finally back to lerd,
another of the very old 2003 monsters, redrawn at ten times the size with slightly more competent animation.
marginal progress, major reminder of how stupid my life is, which I do not need, because I do not forget.
the movements of the tail appendage do not match on each angle, but they do not have to, merely not look terrible, and only the back facing one does, along with the arms, that look more like a low-impact exercise than a motion to pull the body along a floor but it looks better than the old version, to me, and inside that game the old one looked fine so I will be impressed to see how this ends up being worse.
the mid-section is a different color now but I can palette-swap it to green in-game. And I can also NOT palette swap it to green, in case you were wondering why I’d bother to discolor it at all. the colors only need to be distinct, not specific.
keeping the color zones distinct and mapped to indices on the game’s 256 color “palette” means they can be changed separately from each other, to colors which are not necessarily on the palette but for the purpose of preparing this example quickly they are.
There was never a reason for lerd having four breast orbs before, as it only had two arms. maybe it looks unique but I don’t want people to think I have a fetish for bare cartoon breasts considering how much other fetishy junk I have attached to my name in the intervening years. ALTHOUGH if, as today’s commenter suggests, having just two makes the problem worse, I can change them back or try something else entirely.
i will start the next non-snake comic strip page next. probably. you might think i have spent some of the long period since posting the most recent page figuring out what is going to appear on the next page but you ought to know me better than that!
these are for animated door objects.
the effect is decent enough that I want to stand in front of them opening them repeatedly fortunately despite them appearing on flat lines and having no depth, unlike regular doom or hexen doors that have visible moving edges.
the fourth one is relatively serious because I have a lot of vestigial level content to work with from when I had more straightforward yet still unreachable “doom mod”-type goals which I do not want to totally jettison, and it requires at least one functioning vague technical junk themed door.
for now all four close by simply playing the opening frames in reverse but I have the power to have them close differently, as might be called for with a zipper since generally those are pulled both open and closed. Though there is no hand pulling the zipper and I do NOT at present have the power to make there be one without having the existence of that hand becoming my singular focus.
As I mentioned, unlike regular up-rising doom doors, these do not, cannot have depth within the game geometry, so the effect here can break down if the moving elements are too block like. Also unlike normal doom doors, since these aren’t part of the original game programming, they have no means of checking for if objects might obstruct them from closing, so they simply close regardless of circumstances, and so I need to make the door-close script ALSO force objects away from them, which includes the player, so it is not POSSIBLE to stand close to one and analyze how flat it looks unless you are specifically setting out to do that, and I would not aim to deprive you of your right to do that, but casually you will not be forced to notice. i CAN have the invisible force-emitting object cause damage or have those who are shoved out of the way damage each other but I choose not to at this time. They PROBABLY deserve it but I won’t assume that they always will.
On that note, the game rise of the triad has a more developed type of animated door which will shred dead bodies which happen to collapse partway between them. But for every neat feature rise of the triad has there are three practical features that it lacks so I am not concerned about that.
i have a list of traits that mark something as “a doom mod” and not a separate production which uses the doom engine.
*doors that open by rising upward
*firearms
*monsters that stand in place and throw single fireballs
*low numbers of animation frames
of course blocky architecture, vertical doors, dumb monsters that take a lot of damage but are easy to outmaneuver and fun stuff to blast them with are qualities that I LIKE and find comforting about doom, so I remain at odds with myself about how much I want to avoid. Even the low animation frames I have found are fun to repurpose for different actions via decades on manipulation, like having the baronknights “laugh” by rapidly cycling between their pain frame and fourth walk frame after throwing off complex strings of fireballs
It looks incredibly stupid. It makes ME laugh that they laugh at me so stupidly.
as can be observed in pof.wad that I put together at some points to use with other people’s levels. Mostly for 1994 era levels from old shovelware CDs that I never finished but thought I might because I like the unrestrained, reality-disconnected attitudes people sometimes made levels with back then.
like what the heck is this? (93talio.wad by Tom Talionis) This is awful. I love it. But the limited bestiary/behaviors can become monotonous. Maybe if I just reveled in that aspect of the game and moved on with my life otherwise I would be further along in it.
but golly beets the exit is RIGHT there! There can’t be much further to go.
here is an annoying hanging imp
it drops down and hits
this pig so it turns and stops yelling “herrow” at and pushing back the player, since unlike this video from February that area actually has other constructions in it now that prevent the pig from merely being ignored.
the imp is summoned by this problematic lever.
if the lever is used enough times the imp will get yelled at by the pig and then appear again beside the lever to hit that instead, which then afterward renders itself unusable.
the lever is behind the hammock imp,
who must be attacked with a strawberry.
the strawberry comes out of a vending machine which for the time being can be directly activated by the player. It only has one frame but I use internal manipulation to make it jump up slightly when attacked and then shake after landing since for now i am not forcing my self to animate it. I didn’t even finish drawing it, really; the large strawberry on the upper right is pasted over directly from the hand animation above it here.
But still that is five separate animated objects all for this single dumb little task. The lever at least can be reused to activate other situations and the pigs can decorations elsewhere, but I really do not manage time well. There may be more evidence of that fact in the immediate digital vicinity.
the hammock imp can officially be offended by a strawberry in real time. implementing this as usual took more effort than it should have, but also as usual it involved doing something for the first time that I expect will be easier on subsequent uses of the same technique, which as usual probably will not be.
the gif version has a shadow. the one in the screenshot doesn’t because I only just added it and it still looks awkward. But it looks worse without one. Wolfenstein 3d (and blake stone) sprites had shadows drawn on the ground but conventional doom engine never did, since they can leave the ground and in the 1993 code there was no way for an object to check if it was on the ground. And also perhaps the only way to ensure the shadow was never lighter than the ground was to have it always be full black, which looks cartoony. Never mind the bright red blood or weird saturated blues in the palette. But cartoony works for what I am doing, at least to a degree.
there is a way to automatically generate duke-nukem 3d style shadows behind objects but that looks bad with anything meant to appear attached to the ceiling or that might possibly appear near an edge, as the shadow will always display in full even if it runs out of level ground
the snapping motion is for if the player attempts to attack it with something other than a strawberry, which for the moment flings the player backward into the air (surreptitiously using four wah blasts fired at once) without inflicting damage. HOWEVER, this view change makes clear that despite the shadow issue the object still isn’t REALLY attached to the ceiling! If I make the ceiling lower, the top of the sprite gets visually cut off from the ground view which prevents you from seeing the creature escape through the ceiling when it does and also that I applied a minor palette conversion to make sure the trap door is the same color as the ceiling!
see?! you almost can’t! see it! which means it might as well not be there at all! aye yike so much to do
also this is my first time running the game since upgrading my RAM from 16 to 32 gigglebytes back in may. Now the game only slows down approximately exactly as much as before
I decided that early in the dope “game,” in order to progress it would be necessary to annoy this thing, whatever it is, by throwing, probably, a strawberry at it, after it asks you to bring it some blueberries.
I have yet to draw in the orange ribbon-things. yet I made a retaliatory gesture for if the player tries to attack it with something other than a strawberry, even though i could have just have the thing “WAH” at and force backward the player since, as evidenced by the linked sequence, it does have that “power.” But I also like the idea of it remaining calm UNTIL the strawberry.
AND all this will probably only be seen once!
I like in hexen how some “switches” are activated with situationally relevant items rather than just pressing the activate button in front of them, but I dislike the heretic/hexen inventory system, as it uses buttons I do not normally press, and they can be used regardless of what the hands are doing and can be used rapidly and stupidly in the heat of combat, provided you have remapped the buttons to something more practical. I want to try out the idea of using items the same way as weapons. it is tricky because generally only buttons 0 through 9 can be used for selecting those, but since the player is controlling a dope i probably wouldn’t give it too many items at once, and i would remove weaker versions of weapons that get replaced so the same number could be used to select them. like chaingun takes over the pistol slot, that sort of thing.
OF COURSE i have seen modifications where the pistol still has value since it is more precise, or like in dark forces where the chaingun-like gun uses more bullets than the regular gun. right but a lot of this is still speculative. Yes even after 6ish years of development, after more years of more passive development before that, I still do not know precisely what I am trying to do.
nuke dukem 3d has the equipped weapon go away and a hand show up and use keycards, when necessary, without needing to designate a keycard as a weapon, but I don’t know how to do that in the doom engine or if there even is a way without another pile of code I don’t understand and I hate asking for that.
my idea might still be annoying, unless the solutions are fairly intuitive, especially with thrown items that would need to be picked up again or replaced. this one isn’t intuitive, but since, at the moment, the strawberry is the first item you can get and there are only two points of interest that you might think to throw it at i IMAGINE it is functional, which is an improvement upon imagining that I might think of things to try later.
But I also need to make more comic pages. It is funny to have a project where even less takes longer to happen than in that.
I never finished playing lagoon either. I much prefer the present tasks I am never finishing.
a creature previously identified as zipe or eemp that i want to be able to jump, like the fyip now can, but also jump kick despite those requiring different animations because i am never efficient where it counts.
i like the idea of fyips flopping over if they try and jump down from too high a point. obviously i haven’t made any frames for that yet! but zipes being glop-formed (similar to dopes) simply splotch on the ground slightly. i have not planned nearly well enough to have their glop characteristics matter more deeply than that.
also now seeing these against this dark background I realize how inconsistently colored they are, a likely consequence of the regular jump frames being totally new while the kicking frames I initially drew in 2019 before I introduced shadow colors and simply altered this week. Of course the jump pose uses a walk frame as a base, BUT both the walk and kick attack were based on 2003/4 era sprites, with the kicking motion made after I amended the game palette to have two extra dark browns, which I guess carried over into the remade sprites to some degree even though those were all made with the same number of browns available, so in fact they didn’t match before either, but it wasn’t as glaring as this since the shadows weren’t colored then. Does that make sense? It shouldn’t. I will need to see which looks less out of place once I implement the new set of motions. The creature being colored isn’t nearly as tough as it thinks it is whatever the case.
today is this website’s twenty first or twenty second anniversary. I do not talk about my birth-day but i mention its. However I named myself “bimshwel” after it and retroactively renamed it to just be this/the/that website so I owe it at least this courtesy. It will continue to be malnourished on update quality.
The news just gets worse. The highest court in the country is taking bribes from a collector of Hitler Memorabilia, the threat of war with china and russia or possibly ourselves rises again, despite unprecedented climate disasters still nobody with power cares about stopping them. And direst of all?
dopes with glasses! That’s it, life has no meaning. We can never recover from this. I might as well
dopes with glasses and hats!
Truly awful. I can tell these things “think” they are scholars among dopes, and they are probably the dumbest dopes of all time! Not like me. I do useful things with MY life.
for the first time in united states of america history a president, former or otherwise, has been criminally indicted. but I want to talk about something more important.
not the most imaginative vegetation but the movement makes a difference compared to the old versions.
I also tried to make their scales relative to each other more consistent, but I did not succeed! These are full size and the gifs are between 20% and 25% of full size.
I should see about adding stripes to something since the spots may get tiresome. I have the power to make the spots glow in darkness by making an overlay for each frame with only brightness values, which I already did for the eyes on one of the imps, though I am wary of doing too much of that after all the slowdown I have already had from sprite over-laying.
the colors seem at first a tad flat relative to the old versions that I made with whatever colors I felt like, but the solution to that is more directly within my grasp without additional images needing to be loaded than brightness is.
I still CAN use whatever colors I want, but I desire to keep animated objects within the 256 color game palette so that the file sizes would be lower than true color images, since these are quite larger than before, over 1000×1000 pixels per frame, on average, and there are quite a number of frames! But I am able to alter how the palette is accessed.
Unfortunately this program, called Slade, has a strange malfunction in its palette recoloring manager –apart from its frustratingly small window sections that ordinarily can’t be resized and the few that can will rapidly revert to their default size– that will copy the first gradient color on to the second one if a graphic that the palette change is applied to already exists within a set of definitions that I view within this editor. And it may not be apparent here but I have swapped seven sets of colors so far, two gradients for every set of 16 colors, because a single gradient across that many looks worse than the regular palette. And so I must immediately remove the data for that palette change from the file and put it into a different one that will never be opened in this editor ever again. and if I didn’t get the colors correct –which I can’t really be sure of until I see it within the game– I have to manually text-edit the color numbers to tweak them. HOWEVER up until maybe two weeks ago I also created them by text-entering the numbers so this tedious inconvenience is still an improvement. Even with the bug it lets me establish which palette indexes are being replaced rather fast.
so I only need to figure out HALF of this!
these things can now jump in places where normal monsters would stop and turn around. once in a while they even get somewhere.
for whatever reason in the south-west-facing angle I had the left arm lower, but every other angle had it up, but it was west and north-west that looked out of place, so I “corrected” them to match southwest even though that one is wrong. the jump looks too ostentatious with the arm in the air. it looked like the creature should be making that pihGAA grunt that Kyle Katarn in Dark Forces does when he jumps. It was making me laugh.
but maybe that is good and i should switch them back.
they also have marginally improved pain frames, since part of alleviating the repeatedly cited “lag” associated with this creature is exporting its sprites as single pieces rather than layered fragments that can be reused for different versions of itself (but that ultimately create a load problem since the game struggles more with volume than mass, essentially), so rather than have them wiggle around independently I have no choice but to animate them properly. however their “death” frames and all frames for the shorter pointy-noised “fyop” are still layered like before so those are not in here, though they tried to be. And then I spent too much of yesterday trying to make a better looking test area to show the sprites in, and I ended up filling it with so much useless doohickery that the video capture still gave me problems. Also the test area is still ugly.
in any event now I can do more important things
or I can start redrawing and adding needless animation to old pieces of scenery that nobody will notice because they hang from ceilings and aren’t interactive or important. ah, a life well-spent.
The clouds are on heroin now. It certainly explains all the erratic and extreme weather. lately. I am surprised I haven’t heard anybody talking about this.
what i HAVE observed people talking about (or one person quote-tweeting a quote-tweet about):
I see why the Central Intelligence Agency cancelled this: “listen kids you THINK bin Laden is a bold patriot leading the fight for justice from his cave, but he’s actually on the front lines flying across the desert, controlling matter with his mind and fighting off multiple white infidels at once with a double laser sword”
Although the text in the apparent source, this 2014 article, indicates the toys were meant to be part of good will packages. Based on the minimal context year-old twitter post I thought the figures would have been given out separate from anything else, in order to make their intent less clear. It does not to me seem sensible for US allies, cronies or conscripts to be appearing sympathetic to bin Laden up front because that potentially undermines their message; the toy might never actually be played with or it could be lost or the larger package it was contained within could be stolen before it reveals its true nature, quite apart from if the MEANING of the transformation comes across in the intended fashion. Just giving out the toys at all risks sending the message: Osama bin-Laden is a well meaning merry fellow! Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. Don’t believe what we told you about him up to this point!
And then assuming the toy does go to a child who does witness the paint fall off, that kid then needs to deduce “OH i get it now, the people who gave us this DON’T actually like Osama bin-Laden. Well consider me convinced! I don’t like him either now. I will be sure to pass this along when a local warlord kidnaps my mother and tapes a bomb to my father’s chest.”
I suppose this story is funnier the less context you have.
I also saw another old twittor post last week that explained how to view articles on sites like washington post’s without creating an account, which would actually be practical information to have and I didn’t bother to take note of where that was nor of the specific instructions. Listen I can’t keep up with everything. I need to focus on what’s important like one year old posts on a broken social media platform about nine year old news stories about twenty-year old weird stuff that the CIA ultimately decided against doing.
and also teaching vaguely dog-rodent people how to jump
one of these is from 2004, the other is from a bit more recently. The usual story applies to it: I expected a certain difficulty level and it became exaggerated beyond what I could handle, foremost on the least important sections. the front view (1), the most important and most likely to be seen view, was easy. side-front (8, gets mirrored to be angle 2) was a bit harder, then side (7 (no not THAT side 7 (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is)))was horrible, and side-back (6) was a disaster. in part because I kept trying to match it to 7, even though 7 was horrible. i ought to have drawn over angle 8, but i didn’t because i was using the OLD old old 2004 version as a base, even though the old version’s angles matched even worse. i was even conscious of how poorly they matched at the time. although looking at that again did at last convince me to add stripes. Thankfully stripes have not been a disaster yet, though i have not tried to draw them on the copious amount of earlier redrawn sprites of this… thing. My best decision over the 2004 version is blocking the back muscles with that pathetic half-cape. I didn’t know how to draw back muscles then, and I STILL don’t. This new edition of the monster is old enough that I no longer recall if that was why I added a cape, but there do not appear to be other conceivable justifications.
angle 8 actually doesn’t have the far hand out far enough; trying to match angle 6 to it also held me up somewhat. Since it doesn’t look BAD on angle 8 like it does on 6 i don’t NEED to change it.
no I sure don’t.
please do not make me change it, me.
the fool (that I drew, not me) yet has no proper pain frames; in the past this motion was used both for a close-up attack and a non-violent reaction to experiencing violence. For the moment that shall continue as I am rather worn out from the length of time necessary to draw it. Going forward, assuming I am not cursed by a being beyond my comprehension to remake my own old unreleased material for the remainder of my lifespan, I want to include more expressive characters, but that will require fewer moving parts. even minimally detailed ones like this become a problem when there are so many pieces. If this gets any more frames I hope they will have the courtesy to be non-rotatable!
although mercifully and surprisingly these are still in stock so perhaps I should order one. Gosh I’ll SAVE so much MONEY!
an eccentric imp melts, in 2023 and 2004. I do like the stripes on the 2004 version of this animation, but I also repeatedly didn’t notice that I forgot stripes, which happened with the same sort of stripes on elpse back when I first started coloring in the comic strip pages. if I would have the patience to draw stripes on all the other sprites of this thing. is also uncertain.
The old version also simply has purple hands and feet rather than wearing purple gloves over them as, for now, the new one does. Surprisingly, it is easier to draw those melt since the form does not need to be consistent between frames. Since I didn’t draw this from eight angles, however, switching the gloves to hands shouldn’t be as big a deal as some previous not big a deals ended up being.
That trick I was so proud of on the linked page, to put all the angles in one image, made the game too slow, trying to load them all at the same time, so I had to re-insert them all separately anyway. I might have mentioned that before, but I immediately forget what I saw after saying them. That is part of the point of saying things, for me, to get them out so I stop thinking about them and can think about other things. But that does not prevent me from beginning to think about them again in the future! At best I can send them to the back of the queue.
a video of pictures I made last year set to some suspicious music.
I hope you hate pine cones, since three or four of these pictures don’t have one.
It took a ridiculous amount of time to make this considering that it is 95% comprised of stuff I had already made. My trashter plan to display gzdoom-engine material from within the gzdoom engine rather than as gifs of the source material did not help like I thought it would. I opposed gifs since while I design the graphics grouped, I have to separate them to put them into the game, and I refine them after separation, so I didn’t want the less-refined versions. and some pieces, like the launched yeep parts mentioned (but not yet drawn and so not shown) previously, were separate to begin with. howEVER, since I draw the stuff at ten times the 1993 game’s resolution, and my computer is less than top-of-the line, those graphics need to be reloaded each time the game is started, and then I am having it load extra graphics and generate extra objects on top of that, IN ADDITION to me running video capture software, which means loading all that tomfoolery in an extra window while simultaneously saving a copy of it all, the game can’t help but choke up for a few moments when stuff is exploding. and SO I spent an extra day, two days? trying to reduce that, just a few seconds of the dumb video. And I already spent an extra day drawing all those dumb letters and setting up the circumstances under which they appear and explode. originally they were to use the same explosion frames as the launched yeep globs, hence my using the same colors, but those explosions looked too uniform, unless those were themselves launching more globs, but more globs meant more lag. and SO i drew EXTRA explosions for the letters I and O that would prevent them from needing to launch globs.
but that still means loading extra graphics so it doesn’t reduce THAT much lag. I also had the letters L and F turn into I and G into O as they explode, and that still wasn’t enough! For the yeep section near the end, I had all the pertinent graphics pre-load before I started recording, but that wasn’t an option with the letters because they FALL FROM THE CEILING as soon as the level starts. I COULD have preloaded all the graphics if I had thought to suspend the letters on disappearing floors or had them teleport into the room, but I was too busy to be thinking! I also forgot to set the level to change the colors to something other than orange, so that the aftermush looks less like a nickelodeon logo family reunion but if I had, I would probably still today be trying to optimize or fix it in some way and I am glad to not be doing that.
I can’t even show this picture without needing to explain it. the level editor shows a 2003 dope rather than a 2018 dope because it assumes the player character uses PLAY-named sprites, but the newer dopes have DOPE-named sprites, and I simply never took out the old sprites. the weird background is irrelevant; it is the first graphic in the definition file, since for some arcane reason that graphic shows up invisible in the game, but not in the editor. I needed it invisible so that the background shows through it. there are other hacky ways to make the ground and walls invisible but everything I do is already hacky so I preferred something that worked consistently.
these are off-center relative to the player character’s viewpoint because they seemed to my own viewpoint to be showing up offcenter when I placed them IN the center. However by the time I made the video that seemed to no longer be the case but I was too tired from the endless re-records hoping for less lag and more interesting random splat locations, then inserting that into the video, cropping out the wrong takes, then moving it to the front, then dumping it all that since I wanted to go back and change something else in the setup and then need to re-record again, that I left the positions alone.
“AASCREBO” will go to the top of most lists. It is not necessary for the list to be alphabetical, but I was trying to amuse myself. Regular Doom2 calls it
which I dislike seeing in the list, and regular regular Doom calls it
which I hate even more, and not just because the base-2 display system means you aren’t actually ALLOWED to make 24-length wall textures! Even if that worked it wouldn’t work! screbo is stupid garbage that nemitz says, and I had already changed the poison logo to feature nemitz, so it fits. I placed it over the pile of skulls that is shown by default after coloring them purple. I don’t want any of the base game’s graphics in this, even edited ones, and nemitz endorsements of rubbish are anachronistic within this project’s complex chronology of being set before nemitz, but as noted previously these don’t actually show up! but even THESE are a problem since floor graphics are backwards on the ceiling. If I want to control invisible objects that it is possible to move beneath, I risk seeing not only a backwards S but a backwards nemitz inside the level editor’s 3d view mode. What could be worse than that? I probably won’t find out until I try to make next year’s video.
and after all that, I today realized: the ORDER of the primary content is terrible. It starts on a snake comic strip that nobody cared about and then ends on generic wall textures that nobody SHOULD care about. I should have started and ended on stuff with meaning. I too more concerned with irrelevant nonsense to consider the marginally more relevant nonsense. There is probably an important life lesson there but I am too concerned with complaining to process it right now.
a yeep floats in five directions
a yeep has a problem in five directions
a yeep explodes in five directions
its tentacloids and eyeballs disappear because they launch as separate objects that are not necessarily coherent in gif form. the body dissolves since i want to have an all-directional mass of glop appear in its place, since non-moving, irregular objects can look really awkward with extra angles. Which I know because several monsters larger than this one DO have multi-directional bodies when punished and can look quite awkward. And I will likely leave them like that, but I can be cautious about creating more like them. sometimes
this latest yeep differs from past yeeps in that it lacks a darker colored midsection. I tried to sort out what that was and how it worked and could not, and so now it is not there at all. Much like several components of this website, except for once I took out something I didn’t understand on purpose.
the old exploding yeep did not need to launch the tentacloids since it only exploded from one direction and did not need its body to dissolve and be replaced. In trying to solve one problem I continue to create one or more others. And I yet do not know how i will sort out the tentacloids. The present single one in the south-east angle may not be viable since it does not take into account the possibility of the yeep exploding while off the ground. ALthough the old yeep didn’t actually finishing exploding after being beaten and launch its eyeballs until it landed, so perhaps this way IS viable. i think overall whatever result i get this time will be superior to what I had.
the old exploding yeep is actually not nearly as old as its other sprites; I drew the explosion in 2017. prior to then its body only had a single dissolve frame and i considered the pink blobs launched from it to be sufficient. I actually changed that because it looked really depressing if the sprites were browsed outside of the game, or pog forbid if somebody warped to level 30 and tried to force the original doom 2 monster roll call to appear, where none of this stuff looks right, that one would look especially not right.
NOW if somebody tries that the game will show sprites too big for the screen, or just show the regular game’s monsters, or crash completely, so REALLY I can get away with doing LESS for the yeep now instead of more. But I seem unable to do less unless it truly matters that I don’t.
finally this thing gets what it deserves
it hardly seems to justify four extra days, but now these things can lose their hats, pick up their hats, explode with or without the hats, and make slightly fewer maximum decibel noises that I recorded in 2002 or stole from something else. in fact the new sounds may even be TOO quiet. in parts where I turned down the video volume to make the old ones bearable, the new ones are inaudible. particularly the TERRIBLE old sound effects for the player taking damage are still active. after the first section I quickly replaced them but the damage has been done!
these will spray out collectible candy pieces once I get around to that. The little colored dots that fall out of their bodies are supposed to be candy. It ends up not looking any less gruesome than blood and organs but this wouldn’t be an official bimshwel production were there not copious amounts of effort put into something that doesn’t really make a difference.
I still need to find a proper bell to sample since the little circular bells and christmas ornaments that I have don’t sound like the bells on display here and are hardly audible unless i initiate a heavy impact that ends up registering as more plastic than bell-like. I also haven’t seen them since before I moved my desk and bed a few weeks ago so for the moment additional recording attempts are not possible.
the animation state the corresponds with dropping the hat I realize does not work. the creature throws its head back which looks good from the side, but 80% of the time it would appear from the front. even if I set the hat to get flung upwards, that would be beyond the view of any player close enough to connect with a slap attack. whupth. I put in a temporary weapon object that could inflict hat-removing damage from a distance, but then the dork was even less likely to walk back and grab its hat since there wasn’t a player obstructing its movement and forcing it to turn around. I have a very silly life.
another problem: when I record video it gets REALLY slow, and it stutters each session while loading graphics anyway. getting these idiots to walk toward their hats and retrieve the hats while on camera is also frustratingly elusive.
they are also supposed to drop their hats 100% of the time when slapped but sometimes they just do nothing or drop two hats without losing one. even the idiot stuck in a wall that can’t take any actions but to walk in place and make noise manages to maintain control over its hat when I want it not to.
additionally, only the morons with santa claus hats currently toss all the correct objects when they agree to toss anything –the green short imp wearing red near the end magically transforms into a taller imp when it explodes– because because because because because because but now that I have proof that one works that means that the others can also be made to work eventually. Tossing the objects is crucial because if everything is in one sprite the body ends up looking about 4 times as wide as its collision box and that is not good.
and they ARE morons; even when positioned properly they aren’t smart enough to actually take the hats so the hats need to GIVE themselves back.
note that for example purposes I am mostly pressing a button that instantly deals maximum damage to foes in order to provoke their explodo animations rather than using a weapon which does that since I still have yet to implement an implement of mass destruction, other than the tossable pog, but using that while recording video makes it struggle even more, and pog generally isn’t out to cause trouble deliberately.