"Genshin Over it" - VDom1.j2l
Additional artwork: Toxic Bunny (wide pillar from Chateau)
Custom weapons: Seren (Firework)
Music: Gates of Infinity by Neurodancer
This level was the genesis of the pack: its background is from Genshin
Impact's loading screen, which looked so cool I knew I wanted to use it as
the background for SOMETHING: then later a DOM level contest got announced
and I realized this was my chance. (Initially I used the loading screen's
daytime palette, but playtesters worried the level was too bright, so now
everything is sunset-colored.) Using other Genshin backgrounds and other
official JJ2 tilesets for more DOM levels only came along as an idea later.
There aren't a lot of dedicated DOM levels out there, but some of the most
successful are those that put a lot of distance between the start position
and any control points, providing a lot of room for people to split into
either defenders or attackers, which in turn makes the gamemode feel
somewhat closer to Assault than a weird Team Battle. I adopted this
strategy with some very basic layout and eyecandy work, and because this
made some of the more vertically-focused weapons seem pretty powerful, I
decided to use powerful vertical weapons EXCLUSIVELY and also give players
all the ammo they wanted. Focus on fighting and nothing else. Two of these
weapons are among the more commonly used customs, and I think some of my
choices in later maps are more obscure, but whatever, being a hipster is
not a 24/7 job. Before I made the level I assumed it should be impossible
to go from one tower to the other, but I abandoned that idea and I guess
it's fine this way, less predictable, you can be guarding a chokepoint
perfectly but someone else can still climb up the OTHER tower and capture
the gem above you, whoops! Gotta go up and fight them to the death!
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"King of Wuwang Hill" - VDom2.j2l
Additional artwork: zapS/Olsen (cave edits from Carrotus Fix 1.5)
Custom weapons: PurpleJazz (Fusion Cannon)
Super powerful spring code in this level and the next: Seren
Music: Spooky Forest by wagman1
There's only one control point here, but it warps to one of eleven
varyingly-defensible spots scattered around the level every time it changes
color, as inspired by the King of the Hill mode from the game "Knight Club
+". This is one of those scripts that should be simple but isn't: JJ2+('s
angelscript api) doesn't actually allow you to move control points, so
instead what I do is move EVERYTHING ELSE, including all players and
bullets and other objects, every time the control point changes hands.
Whee! I'm not sure why this level approximates being symmetrical other than
that being a little easier to design. Some spots the control point can end
up are much easier to defend against other players than others, but that's
the luck of the draw for you. At one point this level used PJ's Super
Toaster too, but it didn't really add much (sorry), so I replaced it with a
seeker powerup because Umbaman points out those don't get much use
nowadays. There were v-poles but playtesting convinced me that was a bad
idea, just an invitation "hi PLEASE KILL ME WITH SEEKERS while I CAN'T
MOVE."
Wuwang Hill is a kind of weird area in Genshin Impact in that there's this
random haunted village somewhere in Liyue but it doesn't get commented on
much. (It's also horribly unpleasant to navigate, especially if a bounty
sends you there and you've got a time limit!) But it's good that it exists,
because I made this level spooky-themed kind of arbitrarily to go with the
warping control point mechanic (its original name was "Ghoul Jewel"), and
then only later realized I could name it after Wuwang. Making the Labrat
torches all-blue helped with that.
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"Labmoratory" - VDom3.j2l
Custom weapons: PurpleJazz (Bubble Gun, Mortar Launcher, Lightning Rod)
Music: Monologues by Marko Kettunen
A lot of this pack involved me being stubborn and trying to come up with a
bunch of different "Domination, but........" ideas, and here's one that's
probably pretty obvious: Domination, but the control point is behind a coin
warp! I'd tried something similar already in an edit of Minmay's Bank
Robbery level "Oil," and it felt all right but still, y'know, was clearly a
Bank Robbery level, so here I tried the same thing but in an original
layout and with coins EVERYWHERE instead of in team-specific areas.
(Actually NONE of these levels have team-specific areas, really, so there's
probably some more design space I can still explore in that direction
someday.) Beyond the coin idea, this level revolves around the mortar
launcher weapon pretty closely, there's a lot of open space at the top and
there are coins to pick up there but it's really easy for people to drop
mortars on you!! Down below in the second floor it's safer but hopefully
the rewards aren't as plentiful, I dunno, I may have gotten the numbers a
bit wrong there, but there's definitely a different feeling between the two
floors. Though the first bit of actual layout I made in-editor, not just
in-head, was the two giant springs on either side that give you lots of
lightning rod ammo and are designed to let Jazz/Lori sweep overhead and
utterly carpet the top floor in electricity, another death-from-above sorta
deal.
The third custom weapon, though, was informed almost entirely by theme
instead of layout, oh well. This map is set in the "Golden House" building
in Liyue, which is the mint where all the world's money is made! Wow!
And-MINIMAL SPOILERS-the fight you do there involves WATER POWERS as well
as (PURPLE) ELECTRICITY POWERS. So that meant it had to be the bubble gun.
I think it works okay because there are lots of walls for the bubbles to
bounce off in the second floor, and I like how I handled the powerup (get
it practically for free if you use the coin warp, or otherwise use those
giant springs I mentioned earlier), but it's still not as close a gameplay
fit as the other stuff. You shoot a bubble underground, woo, maybe someone
gets hurt, meh, it's not as dramatic. Anyway though I do like the walls
here, this pack doesn't include a whole lot of layer 4 experimentation
because I was trying to match tilesets to Genshin areas, and for all that
the coin idea matched with the mint, nothing really corresponded to LABRAT
(oh wait NOT TRUE I unlocked a much better thematic match dungeon AFTER
making this level, oh nooooooo), so here I had to make sort of weird golden
earthen wally doodads instead of featuring Labrat's normal metal floors.
The pipes in the background don't make much sense but whatever, they're
cheap.
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"City of FreeDOM" - VDom4.j2l
Additional artwork: Obi1mcd (banners from Palmtree Plaza)
Custom weapons: PurpleJazz (Tornado Gun), szmol96 (Petrol Bomb)
Music: Midnight by Dragonking
This concept went through multiple iterations! First I thought about making
a DOM level where each time a team captured a control point, that control
point got locked away permanently and everyone had to fight for the next
one instead. That seemed like it would run into problems of diminishing
returns, though, not to mention being hard to understand. This gradually
became a completely vertically symmetrical level with three tiers-a city, a
vertically symmetrical sewer, and a flipped version of the city-and you
could only enter each lower tier if your team controlled the tier you were
leaving. Making the level ACTUALLY vertically symmetrical was too hard,
though, so all three tiers ended up using unique layouts, and I threw out
the team locks at the last minute because the strategy seemed complicated
enough already without players worrying about weird script stuff too. There
are several places where I made sure to have two parallel routes to avoid
having too many chokepoints for defenders, but the sewer zone could
probably use more work on that front. :(
As for theming, Colon was a pretty obvious match for Mondstadt, the first
big city you encounter in Genshin. And I got very lucky in finding two
custom weapons that were good gameplay matches for the layout but also
corresponded well to the powers of two Mondstadt characters, Jean and Klee.
Thinking about how Jean's powers work by spreading other elements around
led me to edit the petrol bombs' flames so they can be carried by the
tornado bullets... it's probably not the most useful thing ever but it's
extremely cool! I like the freeze enemy pickups at the bottom tier,
providing an obvious target for the tornado guns to push your opponents at,
and maybe the rest of the level should have more stuff like that, oh well.
Generally though your infinite weapon 1 shouldn't be the most useful thing
ever or why would you bother with other ammo?
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"Teapot DOM" - VDom5.j2l
Additional artwork: Blade (crystals, lily pads, and geometric shapes from
Aztec 2)
Custom weapons: Naps (AntiGrav Bouncer)
Music: Seaside by Purple Motion / Plant
This is pretty (nature tilesets!!) but I think it may be doomed to be the
worst level of the pack, or the least interesting anyway. It's pretty much
just a big level with four rushed mini-arenas and no obvious gimmick. Which
isn't to say there's no gimmick at all! The start positions move around
when you die so you're always going to respawn in a quadrant that your team
controls, unless there are no such quadrants and then you spawn in the
middle. Attacking takes much more work than defending. But there's no sense
telling the player about it, because they don't really need to know, do
they? Die, respawn SOMEWHERE, get back to work! Combining bouncers with
Naps' reverse bouncers was fun but I'm kind of worried they're actually too
strong, if someone were playing this level seriously? You heal up and get
the powerups in the center and it seems you could mount a pretty darn
vigorous defense in any of the four diagonal tubes, making opponents almost
dead before they even got close to the gem you're defending. And remember
attacking takes a while to pull off. Bleh. But it's pretty!
Pretty late in Genshin's story, you go inside an old woman's teapot and
enter a weird green/orange world full of floating rocks and lily pads and
glowing bridges. So yeah, obviously that's what Psych should be, right? I
even got lucky with the Teapot=Hatters thing! The glowing bridges are used
to connect a series of round rocky platforms, but transplanting that sort
of layout into a 2D game seemed like it would let players fall from one
area to another instead of using the bridges. But there's also ANOTHER
dungeon that's in the same kind of setting but with a thick brown fog
beneath you, so I surrounded the JJ2 level's arenas with brown fog that
instakills you, and that solved all my problems. The background here is one
of the only screenshots I took myself instead of grabbing off of google
image search, and let me tell you, it wasn't as easy as it should be
because Genshin's photo mode (which normally lets you hide the player and
UI and stuff) ISN'T AVAILABLE IN DUNGEONS. I mean, wtf. But I made it work!
Hahahahaaha
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"Archonpelago" - VDom6.j2l
Custom weapons: Smoke (Phoenix Gun)
Music: ABYSS by Obscene
So I wanted to get all these levels done on or before February 19th, so I
could spend the 20th playtesting and revising them and then get them on J2O
before the 21st, when the DOM contest's second deadline elapsed. (Granted,
I already submitted the first two levels a month ago and am not allowed to
submit any more, but it still felt like a good SYMBOLIC deadline.)
Unfortunately making VDom5 took kinda FOREVER??? because it has so much
layout and so much graphical work (had to make those glowing bridges!), so
by the time it was done I had hardly any time to make this final level
before the 20th. And yet even though I rushed out the layout and did
minimal editing... I think it all... works? Like, this is GOOD? I think?
It's a return to the same basic idea as VDom1, running an obstacle course
between the start and the control point, and health mostly at the start and
not at all at the end, but this time with the level itself providing a lot
more obstacles, not just the other players. This level is extremely
(consciously) similar to the race level "Archipelago" by Ragnarok and I
didn't have time to ask him if this was okay but I hope it is!!! Because
Archipelago is a good level (and much bigger than this one)! Rag's level
lets you swim though of course but here the water is hurt pits because all
these levels are pit levels of one stripe or another, and if you're frozen
when you fall in you just die, no warp for you, dead. I did briefly
consider trying to mimic Genshin's swimming physics instead but couldn't
convince myself that would add anything so I didn't.
There's a lot of water in Genshin but mostly it's just there to serve as a
border around the world, occasionally you find a random big ship and climb
on board but tbh the ships are never as cool in practice as I want them to
be while trying to get to them. But there is this one incredibly metal
area, Guyun Stone Forest, where the rocks are actually a series of GIANT
SPEARS that the ROCK GOD threw from space to DEFEAT OTHER GODS in a GOD
WAR. So yeah okay that felt like a good theme/layout idea, you can see most
of the sand walls are kind of slanted to look like those spears, though I
also added in some wooden structures for variety. Schwarzenguards count as
gods I guess. I considered various weapons that might fit that theme of
stuff falling down from the sky, Smoke's "Zeus Artillery" or PJ's Mortar
Cannons again, but none of them felt as fun as the Phoenix Gun, which is a
bird that shoots an obscene number of fireballs! (OBSCENE. That's a joke!)
I gave it very few pickups because it's ludicrously overpowered in this
layout but it's so darn cool. Then most of the other ammo was even more
stuff that flies far and fast, because, like, I've played the real
Archipelago, it involves chasing people. And toward the end there's a
blaster powerup that you get in a very very cool way, it's not useful for
the rest of the map but it might help you once you reach the end and want
to kill everyone around you! A skilled player can set up a very strong
defense of the control point in this map, but, like, am I really going to
say that a domination map shouldn't allow the possibility of domination??
