> things which do not necessarily have a reason to exist.

uh, speaking of.. what exactly is this for (what we see in the video), some kind of game it looks like?

I like the toons. but I like your style so I guess that's a given :)

Some kind of game I suppose. Not a very good one! This is a very old project that never worked quite the way I wanted to and consequently could never be plainly exhibited or distributed. My hope is to make it at least functional on an artistic level so I can show it and stop worrying about never having finished it!
It runs in the gzdoom engine but my hope is for people to eventually be able to look at it and not immediately declare "oh it's a doom mod."

hm try to draw attention to aspects of the game that make it unlike doom, maybe?

one problem, however, might be that Doom was so influential that it's a bit hard to not have traces of that legacy

That is what I am trying to do! There will always be traces of its origin but I see plenty of people call themselves "gamedev" when putting forth less effort than I do just because their starting point has a vaguer name on it. I think I ought to try and grasp at some scrap of legitimacy.

lol what even is that title tho

These animations are great! They feel weighty despite their cartooniness.

The story is https://www.independent.co.uk/envir.....-a8674706.html there, if you are curious. Research indicates that breathing in carbon dioxide can make it more difficult for people to perform cognitive tasks, although I personally think "stupid" is the wrong word. Stupid, to me, means being content in ignorance, and generally complacent.

Thank you! I do not animate (or do anything else) in a conventional or efficient manner so I hope at the very least this creates an effect that is unique in some ideally positive way.

Oh no, not the dopes again!

Ah the sweet mystery of dope locomotion. They walk, they stroll, they amble endlessly, yet they never seem to go anywhere.

A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the Wisest Men.

I assumed from the angles required it was Dope Doom or suchforth. A lot of ZDoom mods only go as far as weapon sets so functional enemy types (if a dope has to be automatically assumed an enemy) is neat! Could make a fun custom wave for REELism if anything (which if you haven't played I recommend!)

The last zdoom item which actually used its capabilities and that I got through was massmouth 2 in 2004! Plus a prolonged and strange experience with "Archie" in 2014 since the person making it wanted me to test it. But inevitably I will have to look at some other new ones to figure out how more recent features work.
I have not had time for video games in general, really, the past three years, but I have been able to chip away at my ancient backlog of 1994-era wads now and then. I cannot keep up with anything that feels like it requires too much obligation.
I drew at least 12 monsters for this but wanted to have a more complete package which I could never sort out, and now the old graphics look very primitive. This in fact is a replacement for the 2003 dope design!

i was listening to a disco song when i saw this
and it matched so perfectly hahah

I suppose it could be pretty hard using the Doom engine to get the kind of non-combat-related behavior you want, but it's often the greatest limitations that produce the most interesting results in art. I think if you're going for a game that doesn't fit conventional Doom engine expectations, simply being creative and oriented away from traditional 'shoot the bad things' gameplay would really set this apart from the crowd.

Part of me pictures this being half crowd navigation, half food fight simulator, half 'lure the dummies to shiny objects to get them to accidentally activate mechanisms' type puzzle solving, half Pikmin Meets Lemmings... not sure how those could be done, or whether the engine can do those things, but there's definitely potential there~

Quite honestly it is hard to do -anything- in the doom engine and I have many times regretted that I spent so long on this dumb thing as to feel a need to do justice to it so long after I thought I was done with it!
I do not necessarily aim for non-combat, But I would like it to not be foremost described as "doom mod" or "dope doom" because that makes it seem like I just changed a few things that were already there. Anyway it rips off more from Heretic!

I remember reading some mention of a Doom conversion you were working on ages ago on your blog or something, nice to finally see it! It is a delight to look at. A chunk of my inactivity since 2015 was due to me working full tilt on a Doom engine project and it still isn't done 4 years later because I kept getting sidetracked learning new skills in pursuit of making a better wad. After Effects, 3D modelling, programming, the woiks. NOTHING short of state-of-the-art will suffice for this game engine from the 90s. I'm extremely invested in the "3D environment with 2D sprites" thing now.

That video is not really "it," just an example of what this one set of animations looks like in context since I thought it looked funny that, at this point, the dopes were unable to do anything overtly hostile.

Have you shown any examples of what you have done with this sort of thing?

Back in 201x somebody else had pledged to help me figure out the scripting which had been in large part what held me back for a long time, but then didn't, but the experience at least provoked me to try and retake control of it. I am still horrid at scripting but I considered that by emphasizing what I CAN do apart from scripting there might still be a chance of salvaging it. More animation in higher resolution is the current phase of things. I still worry I should have just cut my losses, and want to at least have more of the progress public, so that if I DO give up on it again, there will have been something to show for it this time! 3d modeling is something I should have looked into a long time ago, even if just for my own multi-angle drawing references.

It was a map for SRB2 where the mission was to create every asset from scratch. It got to be pretty big, but it's also pretty empty because I needed some scripting done too and it still hasn't happened. I thought the community's coders would line up behind my project if I just made it look cool enough, but they DIDN'T so it's on hold indefinitely until I do it myself. I totally could now too, but I got sidetracked and now I'm just scripting Adobe Illustrator instead. Textures here, footage of my initial test area here, and here's where I figured out how to exploit the engine's TRANS lumps to remap the palette on the fly although I don't have much use for it in practice

My experience with requesting assistance has definitely been that unless I ask a single specific question I won't get any help, and I still might not get any, and may even be insulted just for asking.

That certainly looks less like "doom" than my whatever-it-is does, but thankfully mine does less so than it once did. The textures are quite pretty! Did you construct those? They made me think of a sonic game when I saw them, before I noticed the text or looked at the video.

I have not heard of "SRB2" but I played "Super Sonic Doom" in 2004 and it was not much fun, as much as I liked the high quantity of dorky side-def bridges.
I would be interested in how you got the jumping to skip to a different sprite than regular walking and how you can actually see the 4/6 sprite angles in chase-cam mode.
And also how the floating platforms are actually carrying the character. Are they polyobjects? I used them for my title screen but have only put the older hexen style ones in actual levels so far since my priority has mostly been making new graphics since returning to this. The wave on the sky graphic, is that the built in flat-warp effect or something else?

I like that palette effect, but would that only work in a 256 color video mode?

Yep, textures are all me! Corel Painter and Pro Motion make tiling easy since they have modes where the brush wraps around when you paint off the edge of the canvas. Vanilla SRB2 has its own style- my number one goal was to bring the whole art direction closer to classic Sonic, so I love hearing that I nailed it. SRB2 was built off Doom Legacy back in 1997 and they've been developing at the source level ever since, so pretty much everything besides the renderers have been modified at this point. So no state hacks, just C. Those are polyobjects yes. The bobbing tower is just a bunch of midtextures offset from some rising/falling sectors. And yep, palette effect only works in software, which the community mostly prefers anyway. I got really obsessed with indexed color graphics for a while after I saw Mark Ferrari's color cycling art.

If your project isn't too far along, maybe building off SRB2 would be a better option? Ever since they added Lua scripting, it's becoming more of a platform for general game development. Like, here's a complete game that just dropped a few weeks ago. The community is super active (on Discord, anyway). The scriptmongers especially are pretty good about answering questions, so it's a great environment for learning to code.

https://youtu.be/JwfxQwQo0PE this shows a bit more but still is not really what I want to be showing.

It is super far along in the respect that there are 5 good and two crummy years put into it, with nine years wishing I had finished it between them, but that may not be readily apparent if you saw the mass of wads that presently comprise it. I repeatedly tell myself now: one REALLY good year will make a huge difference! I got held up so much by new versions of zdoom breaking stuff that to give up on it after sorting out all that and finally having an idea how i could do what I initially wanted with it would not be feasible. Cutting my losses is not something I have ever been able to do, and if I did I would more than likely dump the doom engine entirely to do something in plain two-dimensions like I always wanted to!

I was not able to go to true color mode for a long time, but once I was able to it removed some frustrating barriers so I could not give up on that now, either. My method for drawing tiled textures, however, could definitely be improved. I have still been copy-move-pasting to get it to look correct. i get good enough results with it, and better than I used to, but it could certainly go faster.

Anyway the game. That's insane! Vibrant, lively, imaginative. Has all the trappings of a bonsai garden project where the lone artist spends a decade thinking and rethinking and overthinking it over the course of a decade until the end product is so deeply personal and original that it stands alone. I still haven't started my bonsai game yet, I've always been too scared that I'd somehow ruin it I ever tried to draw anything for it without the requisite level of skill. Keep pushing because I want to play it.

I came back today for the tiny violin weapon. It's so good.

The one that you made definitely looks organic in how it handles color. I didn't even know you COULD have opengl in 256 video modes. I don't personally see any reason why you shouldn't be able to, that has merely been my experience that true 3d rarely accompanies tightly controlled colors. It can definitely go too far if it is poorly managed. I remember trying out the Doomsday port for the first time and was overwhelmed by the amount of glowy lens-flary blurry watery excess. Even the menu graphics were blurred despite that making them uglier and harder to read. Although at that time I probably had to run it at 640x480 or lower to get a marginal frame rate, and that stuff looks less ugly the higher the resolution goes.

I do not know what tool you would use to directly edit colormaps, either. Maybe it just didn't exist back when I was fussing with that. There used to be a program called Inkworks that would let you change what color the screen flashes and how it flashes when you get items and take damage, and set a different darkness fade color. I had set it to the second-darkest blue, I think. At some point zdoom disabled custom colormaps, although by now it has provided alternate ways to do some of that.

I would have loved to have yellow fade into greens and purples rather than go straight to orange then grey then black. I draw all the sprites in what is very similar to the base game palette (the colors are edited but apart from replacing duplicates, two extra purples and a few cyan tones, all serve the same role) but use copious amounts of true-color translations to make them not look as much like "yes this is a doom monster." I wonder what I might have done differently if I had set out to replace everything from the outset, but it is too late to go back!

Thank you for speaking so highly of whatever this is! I fear you may praise it in excess due to mentally filling in what you don't see with grander material than there is, but I intend that there shall be. The violin is not very practical, since you cannot see where you are aiming before firing, but tiny musical instruments are funny to me. Doom community people can't get enough of "realistic" boring weapons that you have to reload, copied out of newer games that at least have complex code to make them behave realistically enough that their boringness is less apparent. I want all the "weapons" to be flagrantly unrealistic. Maybe I will limit appearances of the sillier ones, since too much novelty gets tiresome.

I don't have much tolerance for racing games but I would like to casually walk around in areas like in that linked video. Going forward I intend or hope to implement more surreal environments. So in a sense I have only just begun what truly needs to be done. I think the software shading actually hurts what those people are trying to do; it washes out a lot of the potential vibrancy. It comes across looking almost more like the game gear than the genesis, somehow.

Two of the maps are actually remakes of levels from the Sonic Drift Game Gear games, so it works out! For two maps!

I guess it depends on the implementation- between the fog, the stark white/black shading and the linear blending for colormaps, OpenGL in SRB2 just desaturates and sucks the life out of everything. Doesn't help that they removed dynamic lighting 10 years ago for some reason (although that was ugly too). With this wad, I made my own palette and manually edited the COLORMAP lump to get nonlinear color gradations across all light levels. I really love that level of control, but then I'm also the first/only person in that community to tailor the entire palette to a single map, so they're not getting the same mileage.

Oh yeah, and their OpenGL hasn't gone true color yet either, so it's just 256 color textures with tacky lighting and filters. I guess that's the real problem. Also FA apparently doesn't nest replies properly at all so not a single one of these comments got listed in the correct order.

I kept thinking about it and imagined that the "jump" there is actually an attack frame which changes the user's vertical velocity, and the camera is a scripted in-level sort which follows the player but not as rigidly as the chasecam does.

Wow, the animation is very fluid and realistic. Nice work!

Doom, but Mars it's infested by silly blue imp-like creatures