Zombie DOOM mod

[RobbyPants]

Back in 2013, I started modding DOOM, and decided to make a zombie survival mod. Over the course of a year or so, I got all the behavior of the enemies I wanted down, the new "realistic" guns, and some of the graphics. The graphics are the most time-consuming part, so I never really worked on them, and largely put the project away, occasionally revisiting it.

About a week ago, I had some renewed interest in this project, and have started putting in a lot of time making new graphics for the monsters, as well as creating objects to place in the maps. I'm going to have to start creating maps, soon, to get your character running around through an apartment building and later down the city streets.

Here's some of the progress, so far:


Using lots of pallet-swapping, I'm able to make zombies with different clothes, skin, and hair colors, to add variety to the game.




I added in humans that will turn into zombies if killed by zombies or any of the green slime in the game. The humans have the same color combinations as the zombies, so you don't run into issues of red-shirt humans spawning blue-shirt zombies.




In addition to humans, I added cops. They will fight instead of running, and are pretty competent against the slow zombies. Fast zombies and zombies with ranged attacks will kill them much faster. If they come back as zombies, they're twice as tough as the other slow zombies because of their armor.




There are zombies that will crawl out of the dirt, seemingly coming from nowhere.




There are some cultists (that replace the cacodemons). They largely behave the same, albeit more aggressively. There are several other types, including necromancers that summon zombies (replacing the pain elementals that spawn lost souls).




Here is some of the arsenal of guns you can find. You're limited in terms of how many you can carry at a time, and each has an internal capacity, forcing you to spend time reloading.




The knife replaces the chainsaw. One advantage to keeping the pistol instead of the Uzi is that you can hold the knife in your other hand, making quick attacks. This saves on both time and ammo in a mod where things are meant to be scarce.

(spoilered, cuz wide)

Some graphics I made a while back for reloading the AK-47.




The cross-hairs on the rifle scope. If you have the time and space to use the thing, it's fantastic, but not advised for running around in tight spaces.




I've created some cars. The police cars actually have lights:




I was working on new types of exploding barrels today. I decided to make eight of them stacked on a skid, which makes a much larger explosion. I had to tweak the radius a bit, because I was obliterated a fraction of a second after taking this screen shot.




Some furniture I recently added in, with some rotation sprites. That's where all the time comes from when making graphics. If you track rotation, you're probably doing around five images for still objects, and 40-60 for each individual monster.

[Thaluikhain]

You might want to spoiler that pic with the knife and pistol.

Anyhoo, I'm always impressed by modders who can stick to a project for long enough to do anything like that, I tend to get discouraged and lose interest too fast, no matter how small a project I'm doing.

[RobbyPants]

You might want to spoiler that pic with the knife and pistol.

I put this together on a widescreen monitor, so I hadn't thought of that. Done.

Anyhoo, I'm always impressed by modders who can stick to a project for long enough to do anything like that, I tend to get discouraged and lose interest too fast, no matter how small a project I'm doing.

Well, I mean, I did, too. Most of the programming was done on this back by 2014. I did some weapon graphics several years ago, but largely didn't touch this since 2016 or so.

Typically, my mods are much smaller and faster to put together. They're usually new weapon mods and/or modified monster behavior mods. A lot of my bigger small mods build off each other, so I start with one as a base for the next.


It's been both fun figuring out what I can do within the limitations of the engine, and annoying dealing with those limitations and the fucking bizarre languages used.

[Shrapnel]

Throw in a bunch of Commander Keen's hanging from the ceiling and you've got the perfect DOOM mod.

[Thaluikhain]

Judging by the double barrel shotgun is this a DOOM2 mod, rather than DOOM?

(And thus sticking hanging Commander Keens (Commanders Keen?) in should probably be easy)

[RobbyPants]

Judging by the double barrel shotgun is this a DOOM2 mod, rather than DOOM?

Yeah, it's Doom2. I mean, with the editing I'm doing, I could just add a double-barrel in to Doom1, but that's just extra work. I think I was able to mod the existing gun by only adding in three frames (so you can fire it one barrel at a time with the alt-fire button).

[Iduno]

Impressive.

I want to play, but also it would probably get me hooked on DoomRl again.

[Pariah Dog]

My brother would probably be interested in this, he plays a lot of old doom mods.

[RobbyPants]

I've finally started level building! I'm only two rooms in, so far. This is me mucking around with all the textures I created for mundane stuff like carpet, drywall, trim, and cabinets. It's not great, but it's way better at what I want to convey than the default Doom textures:

I'm iffy on how I feel about the dynamic light source in a darkened room. It looks a bit odd to me, but I like the effect of being able to shoot a light out. I can play with darkness and sparse light sources to great effect with zombies wandering the halls, I'm sure:

[RobbyPants]

So, I've started in earnest on level editing. I'm probably about 50-60% done with the first level. Right now, it's primarily two floors of hallways, three apartment rooms, and a lobby on the main floor. I need to add more rooms to explore.

Here is the hall outside your room, complete with evidence of the carnage:

The light is out in the section of the hallway, making it spooky. There is a corpse in there that will stand up and attack you if you linger too long:

I've got one window in the building so far. Windows aren't a pain to add, but putting stuff to see outside of them is what's so time-consuming:

Here's what little I have of the lobby, with the door out to the street. Crossing the door ends the level:

[Thaluikhain]

Huh, that looks pretty good, I like the bloody handprint and the idea of corpses coming to life.

Have you set it in a specific city/country?

(Oh, and all but the second pic are too wide again)

[RobbyPants]

Huh, that looks pretty good, I like the bloody handprint and the idea of corpses coming to life.

Thanks. I was really pleased with the hand print texture I was able to make.

I just started the second level last night, which takes place on the streets. I also have invisible actors that will summon a zombie digging out of the ground (and some random dirt piles) when the player gets close enough. I'm thinking about making a cemetery full of them.

Have you set it in a specific city/country?

It's just something I'm making from scratch. Due to Doom limitations, I don't want to try to model any specific place too closely. It's presumably an English-speaking country, because that's what everyone will speak.

[RobbyPants]

Some shots of the beginning of the street level. Right now, I only have the buildings up one side of one block, and a set of alleys and dumpsters on one side. This will probably involve a lot of copy-pasting, and then tweaking the buildings so it doesn't look too cookie-cutter.

[Thaluikhain]

Do the cars move? If not, I might recommend a lot more of them, traffic jams of abandoned cars are big in zombie movies, and they'd interfere with sight lines and give lurking zombies something to hide behind.

[Iduno]

With as dark as everything else is, the very white police car almost looks like it's glowing. I don't know if just adding some shadows to it would fix that, or if you "need" to grey the whole thing up a bit.

Everything else seems to fit.

[Thaluikhain]

Hadn't noticed that before, but yeah, it does.

[RobbyPants]

Do the cars move? If not, I might recommend a lot more of them, traffic jams of abandoned cars are big in zombie movies, and they'd interfere with sight lines and give lurking zombies something to hide behind.

Not in this mod. I've messed with moving cars in a horror mod I was working on. I'm just going to have them parked for simplicity. Before I sprinkle too many cars in, I need to add at least a pickup truck, and maybe another model of car. I've got nothing but Ford Tauruses in this thing, so far.

With as dark as everything else is, the very white police car almost looks like it's glowing. I don't know if just adding some shadows to it would fix that, or if you "need" to grey the whole thing up a bit.

Everything else seems to fit.

I'll have to look at the code, but I think I'm setting the frames to "bright" (full light value), which I could easily remove. This is typically used for things like muzzle flashes, explosions, and drawing things that are a light source. The car already has its own light source that alternates between red and blue, so it shouldn't need any artificial light on it.



Edit:

So, yeah, it was set to bright. I turned that off, and now I have the annoying effect that the lights I added are lighting up the sprite:



I have a few possible options:

• Live with it bright white (easy)
• Live with it glowing red and blue (easy, but I feel worse than having it white)
• Remove the lights (easy, but I like the effect).
• Try to brighten just the lights and the area around it on the sprites using bright maps* (the most work)

*bright maps allow you to to draw a greyscale image to show how much you should light up different pixels of a sprite (white = full light, black = none, and various shades of grey have scaling levels of light). I've used this to make a creature with glowing eyes that you can see at a distance to great effect. Mods that go for looking really pretty do this with muzzle flares as well.

I think the cop car is in ten sprites (five each for differing rotations for both the red light and blue light being lit). I'd have to make a bright map for each, and probably turn the light sources off.

[Iduno]

It was only noticeable when the car was parked in a very dark location, so it's probably easier to just live with the too-bright version.

[RobbyPants]

It was only noticeable when the car was parked in a very dark location, so it's probably easier to just live with the too-bright version.

The brightmaps didn't work for some reason, so I ended up shrinking the lights and raising them up a bit, so just the top of the car is partially illuminated.

Anyway, I worked a bit on some of the stuff in the city. I added a residential block and a park (complete with animated fountain and water noises!). I'm trying to set it up so I can largely just copy-paste entire blocks, and then make some small changes to bits here and there.

Some buildings, you'll be able to go in, and some you can get on top of, but I haven't added that, yet.

[RobbyPants]

Office Space with zombies and TPS reports! Also, another office at night:

[Shrapnel]

Still seeing a marked lack of Keen. Maybe add some John Romero heads in, too?

[Iduno]

Still seeing a marked lack of Keen. Maybe add some John Romero heads in, too?

"To win the game you must..."

[RobbyPants]

I mean, technically, they're in the WAD file used by the emulator...

[RobbyPants]

I made a two-headed zombie by modifying the mancubus sprites. He can punch you back about 15 feet.




I'm working on making a UAC factory to give a few "DOOM-like" levels for the zombie mod. Looks like the zombies gave you a way in...




I made some rather clunky semi trailers, but it sets the stage well.




I loaded a flat bed up with a bunch of skids of barrels. This leads to a very satisfying chain reaction.

[RobbyPants]

For a fun change of pace, the 5th level is a very Doom-like factory. I'm using UAC as antagonists for this mod.




I'm working with both some original Doom textures, and some I created on my own. Those pipes are animated.










There's even a trash compactor (that nicely crushes zombies)!




I've added slime tubes, some of which contain experimental zombies. These are to go in the factory I'm working on. Some of the zombies will burst out if you get too close.