Forever Friendship

Oh, boy, G6 stuff just dropped! Personally, I just like little ponies--even G1 has some good stuff--so I'm kindof excited to see where this goes. 

Theme song is pretty good, no complaints there. 

Wonder what Rarity will look like in the new style. I mean, I'm not going to redo these mugshots, not after how long it took me to start and how much a pain her mane is; but I'm curious to know what...

what they...

changed... 

... 

Where's Rarity??

  

And it's short and on youtube? 

Someone pointed out that Bluey has shorter episodes, too, and they can do a lot in that timeframe so I'm cautiously optimistic about that.

Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

And now I guess I have an actual deadline? Like G5 was its own thing but now if they're bringing back FiM characters then I guess that's my cue to release before G6!Rarity shows up.

She'd better show up. She grew on me as a character very quickly.

and inb4 all the 'Applejack is a background pony' jokes come back.

It's RAMPing time! *ramps all over the place*

There are many great things happening in June, and one of those things is the RAMP project.

Have you ever thought about making a doom map, but weren't sure where to start? Or wanted to, but weren't sure if anyone would ever see it? RAMP might be what you're looking for. 

I did one map three years ago(!), and keep saying that I'll do another one and... well... I'm me, and I haven't. But! If you're looking for a sign to start your own doom mapping thing, this could be it.

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. 

Status(bar) Update

Ah, the status bar. I have always liked having it (even though I know some people prefer to turn it off). It just feels classic to me. 

But what if I wanted to update it? For example, if I wanted to show when Rarity has picked up the berserk powerup (because sometimes I forget!).

I could just add a small image, like so:

Regular-strength Rarity

Rarity's on fire with the berserk powerup!

Or, what if you wanted to know if you had green armor or blue armor (because they have different save percentages and I didn't realize this for a long time)? 

Three points on the shield for the 33% save

It's a bigger shield to show the 50%. 
Still have to figure out what the armor powerups will be, though. 

Or what if I wanted to find a statusbar font that looked like something Rarity would use but still is legible at tiny size?

...I don't have a picture for this one. The red freedoom one doesn't really fit, and the mlp-font text below is a little too pixelated for my liking, so that's another thing I'll have to change. 

But still! Very fun.

Rarifilly vs the Changelings!

 Apparently, it is a foal's day, so what better day than today to reveal the next iteration: Rarifilly vs the Changelings!

Featuring:

• Lower view-height and lower-damaging attacks for a more fully-filly experience!

Let me guess, you were expecting somepony taller?

• Cuter mugshots!

Don't let her take damage!

• The same bland, flat levels as the original Raridoom (seriously how did i miss so many lower unpegged tags T.T??
• A new story: With Sweetie Belle still not yet born, filly!Rarity is now being dragged through the hive, looking for her destiny! Can she find it, or is she doomed to wander around forever fighting dumb changelings!

Oh, no, not another level!

Happy foal's day!

Little Update

The Freedoom project put out an update about a week and a half ago. They've redone some sprites and some textures, which is fun, and also most of the strings, which I wasn't expecting. I mean, I like making the strings relevant (I'm still proud of 'Rarity ruined her mane in the slime'), but I wasn't really expecting 'Put on a force field vest.' when I picked up the green armor (the blue red armor now says 'attuned force field armor', which was a cool word but one I did have to look up). And as much as I like the new armor bonuses (red is my favorite color), it just makes me realize I'm not sure what I want to do for them for my game. 😕

Guess that means I should do an update, too. I've been fighting the statusbar (ever realized that the flag you set that you were certain you needed was the one that was messing things up? yeah, good times...) and honestly I'm not sure how much people use it anymore. But I like it still.

Also I made some nice, new Rarity mugshots and dang it, they will be used.

Also pulled out UDB again recently. It had been a while since I'd done any mapping (I was so many versions behind...), so opening one and going 'oh, hey, that's a cacodemon, i did do that' was a pleasant surprise. I'm already 20 maps (+2) down, but my second-biggest concern is everything looking flat--I've been watching a lot of David's videos and every beginner's map, he'll comment on how just adjusting the floor height or ceiling height a little bit makes a big difference in making things look better. I've been going through the maps, trying to add some greebles here and there. I wouldn't expect an open beta for raridoom2 anytime soon, but it is happening. 

but the weirdest freedoom update is that they added a 'jump' noise every time you jump and let me tell you i was not expecting that in the slightest

30 Years

Couldn't not post today! Doom is 30 years old! Originally released on December 10th, 1993, and has been a world-changer ever since. This calls for a celebration! 

Party on, Changeling Pie!

Update your software, y'all

So work on Raridoom2 is going slowly, but hey, what else is new?

You know what wasn't new: my version of inkscape. I was still using version 1.2 (from May of 2022), because it was still working fine. 

Fun fact: Inkscape 1.2 has a little bug where if you have an export window open (like when you're exporting sprites) and using copy-paste (like you do when you're spriting or copying paths from another inkscape document), it'll clear your gradients when you save it. This happened once before, but it was an easy fix because it was early enough in the process that I only lost a couple things that were easily fixable.

But last night, it ate all my cacodemon sprite gradients. "Where are its eyes? Did I delete the eyes? And it looks really see-through, which makes sense because it's bigger than, say, the imps; but- wait, where is the carapace?" 

Nom, nom.

This has been a PSA from baha: update your software.

also i was going to just not have pain elementals in the game because i hated them and wasn't sure how to justify them creating the hornets but then i realized 1) it looks just like the caco so i could just recolor it and 2) portals are canon in the mlp universe so it's not spitting out new changelings but instead summoning them. so pain elementals are going to be a thing.

Raridoom: Custom Edition Update

When I updated from Open Beta 3 to Raridoom .8, I tried cleaning up some of the code (because Chex Quest basically replaces definitions, and I was replacing those replacements; honestly, it's a miracle the game runs at all). This borked Custom Edition, which I thought was sad, because I really liked how the spells looked and how every enemy sounded different and I was not smart enough to figure out how to fix it myself.

But rejoice! For NikoTheGrunt has updated Custom Edition once more and packed it with a lot of new features! Monsters got updated with new sounds, new behavior (check out the bumblebees!), nice text (it's even color coded!), additional little touches like terrain splashes and cake splatters, you've got to check this out. 

The full changelog (with download link) is here and if you'd like to check out the post on the zdoom forums, it's there, too! You'll need GZdoom 2.4 or newer (or LZDoom 3.88+, if you'd prefer) and chex3.wad to play it. It's wrapped up nicely as a .pk3, so just drag and drop it on the engine and let the spells fly!

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

 

So I was working on my maps and I realized that there was one area where you could hide from monsters with impunity, because they couldn't climb up the stairs. Turns out, the default maxstepheight for monsters is 24 units.

So...

Modern problems require modern solutions.

Lost Souls

I do not like them. I do not like them at all. They're quick, frustrating, take a decent chunk of health, and always seem to show up in groups and at the worst time.

But I finally got some sprites together for them none of the death sprites, but that's neither here nor there. 

And now I love them. 

I mean, I still hate them. One literally killed me in my last playtest. But now I love them. They're little yellow hornets and they fit in the game now and they fly and they're great.

So yeah. Expect them.

Pacifist Runs

Are these a thing? Or a big thing, I mean?

I remember someone mentioning how they couldn't get a 100% items run on some maps in Raridoom (esp. E1M8) because of monster placement (fixed that in my new project, btw; enemies only drop ammo now). And honestly, I hadn't even considered that. I mean, I thought 100% items was nice, but my favorite stat was 100% secrets. And 100% kills (E2M9 aside). There's just something thrilling about finding secrets. I blame that chainsaw visible from the window in Doom 1.

This question came about because I came across this Decino video and the sequel videos, and it turns out it's possible, but tricky, to do it in the originals. I haven't put any 'you must kill this monster for the door to open' parts in this current project, but the current map I'm working on takes a couple cues from E1M8, which does. And throwing in a couple more monsters means a lot of infighting (which may be a thing this time around?), but it's not enough to kill them. 

How disappointed would people be if peace was never an option?

Love Day PSA

 

...I'm sure it's nothing. ;-)

Ok, I lied.

It's an announcement. 

You all like anthro ponies, right?

Not sure what for, exactly, but I'm sure it'll become its own thing on its own soon enough, just like the first Rarity vs the Changelings did. 

Fun fact: I originally only planned on doing 3 episodes of 5 levels, like the original Chex Quest. Instead, I ended up with 37 playable levels and two cutscene levels (those are a lot less fun than they sound). 

Should be fun!