April: Foals Now Included!

In the original Raridoom, you set out to rescue Sweetie Belle from the changeling hive. That got me thinking, and now, she can come with you as you tear your way through the hive again!

Coding companions is hard, but I think I have it down. Being a foal, her only weapon is the pistol, and that can't be exchanged. She moves slower than your run but faster than your walk, and can't teleport to you so you might need to backtrack a bit to retrieve her, but don't get too far from her! At a random time in the level, she'll get tired and sit down for a while, which is a problem because I haven't figured out how to heal her (even the helper dogs don't get healed, they just start out with 500 health points) and friendly fire is on. Random (squeaky!) sound bites for her active sounds, playing... not quite constantly but close! And if she falls down off a ledge, she doesn't really have a jump to get back out, so "map *" (no quotes) in your console will be your best friend!

 

 

 

mfw when i was writing this

no i'm not doing this

but i did almost have Sweetie Belle be the protagonist of the sequel

but Raridoom 2 sounded better than SweetieDoom / BelleDoom / anything else I could think of

anyway

someday i'll get those spells sprited and get a beta test out there

but today is not that day and tomorrow doesn't look good, either

Fall Update

So, long story short, there was a bit of drama in the Doom fandom, and I'll probably be releasing the final version of Raridoom2 for UZDoom. Eventually. Still only have about a third of the maps done and none of the weapons. But I did want to post something here, just to show I'm not dead.

And part of that is because I don't like spriting.

I mean, I've gotten ok at it so far, I guess. Honestly, it's mostly just moving shapes around in Inkscape and reminding myself that it's going to be a very small image anyway and I shouldn't make such a big deal of how the hands look I say as I go back and scoot it over just a little bit because now I've seen it and can't un-see it.

But sometimes I just am not feeling it, despite being in a doom-ish mood. So other ideas spawn. And, well, why waste inspiration?

How about a game where you play as a clowngirl trying to spread some laughter to save her circus from dreary developers? Clown-themed weapons, and Poppy Playtime-esque encouragement text screens when you die.

I'm calling her Lulu for now.

I'm sure using yellow as player 1's color when doom expects more of a green won't be any issue at all.

 How about a game where you play as a bot who is trying to escape with the help of a friendly hacker? Your weapons are actually modifications to your body and if you shoot for too long, you'll overheat; but all your enemies drop chips that you can use to upgrade yourself.

Heat bar visible by the armor/health display. 
doom3 keycards as placeholders also visible but let's ignore that for now.

I always overheat at the worst time.

How about a game where you play as Applejack brought back to life via strange magic to fight back against mutant vegetables and the soundtrack is all hillbilly metal? 

"I'm going to defeat you with the power of friendship... and this here shotgun I found." 

I read a story once where Megan from G1 ended up in G4 and the fact that there were two ponies with the name 'Applejack' was relevant to a prophecy, somehow. 

Not sure how many of these will ever get out of the 'test' folder on my computer, but it's very fun to play with this engine and see what else can be done with it. 

Raridoom .9

I said I was done with Rarity vs The Changelings. 

...I say a lot of things.

So I only tested it on the zdoom version that Chex Quest came with. Apparently, that version was more forgiving than the current gzdoom. Zdoom didn't care if an actor had 'Game Doom' in the definition, it would spawn it anyway. Gzdoom was like 'lol, no, you're playing Chex, not Doom' and wouldn't spawn it. That fix took fifteen seconds to figure out.

And then I kept playing.

The blue skullkey got defined twice and zdoom was like 'yeah, i guess that's the same thing' and gzdoom was like 'absolutely not, those are two separate actors' so I got stuck on map 3 because the fimfic key (man, remember when 502fiction was a thing??) wouldn't open the door. The rooms were boxy and square with a lot of straight lines. The doors were really wide and most were missing the 'lower unpegged' flag and many had different light levels than the rooms they were connected to. Bridge items are hacks and I never really liked them. 

So I ran through the maps and did a little updating.

There aren't many changes. Mostly just minor adjustments to the maps, some height changes, more curved lines, an occasional extra monster, that sort of thing. I tried to remove a couple double-definitions and that broke it so just ignore those error messages, you shouldn't see them during normal gameplay, anyway.

But still! You can now play vanilla Rarity vs The Changelings on GZdoom. Link in the sidebar has been updated or click here; just replace the old 'rarity.wad' with 'raridoom point 9.wad' and play as usual.

and if you find anything i missed, plz let me know!! 

We made it!

I'll freely admit I'm not always the most up-to-date on things (I'm still running slade 3.2.5 and i guess 3.2.7 came out about four months ago...), and once again, I missed something very important; but I didn't want to post this yesterday (for obvious reasons).

Rarity vs The Changelings now has a post on Equestria Gaming!

They've even put the files together to make it easier to download and play. It's more focused on Custom Edition because it's playable with modern gzdoom, and honestly is a work of art in its own right (I still haven't figured out how the magical beams work, and it impresses me every time).
That said, if you want a more vanilla raridoom experience that still works with gzdoom, keep watching this spot 😁.

Also I threw the Nintendo Hard difficulty in there as a joke. It's like four lines of code and I never made it past map 3. But apparently it's doable, so check that out, too.

Has science gone too far???

 

Yes. Yes, it has.

 

tfw you hear bronies celebrating:

 

(and once again, I find myself mildly irritated that Rarity's coat color is so close to the whites of her eyes and her teeth, which makes these expressions harder to demonstrate, especially at small sizes, but hey)

Merry Christmas, y'all!

Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving, I'm grateful for many things, but especially good computer mice. Have you ever tried making a doom level with just a touchpad? Or a mouse that has a malfunctioning scroll wheel? Miserable. I had to adjust the heights manually, like a peasant. And don't get me started on the vector art. Clicking and dragging those nodes is awful. Put me off spriting for a while. You know, more so than usual.

Speaking of maps and sprites... I'm about 11 maps in (out of 30, hopefully), and I'm missing a couple monsters and... uh... all the weapons, both the pickups and the first-person visuals. Hopefully that happens soon, 1/3 of the way seems like a good time for some playtesting 😊

Oh, and all the sounds, and the textures, and more of the decorations, because in my desire to differentiate from RvsTC, I decided to replace just about everything so it could be released as a standalone game, no iwad required, but that might not work out, condemned to the scrap pile along with the metal slug-style hostages and animated arkham-style antagonist tauntings on death.