, at least when compared to Memfis's earlier Not In My Courtyard. There are few surprises beyond what you find the moment you enter a room or turn a corner. The ammo balance is definitely in your favor, too, a distinct change from the usually ascetic placement. I assume that the author did this in an attempt to compensate for the uncertainty involved in trying to balance for a non-linear layout. You're even allowed to begin at your leisure since there isn't a typical "hot start" and the monster density is thin enough that you're rarely ever pressured in a specific direction.

This is a fun, neat-looking techbase level and should be a nice one for those folks who like to play on the hardest difficulty without the feeling of being ground into the dirt. Unfortunately I can't seem to find the rest of the Grid 64 project. With the Russian Doom Community, I'm sure that the results were interesting.