You can call me butter, 'cause I'm on a roll

A test page that may or may not end up in the final game. Notes will be fairly rare though; if you find one, there may be some treasures within the vicinity.

I spent all of today basically fine-tuning the first level of the game. Very little map progress, but made quite a lot of scripting-related feats. I have to thank the man that added custom inventory into the language. All of my cool tricks rely on just giving and taking invisible items from the player's inventory. Sort of similar to setting flags, but in a slightly more but functionally identical system of flags and variables.

The first radio room in the game. See it in action here.

The radio system has been implemented into the game flawlessly. It's a good thing too, because aside from the combat and enemy AI, I considered this system to be probably the biggest scripting feat I'd have to work into the game. Now that it's over with, everything from here on will be much easier to take care of, smooth sailing. The only things I really have to worry about now are voice acting. But I can use Microsoft Sam as a placeholder til then I guess. Or use my own faggy voice. Fuck.

The art style is still under consideration: I don't know whether or not to use drawings (That take a very long time to create but are of immeasurable quality) or to use stylized photographs (Very easy to make, simply requires the right lighting and posing and post-production photo manipulation, but looks sort of lazy and might end up looking corny) but I might combine the two. Or merge them together to make the player not sure if what they're looking at was once a picture or a drawing.

Overall progress

 A couple personal journal entries with embarrassing info and story spoilers. The only things blacked out are very personal stuff. Good luck reading it though, fuckers!

Slow, but solid. Not a lot to show here sadly, most of the work is story-related and I don't want to spoil it, though I can give hints as to what the progress has been like, perhaps.

I said before, at this game's very conception, it should feel like a game you picked up from your older goth brother's dirty, pot-smelling bedroom floor. It should feel like a game that just comes in a CD that's blank save for sharpie on the front saying "Necropolis." It comes with a broken installation file, and the readme is an HTML page displaying basic enemies and weapons in cryptic paragraphs and weird wording like it was translated from some Eastern European language. The whole game should feel haunting when you play it, like you know you're not supposed to but you're doing it anyway. Like everything is just above your grasp and is just out there, and it always seems too "grown up" and confusing for you.

That's the feel I want for my game. Something obscure and mysterious. Something off-putting and, though not quite horrifying, unnerving and disturbing.

I wonder if I just got rid of all of those elements of the game itself by, as the creator, explaining those elements. Fuck. I hope nobody's reading this blog post.

But if you are remember you can subscribe to its RSS feed via the little button at the very bottom of this page saying subscribe to atom. Then you can receive posts on your phone and all sorts of nifty shit!!!!!!!! Do it now if you're still interested dammit. I don't want to lose fans for this. God forbid I do it's the only thing I have to look forward to anymore.

Story Writing & Concept art

Here's some really quick and crappy concept art for a cutscene.

I've been sketching a lot and I find that I get the best creativity bursts when I'm trying to learn something so I end up forgetting everything I learned in class but I walk out with fistfuls of crumpled note paper about this game. God dammit.

I think pretty soon once all the writing and scripts are finalized I'm gonna need some VA's. No girls unfortunately, all male cast here. Total sausagefest mod. No specific voice types or anything I'm going for, if you know anyone who's a good VA or you yourself are then feel free to leave a comment giving your email or steam somewhere.

I'm hoping to give the story some sort of balance between conciseness and surreality. Make it easy to understand, yet at the same time it just totally fucks with your brain and leaves you unable to think straight for weeks. Sort of like Xavier: Renegade Angel except not totally out there.

I'm thinking of adding another gamemode that basically acts as some sort of arcade action thing and the longer your survive or points you get then you can unlock special items. But that would require a whole lot of console variable fuckery that I probably couldn't manage.

For anyone wanting to write a story and hitting writer's block, a walk for a half an hour works perfect. My best ideas have been formed while walking.

I ate a cactus prickly pear

It tasted like shit. I might make it a healing item.

Tweaking AI

Since this mod is mostly melee oriented, I wanted the combat to feel as seamless as possible. It'd be challenging but fair, and timing would be a crucial element. If you time the second slash or the kick just right, you might get out of a scrap hurt-free. But if you mess up a few times, it's to the grave with the player. That's the general attitude I had. I also want running away to always be an option for the player should they be too overwhelmed with enemies, and so I might add in another weapon that would aid in slowing enemies down so that the player would escape.

One troubling issue I had was that the enemies seemed to hit the player almost 80% of the time whenever they were called to their attack states. This made it really hard for the player to dodge any attacks without a dedicated dodge button (which would have to include a whole lot of hackery to make even functional), and the player had to rely on a random 50% pain chance to interrupt the enemy mid-attack just so they could get by without getting hit.

To put it bluntly, it sucked ass. I revamped it.

Originally when a monster attacks, I set it to be a few repeating states of the monster reverse-recoiling itself towards the player while also calling a_facetarget, which meant that the enemy, when attacking, was always directed to the player and only impeccable timing could save your skin. I made it so it calls the a_facetarget function only once, so now it gives the player much more room for error to dodge the attack. I also lessened the amount of space that they recoil and gave them a smaller melee zone radius thing, so you could, with good timing, take a few hits at en enemy and then retreat. One issue solved, then, though I'm sure with my anal retentiveness I'll visit this topic again.

The map grows

I sketched some of the beginning map in my free time after reading on the ZDoom forums that it's much better to write out your map's layout on paper rather than winging it in the editor. I agree. Makes it seem a lot simpler, plus you don't have to worry about spare vertices and sticky sectors and all that other confusing shit if you want to change something. On paper you can just erase it or scribble it out. So I have almost all of the tutorial beginning map drawn out on paper. Makin' progress. Only thing left is that I just need to find a proper way to transition from the building to the inner city.

As you can notice in the screenshot I rely heavily on dynamic lights for this mod, and possibly aside from subtle brightness changes in the sectors, I think it'll be the main source of light for the entire mod. Including the flashlight of course, which I still need to work on the sprites for. Was planning on having a button turn the flashlight off, but realized that it's probably pointless, come to think of it. You wouldn't equip the flashlight just to fucking turn it off and wander around in the dark.

Here's some gameplay gifs to whet your appetite.

Greetings and Background

Hello and welcome to the development blog for the quasi-horror mind fucker mod for Doom II, Necropolis: Voices in the Night. (Sometimes referred to as Undoom, Necropolis or VIN in notes that might be featured) Unless otherwise specified in the post, the person that will usually be posting on this blog will be MONKET. The team working on Necropolis so far includes such badboys like DZ987, in charge of music design and some aspects of graphics, MONKET, lead developer, spriter, writer, and programmer, Kupo, artist, and Noname55, voice actor.

Necropolis is our first major project done in the idTech engine and can be considered a total conversion mod that will hopefully be released stand-alone. It has all-original weapons, new cast of enemies, a gripping story, and most prevalent of all is its conversion of Doom from a run-n-gun to a gritty first-person brawler. This is the development blog for it, and will show its current progress, including current maps, enemy/AI improvements, and the occasional rave from writer's block or coding impairments.

Enter the deepest, darkest parts of your psyche. Probe your subconscious' own judgement and massage the tender muscles of fears and desires. It is instinct alone that saves you.