[DEMO] Doom Happens - v0.4 Major Remastering, last Alpha

[Tormentor667]

Looks really promising

[Lycaon]

Here's a sneak peak at what i'm doing on the other side of the lift after you finnish the demo. The idea is that O-Ren Ishii comes at you in the building's rooftop with a railgun (she was a sniper in the movie), and runs along the balcony while she sends weak enemies to distract you (not the crazy 88). To that purpose, you'll have the minigun to quickly get rid of said enemies (in case you didn't already have it by finding it in a secret). I'm just drawing the general layout of the fight and I haven't done the decorate for the actual miniboss yet, but it will be something like this: she will fire high damaging railguns but will take a while to aim and actually shoot. That is your chance. Nevertheless, since she runs really fast and quits firing as soon as you hit her, it's hard to keep track of her and could stab you in the back. With a giant steel bar launched at gauss force, that is. To balance this, she will have much less health than all prior minibosses. It will hopefully be a tight, suspenseful fight. Probably gonna use Metal Gear Solid's battle music.

I know some textures are offset, I just didn't start with the detail yet.

Screenshots here:

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[Lycaon]

I'm bumping this so that people who might have had performance issues with this know that I included a Troubleshooting section in the main post. Long story short: If you have an fps drop when you go outside, set fog mode to "standard" and keep the fonts without any resize (this is because messages display incorrectly otherwise).

[WARCHILD_89]

I like the level design, should give it a try after work

[Lycaon]

There is still progress on this project, although slow.

I was going through options to make the gameplay more interesting and fresh. Since this first map is urban warfare-oriented, I was thinking about adding some survivalist elements.

One coolt thing I thougt is making molotovs through the inventary. I have sprites both for empty bottles and gas gallons, so I was thinking about making those 2 objects pickable items that can be merged into molotovs by using any one them in the inventory, consuming 3 bottles and a tank for each 3 molotovs (3 molotovs per use and maybe a delay before you can use it again, but I'm not sure if that is possible yet, should be though). All the human enemies have a death by fire animation, so this is a cool way to take advantage of it.

There are actually quite a lot of ideas I have for the rest of this map and the project in general since the beggining, I didn't talk a lot about it because I want it to be a surprise, but maybe I could say a couple things to show what I'm talking about. There is going to be a zombie outbreak at some point in the map, but you will be in the underground labs of the EDF building when it happens. At this point you had to leave your weapons to pass a security automated check, and you will be left with a pistol and shotgun you find in there to fight the first zombies in this tech UAC-styled lab. Then a doctor in there who unveils part of the story is going to give you a black ops full armor to disguise yourself as one of them and fight the zombies in the streets alongside them, so you get to team up with some robots and UAC bots as well. The point is that you will take advantage of the situation to get inside an outpost where the final boss resides... in a giant mecha. He's messing around with some portals and stuff.

I have also significantly reduced the ammount of ammo in comparison to the current demo release, so that it's much harder to find ammo and you are forced to scavenge at least some ammo in the garbage piles. This will also make molotovs more useful.

[Vostyok]

Just tried this. Pretty unforgiving gameplay, I ended up sticking with the silenced pistol and creeping about everywhere, although the er...

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GIANT FUCKING ROBOT

... did wipe me out, even with the rocket launcher. I like the story approach you've taken though.

[Lycaon]

Actually I got mixed reactions to the difficulty, I guess I could tone it down a bit, but for some people it was kinda easy. How experienced are you in Doom? And what exactly did you find unforgiving, was it the ammount of enemies or their somewhat high damage? There are also a couple of things players should know that I didn't specify ingame, such as the rifle being the most powerful weapon together with the minigun (it has A LOT of damage and pierces straight through robots). Anyways, this isn't even the full demo yet, so there's a lot of time to polish, I don't want hard gameplay to overcome players.

Edit: I augmented the aiming tics before shooting for every enemy, lowered most HPs, slightly reduced their moving speed and also made boss battles a little easier and shorter. Still, I haven't uploaded a version with those changes yet. I want to play test it and make sure it's all working.

[Lycaon]

Big trouble in little china.

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I'm enhancing all the city visuals for a more convincing cyberpunk atmosphere.

Here's some sneakpeek into a flashback cutscene and the fight against O-Ren Ishii

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I'm striving for a more tight and visually filled enviroment, but I also changed most of the cutscenes since the new ones were getting much better. I'm using much more cuts and less panoramic shots to give it more rythm.

Here's a before-after comparison of the detail level of a shot.

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Before


After

[Lycaon]

New version uploaded. I'm hoping to correct some of the mistakes I made in the last version, but this is still far, far away from the finished product.

[Lycaon]

v0.31 uploaded. There was a major bug that slipped through my tests last time. In the last fight against Beatrix Kiddo she would stop coming back after teleporting a couple times. I think that is fixed now, and you can see the actual end of the wad. I'm sorry about that one.

[Ed the Bat]

I just tried running this. After the beginning cutscene, I begin play trapped in a small square room. I don't know how to proceed.

[Lycaon]

I'm really sorry about v0.31, there was a bug that made you start in a box unless you skipped the initial cutscene. v0.32 solves the issue, it's right there in the download section.

Thank you very much Ed, I don't know how this could slip through my tests, something went wrong with a technicality in a script.

[Ed the Bat]

Awesome. Thank you.

EDIT: I've come back after completing the demo. I'm really interested in seeing more of this.
One quick note: I see you have the music from Sunset Riders SNES in MP3 format. If you used SPC format, you could save about 4MB and get infinitely-looping music.

Alternatively, you can upgrade to the higher-quality renditions of the original arcade version. These are available in MP3 or the compact VGZ format, but sadly, GZDoom can't handle this variant of VGZ right now...

[Lycaon]

sounds great! I was thinking about dividing each song into an intro and a loop, playing first the intro and then the loop from then onwards, but I guess this could be easier. There are a lot of things tied with wire, I hope I can improve the quality of every aspect in future releases.

By the way, I decided to divide the story into chapters. What you see as of now is the whole first chapter, and the longest one in the first map. There will be many chapters per map (2 or 3), and the first map will have a hub map for one of its 3 chapters. Each map will still have a distinct theme and final boss. There's just so much in my mind, I hope I can actually do everything I plan.

thank you for your comments!

[Lycaon]

Starting to work on chapter 2. This chapter will be a flashback and will take place in a hub level that is an extension of map01. For this purpose, I'm making a whole new city area that connects with the parts already playable. The layout is done, but this is the only detailed part so far.

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Then I have these concept screenies for the Delta Labs. Nothing final, just testing the lightning and textures

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