Author: ajgraham

In my final project, I really wanted my wad to become an interactive space full of small, intimate surprises. However, this proved to be a little bit trickier than I initially anticipated. It was really difficult for me to figure out how to make my weapons so that when I water flowers, the flower “dies” and begins the dancing animation, but when I water the dog or the tree, there is no effect.

I was so happy, after staring at the shotgun class and reading ZDoom for a few hours, to find that this was possible with custom damage types.

It wasn’t as simple as adding “Damage Type Water” to the weapon’s class, however. I figured out that the damage type and other things associated with the punching mechanism were handled by a flag called “A_Punch.” In order to change these things, I needed to use the flag “A_CustomPunch” instead and create a custom hitPuff, which you can see above.

Then, in an actor’s class, you can create different reactions/deaths to different damage types as you can see in the above example of a flower’s death animation.

 

As I was making and testing these changes, it became incredibly apparent to me that what I was creating was no longer just a wholesome environment.

I was modifying death animations so that when you water a flower “enemy” with your watering can “weapon,” the flower starts to dance rather than die. Or the dog, a modification of the demon, goofily wobbles around and follows you of of a need for love rather than out of a desire to kill.

I was taking over this extremely violent and masculine game and turning it into something very gentle and feminine.

Especially as a woman in tech, re-purposing this game in this way meant a lot to me. Being involved in a space where I sometimes feel small and unseen, games that make me feel just as important and powerful as everyone else are special.

Kill ‘Em With Kindness has become my way of saying, “Yeah, I belong here.”

 

 

Going into this week I was pretty sure that I wanted to expand on the hand-drawn mod that I did.

However I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to expand on it. Should I only create a few more sprites and make the setting a bit larger and complex? Should I keep the small space? If I keep the small space, what kinds of things should I add to it?

After the super helpful group discussion this week, I think I have a decent idea of how I want to go about my final project. I want to focus on my original intent of this mod — to get as far away from Doom as possible.

I want to create an intimate experience full of tiny interactions and surprises. Maybe this means watering a flower and it grows. Maybe I’ll create another hand sprite that allows you to pet the dog and the dog reacts to that. Or when you “shake” the tree the bird flies away or maybe some fruit falls to the ground.

I think all of this is pretty opposite from the very violent and expansive Doom. If only I could get rid of that pause menu.

I guess it is a Doom mod after all.

This week we worked on learning the basics of hardware modding! I purchased a blue tooth mouse because it was the cheapest one I could find at Fry’s Electronics in Sacramento. However, while working on the hardware mod, I realized why it was recommended to purchase a wired mouse.

Dealing with batteries was a pain. Having to keep everything attached to where the batteries would be put in and the extra wires were kind of annoying.

I was still able to get the left switch de-soldered. 

If I were to do another mouse modification, I would definitely like to purchase a different mouse so that I do not have to worry about the extra stuff in the way.

For my final project, I’m not sure if I would want to do a hardware mod. I’m definitely interested in playing with the Arduino in the future, however I am thinking that maybe for my game I should focus more on making the art and environment really good.

However, if I were to do a hardware mod, I think it would be interesting to put the Arduino in an actual watering can, and use the accelerometer to detect when the player tilts the watering can past a certain point to trigger the left click action in the game.

This week I really wanted to try and create something extremely different from Doom — something wholesome with a lot of cute animations in a very small area. My goal was to think small for the map design, but fill the area with a lot of sprites and animations.

Here’s my first sort of “brainstorming” for the level. I started out knowing that I wanted a large tree with some sort of bird animation on it, a frog sitting in a pond, some plants and flowers that the player could water with a watering can, and the “enemy” sprite was going to be some sort of cute animal following the player around.

This is what it turned out to be! I think my favorite animation is the bird poking its head out of the tree every once in a while.

I ended up hand drawing almost everything in this level on a piece of paper, and then editing those drawings in Gimp to have transparency. Here are some of the original drawings:

As well as some failed attempts at drawing…

Although it is extremely tedious, I really wish I had the time to hand draw everything, because I feel like the things that I drew digitally stick out like a sore thumb — the sky, the water, the grass as a few examples. I also wish that my drawings did not end up so pixelated in the final result after spending so much time on them!

Overall, it was really neat to see my drawings come to life in a video game and was also really interesting for me to create something cutesy and wholesome out of something that originally was the complete opposite.

I honestly had a lot more fun making my Doom level this week. I think it was because of a combination of a couple things. One, I was a bit more comfortable with Slade and knew a bit more how to deal with its shortcomings. And two, I was able to incorporate a design that was a lot of fun for me — Zelda!

My map is largely inspired by the first ever level of the Legend of Zelda on the NES.

This time around, what ended up probably taking up most of my time is getting my textures prepared and learning the photo editing software called GIMP.

Generally I would have to take a really tiny screenshot of a texture from Zelda on google, and then copy and paste this texture onto a layer in Gimp, being sure to make sure that it all lines up correctly.

Sometimes while resizing images, I even had to re-pixelize to sharpen them back up.

And, what probably took the most time of them all — creating a transparent background for some of these objects, which I think for the most part turned out pretty good!

The textures aren’t perfect, but I still had a lot of fun drawing inspiration from Zelda. It was cool to really be able to incorporate some of my own ideas into this game! It started to feel like something I created and designed, rather than something that was created for me and I was just editing.

This week we were given a really daunting but exciting task — creating our very first Doom levels! I went into designing my level having no plan whatsoever. I wanted to take to heart the words of Liz Ryerson, who said something along the lines of “The best Doom levels created seemed to be the ones that he [John Romero] wasn’t really thinking about.”

Oddly enough, my level started to definitely take an inspiration from John Romero’s recreation of E1M8.

 

Above is John Romero’s level.

Above is a clip from my level.

You can see the similarities in the jagged lines. However, something I didn’t realize until looking at these side by side is that Romero’s jagged areas were lowered into the ground, whereas mine were raised. Either way, each and every crevice in the jagged areas had to be clicked and textured, which was a total pain to do.

This is the map of my level. I decided to include a small maze inspired by the level I talked about and chose to speed run — E2m2.

The most fun part of this process was definitely looking at other people’s levels and hearing what people thought of mine. I’m looking forward to it again this week!

This week I chose to speed run the same level that I toured last week — E2M2, also known as “Containment Area.” I chose this level in particular for a two reasons. For one, I was already pretty familiar with it. And two, as we watched the speed run in class, I noticed a couple tricks that Dime performed that I thought would be interesting to explore.

I started out by using the invulnerability cheat, and just getting used to the route that I was going to use. At first, I tried going the route that Dime went. However, this route meant that I would have to learn how to strafe jump, which was much more difficult than I expected. The speed runners that we watched always made it look so easy. It was even more frustrating to learn on this level in particular because if you missed the jump, there was a very long path to get back to the spot to try it again.

So I ended up choosing a different path, that involved hitting a button which brought up the bridge to the exit. Eventually I turned off the invulnerability when I got more comfortable with my route.

 

Overall I found speed running to be a pretty fun and interesting experience, and I definitely see why it is so popular, especially in the DOOM community.

This week was really interesting for me as I am someone who has never really explored a game with cheats. I think at first I may have gotten a bit carried away. Going right into episode two I made my self invulnerable, gave myself all weapons and keys, and enabled walking through walls.

However, I found that by using these cheats, especially walking through walls, I was not really able to fully understand and experience the level design. I found myself just sort of zipping through each level without paying attention at all to my surroundings.

I solved this problem best by disabling walking through walls. Disabling this cheat in particular still allowed me to explore what it feels like to play a game with cheats while still allowing me to effectively tour the architecture of Doom without fear of being killed.

Exploring Doom in this manner really allowed me to explore the level design in a very different way than how I explored level 1. The play through of level 1 allowed me to learn about what it was like to look at and play the game from a players perspective. Whereas touring the game in episodes 2 and 3 allowed me to see more of the developers’ and designers’ perspectives and made me think much more about the overall story of Doom and how that is portrayed.

I really enjoy playing video games, but to be 100% honest, this probably would not have ever been a game that I would have chosen to play on my own besides the fact that it is such a classic. I don’t mind the FPS aspect, it’s the monsters (if I can even call them that? What are they?) chasing after me and hearing the “oink oink” noises telling me there’s something nearby trying to hurt me, yet having no idea where it is. I’m the type of person who refuses to watch horror movies, so getting through the spookiness of the game was a bit challenging for me. Embarrassingly, I tried to view it as a sort of “conquering my fear.”

E1:M6 was by far the worst.

After navigating through a crazy, maze-like map, I hit what I thought was going to be an innocent button and immediately like 20 monsters appeared behind me, I sprayed my machine gun everywhere in a panic, and I died, without a recent save to fall back on. Even after later coming to this room and defeating these monsters after a few more tries, I could not for the life of me find the exit. Later I found out it was in that very same room.

In my search for the exit, I was able to uncover 50% of the secrets. I really appreciated the health boost from the blue guy.

Overall, I found myself getting braver and braver to turn corners and explore as I continued to play the game. I found my self saying “even if something does pop out from behind there, I can kill it.”