CaptainW

Long night, that was. Had a hard time finding a moment between the SGDQ and the comic pages I weekly force out of myself. Here's the stuff tweaked and paletted.

I do think it's good to note that the "good guys" in Doom are literally all of humanity. A homeless American hippie bloke just trying to scrape by with what little weaponry he finds, a super-trained Israeli spec-ops operative with a wall-to-wall gun collection, a young British punk with only a rusty bat -- just about every possible human profile could reasonably make for a character in the context of Doom, if not an outright protagonist. Even a mother trying to get to her children. Throw in a gun picked up from a marine's half-eaten corpse and some kind of sci-fi performance-enhancing armour and voilà, Doommom. For what it's worth, I'm doubting that exploring the possibilities of technology would really be an outright necessary thing to do, even in a story-driven Doom. In the vein of Aliens, Doom's always been using the sci-fi more as a backdrop for the horror-action than a real basis; all the tech mostly serves to give the player fun toys to fry monsters with and vaguely believable places to do it in. (Likewise Hexen.) The invasion of hell through man-made technology does give a basis on which to squeeze in the "consequences of technology" theme, nevertheless. Totally unrelated, but one specific idea I've been toying around with is to have the plasma gun actually be a cutting or digging tool instead of a purpose-built weapon.

Cybernetic-slash-bio-slash-whatever enhancements could be a great justification for classic Doom movement speed. Looking at how Bethesda's been doing things lately, I'm hypothesising there'll be some amount of customisation that would at least allow for classic-style gameplay elements as perks or stats. So then stuff like fast movement and pinpoint aiming would make it in, choosable amongst other gameplay styles. From a marketing standpoint, this might be the best course of action, if hardly from a balance one. Doom 4 should have the most literal possible opposite to everything this bloke says. Not "I want." It objectively should.

TNO sorta-kinda had levels, didn't it? Separate missions, at least. The story was generally developed in lulls during and between them leaving room for the action. Bull to the shit it hasn't. "Us gamers" don't have the right to say one goddamn thing about PC in an industry that saw fit to fund Duke Nukem Forever.

Fucking shit, is this the state we're at now? Literally anything but a pasty-white hetebro is goddamn Ingsoc? Fucking gamers, man. Shit, now I'm halfway hoping there's no straight white male characters at all. After Duke Forever, gamers have precisely fuckall to complain about.

Simply dissociating Doom from heavy metal feels kind of wrong to me. Just about the entirety of classic Doom is built around metal aesthetics, with the Satanic imagery, the over-the-top gore (for its time!) and the even more over-the-top badassery of one guy literally badassing his way out of hell. Even throughout the Williams/Midway games, that was kept mostly intact, and as far as visuals go, I find Doom 64 to go even further down the metal road. I grew up with Doom 64 and am way fond of atmo-horror Doom, but much of that is really just because the Williams/Midway audio is so effing amazing. At any rate, with id's known reliance on blank-slate non-characters, I'm sort of pining for some decent female or non-white rep. Hell, while we're at it, LGBT rep. OH SHIT HERE COMES THE FREEZEPEACH BRIGADE

Edgy internet badasses are what's wrong with the community. And the internet at large.

I might actually like Blood more than Doom. ...I'm so terribly sorry. It's just the hitscan enemy behaviour that I find so much better.

^ Might do. Right, so I've had a day half-spent spriting and this is what I've got to show for it so far. I've made a wad of it and nothing seemed to tear out my eyes in motion. The edges on C and D are way jagged because it was 2AM and I couldn't be arsed. If nobody's got any comment, I'll work out the jagged edges and work on palettising it once I've had a night's sleep.

Sure thing. Here it is a little less funky.

Noted. Gave a try at smoothing the shading on the D. I'm wondering if brand new artwork shouldn't be made for the TITLEPIC, though. Am beaten on what it could be, since the evolving weapon designs would probably prevent any sort of action scene...

Very duly noted. It instantly looked less weird when I flipped it. I'd really appreciate it if any comments regarding the design could be made now before any more sprites are made, so that I won't have to reproduce any changes several times over.

Shootmania, if nobody minds a shameless plug, did just about that with Q3-esque mechanics. It's pretty awesome.

Having been lurking DW for a longish while before registering, there's this tendency for DW to go all poor-man's-Something-Awful that I'm really not fond of at all. Somewhat related -- though I found more of it on Zandronum -- there's all the edgy internet badasses who edgily toss around their edgy shit. Were there only one reason for me to recommend the ZDoom forums, it's that I've never seen them tolerate that crap.

So I got this thing so far. Before I go any further, I'd like it if I could get some feedback on the design and more importantly, the style. I'm absolutely aware that there's just something off about the sprite but I can't quite put my finger on what. I'm posting this in case you guys have any idea what that would be that I'm missing. edit: I literally just remembered that lever-action shotguns don't have an ejection port. You never saw anything!