Gardevoir Has A Gun: Version 1.4 [06MAR2023] Gardevoir Day Update!

[kevansevans]

July 23rd update.

Download here! https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2prtwqgpx62m ... 1.pk3?dl=0

Github access! https://github.com/kevansevans/Project-GHAG

Fixed:
* Shotgun consuming too much ammo
* Pistol firing too slow

Changed:
* Taking damage no longer fills anger, killing enemies does

Added:

* Catharsis system. Tougher enemies means bigger rewards and greater rage bonuses. Bigger bonuses also equals health restoration, and can provide overheal up to 500HP! Enemies that damage you will also increase the bonus amount you receive. Receive a big enough of a bonus, and it has the potential to push your anger over 100 the limit!
* New hud! Shiny!
* Punching! Press your reload button to cycle the modes!
- Mega punch. Packs a bigger wallop with zero added effect.
- Ice Punch. Turn your corpses into ice statues, which provide a blocking line of sight and temporary defense from attack.
- Fire punch. Provides a 25 percent chance of setting your enemies on fire that will do an extra bit of damage, equal to 1/16th the enemies max health. Each cycle has a 75 percent chance of repeating.
- Each punch also increases in damage value the angrier you are, and will cause an explosive knockback effect capable of clearing some room for you (And even inflicting status effects to those enemies as well!)
- Does not require ammo, but each punch will cost some anger, so try your best not to whiff those attacks!


Download here! https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2prtwqgpx62m ... 1.pk3?dl=0

==========

Description says Gardevoir can make black holes - so will that be a natural psychic attack as a BFG slot replacer or will there be an actual augmented BFG gun too?

I'm currently more focused on smaller additions before I start adding more bombastic attacks. But there are desires to add a black hole attack to fill in the role of the BFG.

[Spaceman333]

This is shaping up to be a really cool mod, keep up the good work!

[kevansevans]

July 28th update

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rnmdx519owslp ... 1.pk3?dl=0

Fixed:
* Several ZScript related crashes when there's an absurd number of enemies to track.
* Ice Punch being ridiculously OP

Changed:
* "Pokemon moves" no longer grant anger on kill, but still provide health bonuses.
* Health bonus nerfed, reduced by 60 percent.

Added:
* Thunder Punch. 25 percent chance to reduce enemy speed by half.
* Swift. Devastating projectile attack that seeks out enemies and slowly consumes anger.
* Custom CVAR: GHAGRage to set the anger value.

[Jekyll Grim Payne]

Hey, just tried your mod. Very unique!
I have a few short technical notes that, hopefully, you'll find usefull, as well as some bug reports:

- BUG: I managed to freeze an enemy with mega punch, which then unfroze and became unshootable and nonsolid, yet could still attack me.
- I feel like the guns need original sounds. Most of them don't look like Doom guns, so it's weird that they sound like them.
- Mega Punch sounds interrupt each other. Using CHAN_AUTO for the channel should prevent that, I think that'd be a good idea.
- Shotgun is missing a muzzle flash. Pistol's muzzle flash, on the other hand, is kinda goofy imo, I'd make a different graphic (preferably with a few variants).
- Plasma Rifle has a brief recovery period, akin to Doom's Plasma Rifle, but that recovery period isn't animted, it's just the gun sprite being stuck. It'd be nice to have an animation there, like maybe some steam coming out of it (that shouldn't require too much work since that'd be a separate layer).
- I think it'd help the overall look if the weapons were bobbing all the time, not just during their Ready state sequence. Adding player.WeaponState |= WF_WEAPONBOBBING; to their DoEffect override should do the trick.
- I'd utilize altfire for cycling Mega Punch modes. Altfire is a natural pick, while pressing Reload doesn't even occur to me in a mod that doesn't have reloads—I kinda automatically assume it doesn't use that button at all.
- Maybe it's just me, but I feel like anger acquisition and loss are both too slow for how fast-paced Doom gameplay tends to be.

Finally, it's my personal opinion that soft edges simply don't work on sprites unless a sprite is representing something with fuzzy edges. Gardevoir is not fuzzy, to my knowledge, and the guns definitely aren't, so I believe all edges must be hard and pixelated, without any anti-aliasing. But that's up to you; it still looks impressive and polished.

[kevansevans]

Will definitely take into consideration your suggestions. I think I have that bug you mentioned fixed, but I need to give it some more time as I haven't been able to reliably recreate it. I think the script I wrote to handle an actor dying mid/pre-effect isn't working correctly, and the freeze returning the actor to normal persists afterwards.

Art style stays though because I literally can not do any better than that

Do the weapons feel impactful enough though? I really want to hammer home the idea of being a psychic bad ass, but I don't want it to be too easy at the same time.

[kevansevans]

This is a bugfix/balance update

https://www.dropbox.com/s/c1lhljcbmkehp ... 1.pk3?dl=0

Fixed:
* More Hud scaling issues
* Conflicting status effects creating unkillable enemies;
* Audio cutoff issues with punches
* Swift lag issues reduced

Changed:
* Anger gained from kill doubled
* Anger on damage returns, though significantly reduced
* Anger bonus granted with explosive barrel kills
* Swift now fires a single non-seeking projectile at any anger level by default
* Swift costs slightly more than before (1 -> 5 internally)
* Rocket explosions now scale based on given rage value, giving better indication of their reach.
* Element punch will deal 2/3rds the damage applied to target onto surrounding enemies

[Captain J]

This mod is quite interesting. You play as Gardevoir and you get super powerful after you gain ANG meter from killing the enemies. That's the creative stuff!

My complain might be Pistol's muzzle flash seems overlapping and Shotugun doesn't have it at all. Good stuff tho!

[kevansevans]

Update! Stability and some polishing

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tkiqypt8fwg9r ... 1.pk3?dl=0

Added:

* Better effects to easily tell if an actor has a status effect applied
* New pistol and shotgun sound effects
* GHAGPunchOdds cvar, change the likelihood of applying a status effect to targets. Default is 25, set to 100 or higher for the effect to always apply.
* A lot more silly names for the rockets

Fixed:

* Dramatically improved the stability of actor tracking that is used for damage rage bonuses and status effects.
* Various sounds
* Burn damage leaving behind an invincible actor

Changed

* Swift no longer requires ammo. To balance this, damage increases significantly with anger.
* All status effects have a 25 percent chance to be cleared every 2 in game seconds.
* Top speed of Pistol and Shotgun increased

Feedback requests:

What I'm mostly looking for is how the gameplay mechanics work. While most of the feedback I am getting is mostly polish related suggestions, which are definitely very much appreciated and I assume to mean I'm hitting every nail on the head, I want to make sure that my goal of making the player feel like a psychic badass is met. I'm looking for overpowered, but not to the point where it makes things too easy or too boring. Make things really crunchy, invoking the sort of anger that would explode people's heads à la scanners [NSFL link], but, you know, in a way that doesn't make me look like a sociopath.

ty <3

[kevansevans]

Another update: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ckh7sxq32zo6v ... 1.pk3?dl=0

Fixed :

* ZScript crash that would occur on any damaging source that wasn't from an enemy.
* Status effect particles no longer stick to dead enemies or projectiles
* Health being awarded incorrectly, no longer causes desync when picking up health item.

Changed :

* Improved animation looks and slightly tweaked sprites to pistol, shotgun, and rockets (Yes, the muzzle flashes will get added eventually).
* Increased the cost of punching and swift.
* Rage system re-balanced to be simpler internally:
- Better balanced to be difficult early on, but to be easy to maintain when the ball is rolling.
- Anger drain is much faster.
- Kills grant a bonus delay, more kills = slower drain. Bonus decays over time.
- Berserk packs buffed, granting more anger (500 -> 750 internally).
* "Hell Hath No Fury" mode drains anger at a constant rate and can not be slowed down.
* "Hell Hath No Fury" mode grants "infinite anger" to attacks that cost anger. Go nuts.
* Decreased odds that an enemy with a status effect loses that effect, 10 percent chance of returning to normal.


=====

Also as a request, currently stumped on how to make the plasma rifle a relevant weapon in the mod, I feel like it's the weakest link right now and I have no idea what to do. What are some of your ideas?

[openroadracer]

Also as a request, currently stumped on how to make the plasma rifle a relevant weapon in the mod, I feel like it's the weakest link right now and I have no idea what to do. What are some of your ideas?

The simplest thing I could think of, thematically, is just having psychic energy channeled into each projectile. Whether that translates into simply more raw damage, or instead comes with possible effects like splash damage or damage over time, that'd have to be your call.

But you openly say you can't do anything towards buffing fire rate in the mod's lore, so I figure it might be worthwhile to try at least just having added psychic damage based on your Anger level.

[barosans]

in fact, I experienced a bug with the backpack

when we collect too many of backpack, the maximum number of pistol bullets becomes negative and it becomes impossible to get the pistol bullets

[kevansevans]

Hotfix update: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9ikf3gi54620n ... 1.pk3?dl=0

Fixed :
- Rage cool down bonus going into the negatives, making it impossible to gain any anger
- Backpacks causing an integer overflow when granting higher ammo capacity

[Sgt. Ham]

Looking at the description for that pistol gives me an idea. Since Gardevoir can levitate it, how about the ability to use it alongside another weapon a la the Stratocasted Ironblast from Guncaster?

[SnowBay]

This mod is really impressive. A lot of interesting mechanics absolutely change the gameplay. I like the mod so much but it surely needs more balancing because the main heroine (or hero, they both look effeminate) is OP with all that powers. When the mood is murderous, I can kill Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind with just few shots of the Swift. BUT IT'S SOOOOOOOO COOOOOOOOL! As for the normal game, playing is just too easy, but this mod is perfect for the Slaughter maps. Recently I've started playing New Gothic Movement and it's goddamn fun. Really appreciate all the work. Waiting for the possibility to create black holes.

[kevansevans]

August 11 update: https://www.dropbox.com/s/67nz9ma4x6hq3 ... 1.pk3?dl=0

Fixed:

* Debloated punch code. 'Twas ugly.

Changes:

* Pistol and shotgun animation improvements again, with added muzzle flashes.
* Berserk grants a permanent 14 percent rage cool down buff, aka rage drains slower each berserk pack gained. This does not apply when in "hell hath no fury" mode.
* Catharsis system changed into pick up system. Bonuses granted are still the same values, but are now brightly colored pickups. Rage Essence will move towards the player when close, while health essence needs to be tread over.
* Swift nerfed. Bonus projectiles reduced to a max of 3 under normal conditions, and damage reduced. Still a very powerful attack, but better balanced to be a bit of a waste in non-crowd like situations.

All in all, I feel like the balance here is really solid. I'm aiming for a more rampaging feel instead of just over powered. Maybe I'll explain this later down the line in better depth.

===============

This mod is really impressive. A lot of interesting mechanics absolutely change the gameplay. I like the mod so much but it surely needs more balancing because the main heroine (or hero, they both look effeminate) is OP with all that powers. When the mood is murderous, I can kill Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind with just few shots of the Swift. BUT IT'S SOOOOOOOO COOOOOOOOL! As for the normal game, playing is just too easy, but this mod is perfect for the Slaughter maps. Recently I've started playing New Gothic Movement and it's goddamn fun. Really appreciate all the work. Waiting for the possibility to create black holes.

I just want to say I find it really flattering and incredible that you signed up to this forum just to leave a reply on my mod. I really appreciate your criticism and took it in to the changes above, please let me know how it works now.