Author: mlvivar

The day before we showed our games at The Plays The Thing event I had only taken pictures of an apple, banana, and a tree. I knew I wanted to make two main map areas, a normal space and a magical space. I was showing my housemate the first sprites I made and told her my rough idea of a game and she started to sing the I like to eat apples and bananas song, and I knew that’s what I wanted my game to be. The song is a kid song but I also think its kinda creepy, weird and random so i liked that. In the normal space you eat normal apples and bananas and then in the magical space there are apples, bananas and bushes with eyes and dancing trees.

These were the final clay models I used. 

For the map I drew out an apple and banana because that’s my favorite type of map making . 

I kind of like how it starts out with the Doom start screen, but then you just pick fruit…

I wasn’t really sure of what I wanted my game to be the week before it was due. I just had a bunch of random ideas. I wanted to do stuff with flowers or maybe a garden, then I thought of possibly adding a magic mushroom. Either way I did know that I wanted to work with making my own clay models. I thought it was cool that some of the Doom characters were made from clay, and I thought that this way of making sprites would be easier than drawing them myself on Photoshop. It also gave everything in my game its own style. I started out by making things I knew for sure I would use like trees, fruit, a bush. Making these clay figures was fun and since I knew the sprites were going to be really pixelated, I didn’t have to worry much about details.

It took my awhile to figure out the best way to photograph the figures because lighting had to be bright but not be at the wrong angles because then there’d be shadows. Eventually I found the best technique that worked to photograph everything.

 

I really enjoyed what we learned during the hardware day because it added a lot of possibilities to the things we can do for Doom modding. Being able to create a personalized way of interacting with a game makes it so much more immersive.

Learning how to solder was fun, I wasn’t very good at it because I couldn’t melt off enough of the solder. Even though I wasn’t good at it this first time, i think that if i ever had to mod anything electrical in the future I would be able to do it myself.  Whenever I use any type of electrical device, I never really think of how the components of it can be taken apart or re-purposed so it was interesting to think about that this week.

We didn’t spend very much time with the Arduino, but I got a small script to run on multiple LED’s. I’ll probably try to learn to use the Arduino in the future because it’s cool how it allows you a way to instruct and communicate with a physical component. 

This week we got to put everything we’ve learned to make an even more personalized custom mod. Coming up with the idea for a game is always the hardest part for me. It took me a really long time to figure out what kind of theme/story I wanted to create. Eventually I just ended up going with flowers, I just like flowers I guess 🙂 I put most of my work into creating and gathering my “tools” (sprites, textures, sounds, monsters, weapon) for the game than actually making a big map for this wad. The sprites were my biggest obstacle because I thought I’d be able to find stuff online but it was difficult to find the angles of a character that I wanted. I ended up taking a few front viewed sprite and changing them a little in Photoshop to blink. For my monster flower, the sprite I found was really pixelated and I tried to fix it in Photoshop by tracing it and coloring it in but it might not have made a huge difference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I like that we’ve learned so many skills for modding and since we have longer than a week to make the final, hopefully I can end up with a cool wad.

Since our assignment for this week was due on Halloween, I decided to make my mod Halloween themed. Most of the textures I used for this assignment I found online and just opened them up in Photoshop to resize before importing into Slade. When I was creating my map I wanted to mostly experiment with walls/line edges and also learn to make a door! To make it easier, I only made one door and copy and pasted it to three different locations on my map. I also played around with transparent textures on line segments to make the bats and spiderwebs in the spiral hallway.

My favorite room is the secret with the ghosts where the walls scroll. I thought it was a cool feature because it adds movement to the map.

For next week, my personal goal is to make a bigger map. My maps have been pretty small so far and since I know how easy it is to copy, paste and rotate now, I was thinking of maybe creating some symmetrical map? We’ll see.

Since we’ve started playing Doom I’ve been thinking about what I’d want to mod or how I’d want to style my own Doom designs. Doom is very boyish with the heavy metal, roaring monsters, and whole hell vibe. These are all things that make Doom such a cool unique game, but in my own mods I want to start making it a little bit more girly. That’s why I chose to do a rose for this weeks assignment. I was also more inspired by the types of maps that look like a drawing from a birds eye view, like E3M2. 

My Slade difficulties:
When I started using Slade I drew out my rose using the line tool and I later realized that the line segments inside of my rose weren’t actual walls so they ended up being really thin but I textured them anyway and tagged them impassable, which turned out okay except that enemies were able to shoot their weapons through the walls even with the block monsters, sounds and impassable tags on. For some reason I also assumed that you can easily make a door by putting a special on a single line segment but that’s not the case… they’re a lot of work and if I was going to include them into the rose I would’ve had to restructure the inside, so that’s why I just went with open walls.

To decide which level to speedrun I started off by looking at the world records on speeddemosarchive.com, I looked into the levels that could be beat really quickly. Initially, I was going to speedrun E1M4 because it looked so easy in the record videos but when I tried it myself I realized it required a strafe jump and I practiced it for awhile but I just could not make the jump from the staircase to the platform. So then, I went back to the speed demos archive website and tried E2M7 but similarly, it required a rocket jump which I also practiced for awhile but could not do. Finally I ended up speedrunning E3M3, a level that doesn’t required any special jumps or strafing but could still be completed under thirty seconds.

I chose not to straferun when I was speedrunning because I couldn’t control my movement very well when I was moving at an angle. I actually noticed I had better times when I ran with only shift because I ran into less walls and monsters. It took me around 25 runs to get to my personal best and then my times just began to land one or two seconds behind so I ended up with a PB of 30 seconds.

Looking forward to start modding next week!

I spent a lot of time playing Doom this weekend. It’s kind of wierd/cool having to play a videogame as homework. I played episode 2 and episode 3 with the cheatcodes IDDQD (invulnerability), IDFA (full everything minus keys), and double IDDT (map and items reveal). I played in GZDoom this time, which I really liked as an emulator except for the map (the map is sad). I also customized my controls and played with a mouse which made it so much easier! I played the majority of episode 2 and 3 by looking for the keys to find the exit but towards the end of episode 3 I started to get a bit tired of the game from playing for so long so I used the walk through walls cheat (IDSPISPOPD) for 3 of the levels.

In class I presented on the secret exit in E2M5, and my favorite part of that whole secret is still the blood waterfall curtain thing because it’s decorative to the level but also is used to hide a teleporter.

After I presented on Tuesday, Steven presented on E2M9, the secret level in episode 2. Apparently, the secret exit I came across in map 5 was actually an exit that lead to a secret level.

When I toured the game I also played this secret level but the whole time I thought it was just level 6 and that the next map was level 7 and so on. The existance of the secret exit in E2M5 makes more sense to me now after learning that it’s not just another way to beat E2M5, it actually leads to an entirely different level.

 

For this first playthrough of Doom, I had the game running on Steam, but I’m going to try to have it running on Chocolate Doom later so that I could have more freedom with changing my controls for the game. On Steam I had two control options.  In the first, you move with WASD and rotate with the left and right arrow keys. In the second you move with the arrow keys but strafe with period and comma. I ended up playing with the classic controls because I just felt more comfortable having easier access to rotate than strafe.

I’m not good at playing video games, so I wimped out and played on the easiest level, I’m Too Young to Die. I think I could probably do Hey, Not Too Rough next time, I was just scared on my first time playing. When I started to play the game, I made it to M3, then fell in some poison and died. I realized that the game doesn’t save any of your progress through each of the maps, so I had to start over in M1, but then I began saving after completing each map. In M4, it took me forever to figure out how to get the yellow key, but then I figured out that I can view a map of the area by pressing tab and that became very helpful. Then in M5, since I knew how to use the map, I started exploring all the doors and rooms and I found my first secret! A chainsaw.

Most of the levels have this blue orb with a face. I tried to figure out how to touch it but I couldn’t. What is it? What’s it supposed to do?

The last map felt unlike the previous ones, the floor textures were different, there were new bigger monsters and according to the game, I’m still stuck in hell 🙁