i do not know what sort of chemical reaction would cause your body to turn to dust without harming your presumably flimsier clothing but it is far from the only science violation going on
now that my replacement computer is MOSTLY sorted out and not suffering like the previous one was i can perhaps get back to actually implementing some of these sprites and the programming for them and maybe even actual game areas for them to exist within. i really have no need to keep trying to think of new things to have monsters be doing when so much of what is already there is broken or incomplete.
but these are easier to make into website updates. otherwise i need to have something to say, and nothing stupid or worth complaining about happens anymore.
oh OH what’s THIS?
if kittens win do puppies get exiled? if puppies win do kittens need to become puppies? what are the stakes for this contest? Were the circumstances of this combat determined by a neutral party? Or is the point that war isn’t fair and is generally caused by an aggressor who simply wishes to destroy and steal property from a target they do not understand, and do not want to understand, since greater understanding may complicate the perceived morality of depriving another person whom you invented a reason to condemn to death in order to enrich yourself, even when you are already adequately enriched? this seems rather heavy a topic for an ostensibly child-directed company like scholastic
doip having a problem.
i do not like to “kill” things but this may be even more gruesome a fate. eh it probably is not permanent.
a yet more gruesome fate would be me trying to draw that happening from 8 angles and i am not going to
yes that is all! After spending months on and off and off and off and off trying to alleviate this computer’s overheat issues i finally resigned me to buying a replacement which also turns out to be a multi-week process. Some ebay merchants don’t like to answer questions, but they don’t like to accept returns or present all pertinent information or use a consistent format for that information across their offerings, and the older i get, the more i have felt burned by bad purchases and the more annoying and particular my questions seem to get over cheaper and cheaper items.
but when i can’t make a routine grocery trip for less than $120 i do feel uninclined to drop that or double that or triple that on a computer unless i know the computer is going to do the job I want it to. or at least believe i can make the safest assumption possible that it might.
We had no idea how good we had it when cheap chicken was still around
now cheap chicken is branching out and has left us behind
spof again. what a farbtacular yimpinkilp porfbe development
for the pain frames i decided that it doesn’t take THAT long to draw in the flower and it is an extra way to have the creature emote now that its pupils are not visible. likewise it doesn’t take long to draw the basket so long as i don’t care about it being accurate between the angles or even between frames, and for the moment I do not. of course applying this to the prance movement frames where i had initially elected not to bother will take more effort but it won’t be nearly the worst extra work that i have made for myself.
the feet move on the new attack frames because I thought just standing neutrally looked too flat. i have the power to switch which attack frames come up based on what part of its walk cycle the thing is in. presently in the game any attack uses all four frames but the variation is mostly just for show. So i can make them not just for show, though I want to make some intermediate frames and improved gestures relative to the old frames i SHOULD prioritize just getting all the old parts replaced before trying to make the creature do new things, but i almost never accomplish that.
too much snow and hardware issues to think about anything coherent.
i didn’t even get a chance to check on my favorite yard toilet and how it fared admist today’s snow until quite after midnight. it seems to be in good spirits.
This is important at a time when i am removing nemitz from one context since i need to ensure mit does not try to enter other contexts.
obviously this is still rough and proportioned because i am allergic to having anything complete and ready to use
i wonder if i should give it additional normal “death” flops or try to draw this from multiple angles like i have been making me do with other monsters. the returns on those seem to be quite diminishing but it is still always neat to suddenly see one from a weird viewpoint. but i also obviously have been spending years on largely irrelevant cosmetic elements and tend to forget that other people who might have been interested in this at one point don’t have the same connection to it as i do and probably can’t maintain interest in it as an unfinished product for 5 10 20 years like I can
while the flop was always boring, i quite liked the old “extreme death,” but it really depends on the flower. if i give the flower a stem then i can probably attach it to the prancing frames without needing to make separate left right frames just for the dumb flower. hm hm hm you can’t see the pupils following the flower in the new version, maybe i can make the head turn instead.
i was quite proud in 2004 of how i amended the doom pallete to have the more cartoony fire colors without that ruining any existing graphics, and now they have been completely overwritten, yet somewhat ironically with colors that produce a far more surreal explosion more in line with what i would prefer now anyway, and without much thought i based the new explosion on this, slightly. Not too much, since the old explosion was stolen: the fore piece is from the 1992 sega spiderman arcade game and the other is from final fight, since i was obsessed at the time with stealing graphics from other video games and it also being possible to tell where i stole them from, in contrast to now where i am obsessed with wasting way too much effort drawing everything fresh even when i myself already drew it once.
the 2004 old spof, inside the game, during its explosive fate fires out separate blood objects in a circular formation but I might have the new one launch doughnuts or maybe cupcakes. alas the only visual evidence of this appears to be terrible from inside a video i exported in 2018 but you can perhaps vaguely see purply objects apart from the purple on the spofnemitz sprite itself. this will be important dumb day.
the monster that used to be nemitz changed into a monster that looks like it used to be nemitz, but which is and has been sprite-named “spof” either way. why i think i need more when i can barely run the game now as it is is mostly the fault of obsessive compulsion, as usual.
in fact the latest version of the gzdoom engine is now “uzdoom” after the former maintainer whose name supposedly coincidentally is abbreviated “gz” was ousted for being precisely the sort of person who usually has administrative roles in “communities” related to old nerd interests and runs even MORE worrisomely than before. if i become again willing to take this computer apart and try to replace its “thermal paste” again i can check on if a properly functioning computer can feasibly run this in levels with more than 2 monster types active at once without overheating and shutting off out of presumed rage at how stupid the monsters are. i suspect my hardware is, as usual, as always, woefully inadequate for what I want it to do, even when, perhaps especially when, it is something incredibly old fashioned and stupid. the older something is, the more people selling the new ones want to make it difficult to use. you know that, i know that, but I rarely adapt to it effectively.
to clarify, the “story” i have with this watch out for dopes business< has it taking place before the comic strip in which it is established that whatever elpse and nemitz are is not native to this location so there should not be hordes of them as the dope's adversaries. although elpse also says "we were here first" and elpse is highly ignorant and might not be aware if there are in fact plenty of them still there. i briefly considered making it look like nemitz with elpse coloration with that in mind. and this is all made up nonsense anyway and i can do whatever i want. nonetheless i did not want this monster to look like nemitz and waiting for me to sketch an alternative was not effective. after deciding last week on the "nonsense anyway" option, only AFTER i started redrawing it i finally had solid ideas for how to change it, as often occurs. i do not mind if it looks like it USED to be nemitz, only that it does not look like it is nemitz now partway through sketching in angle 4 it struck me that the purple and green color scheme looks like barney the dinosaur, who has been getting blown up in doom add-ons since doom add-ons have existed. but that is somewhat in character with nemitz, to try and pass mitzelf off as a different character and end up resembling one that is even more likely to deserve to come under attack. i do not know yet if i will also include the flower. in fact i do not even have a longwinded reasoning explanation for why i did or did not include it yet.
I wanted the fish to be able to attack from a distance if necessary, and without needing to stop, like doom engine monsters generally do, but i may have made too big a project of it. the fish’s animation needs to be substantially more smooth and consistent than it was so that if the lizard turns while shooting, which is already difficult to make it do, its upper body does not visually detach from its legs. While trying to facilitate this i discovered that in the
while close up i imagine the fish might start jumping like the werewolves from castlevania 2, who do not gain power or extra animation frames from jumping, only become more disturbing. i do not have the power to program something people have never seen before in the past, but i can make things nobody else would want to do in the future.
now this creature can bang its eyes together and theoretically launch the merged eyeball at adversaries, but why would it ever do such a thing? earlier i might have claimed that an eyeball themed attack would be too obvious, but the lumps going through the stalk-pipes seemed like an opportunity unlikely to present itself again.
I thought about how all the “weird” stuff people do with eyeballs now totally grosses me out but i never had a problem with the eyeball-enemy-enriched Guardian Legend years ago, and any projectile in a game heavily reliant on projectiles flying around that isn’t a fireball makes it seem marginally less conventionally boring, so perhaps i will try that.
another weirdo stomping around that i do not know what to do with apart from that. shooting fireballs from its eyes seems TOO obvious but is certainly an option. i have “wanted” for a while to have a wizard type creature that launched magic from its feet instead of its hands and this one looks sort of like a wizard, but i already drew the dumb sandals on it. Perhaps it just stares at foes and makes them uncomfortable.
its coat-like garment does not match the original drawing as well as the hood does because i had indecision about whether i should have green sleeves and purple cuffs or purple sleeves with green cuffs to be consistent with the hood. and so i switched them to totally different colors which can be swapped in-game to either way (and probably won’t work very well).
based on a dork from a 2018ish picture that i moderately renovated and reposted various places recently. i could barely remember drawing it so i imagined people who had seen it would barely remember having done so if they had. I changed the orange creature’s cowboy guns into candy canes because I was annoyed at the cognitive dissonance of frightwing pro-gun discourse persisting even as one of its adherents was gunned down by an alt-right-meming imbecile with weapons that their policies made sure were available and that their own constituents purchased, but I don’t find guns interesting anyway, just amusement in some gun-adjacent aesthetics like texas belts. you can’t tell that they are candy canes at this size and it didn’t seem worth adding extra layers to make sure the stripes were coherent but I know at least that they aren’t guns now.
moderate pog update
unfortunately since there is massive lag if certain monsters are present it is difficult to show what i intend to show here. There is also massive lag from certain types of structures, from loading any large graphics, and also from recording video. Additionally the video editor itself lags so i cannot always be sure if the video i already recorded shows lag or doesn’t.
FURTHER, most of the sound effects here are dubbed since the massive quantity of pog feet and the obnoxious WAH creatures were making too much noise in the initial video i managed to get, and also the scripts to open and close those doors is presently silent. And the variants of the metallic door (the one that is misaligned and in an incorrectly sized space) all use the same exact script right now anyway and thus would make the same sounds if they made any sounds. but they CAN. also the spiral door’s scale corrupts after the first frame. The important thing is that any of this works at all or is in a position where it potentially might since for years almost nothing did.
the important thing here is that it is now possible to turn the weapon pog into the obstruction pog, and back again. which there is little practical reason to do, but being able to is fun. the two explosions are equal in destructive force right now but if i made the standing pog do more damage (as it presently LOOKS like it should) a player may have a reason to try and set one up and deliberately detonate it on the ground.
this also means now if you throw one too close to a wall it won’t blow up in your face, though surprisingly i found myself trying to do that as a means of resetting the situation, and not being able to. the minimum explode distance can be brought closer.
less apparent but no less tedious to set up, i reduced the standing pog explosion lag somewhat so that it is now actually possible for me to record a video of that happening which i previously could not do, and even now it lags, just substantially less so than previously.
I also want these to change color after taking a certain amount of damage so you know how close they are to exploding before trying to convert them into carryable ammunition, but for now the game tells me call to unknown function “getactorproperty” so i will probably need to ask for help with that, which means i might not be able to get help with that, which means i should PLAN on being able to proceed even if that never happens.
the weapon grab sound effect, THAT can be replaced easily; i didn’t much consider that i had not until writing this. In fact the sound was off when i took the video!
it also looks like the right-hand-lowering doesn’t have any animation. in fact i knew that and had gone to recycle the left hand lowering animation for it and then probably had to go to bed and forgot about it. I usually only forget important things so even that is a positive change.
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no skrint i DID replace that sound; i specified a DIFFERENT sound to play but it was ignoring my SNDINFO lump after a certain point so doubtlessly that is screwing up other things as well but meepwhile moving the new definition to the top fixes it. i STILL don’t know how to change the text that just says “[freep] died.” i hate the word “died.” i much prefer “erred” or “got dead” or “became ill” but it seems to be an unlisted string since it isn’t connected to a specific source of demise and it isn’t in the original doom, obviously.
//
a replacement video is now in place which no longer has that noise but those explosion sounds are probably even worse and i can’t blame anyone else for those
oh ah ha this thing again because i spent too much of july drawing other people’s characters in an endeavor called “art fight” that is definitely made for younger people than me, which is most people these days, and yet it still was better than the last time I did it so i cannot reasonably expect it to improve
hm the head part does not move enough in the southeast angle and thus that carries over to its mirrored draw-over northwest angle. and possibly moves too much in the south/north angles. however, those two make it hardest to see movement on the slingshot so putting the motion elsewhere may be an effect distraction
the lemon would simply bop a target and then fall on the floor and be collectable for a largely worthless bonus that would thus not encourage players to stand around letting lemons get flung at them, similar to the pine cones that are already implemented. i am yet unsure if i really want a potted cactus to be the third object and if so how i would implement that and so the in-flight version is yet non-drawn
the large mist blast i thought might actually be too large and non-loopable to work so i made three smaller ones that perhaps can be deployed in groups and then stretched and faded out with internal functions. what a heap load of nonsense for one projectile from a silly creature that was only meant to be a mobile decoration at first
moron the large trousered monster shown not long ago
I said before that i was not sure if this thing should be a monster or just a moving decoration but even as I said that, I was thinking about this.
This is a “organic” monster meaning it is not made of the same colored glop as dopes and therefore should not melt. however that does not mean it cannot fold up like a pile of towels.
durian seems like a good upgrade from lemon because durians are already covered in spikes and widely feared and regulated for their intense smell. But perhaps those are TOO dangerous for a low tier non-“boss” monster to have access to. To the player and also to other low-tier monsters that a dodging player could try to get hit by such a thing. The durian should explode into a damage cloud like the cleric flechette in hexen, something already particularly powerful (and dangerous) for the player and that can’t even be launched across a distance an unlimited number of times.
in fact that should hurt monsters but NOT the player since the player is a dope and I have years ago stated that the dope’s nose has no practical function and is only there to look stupid. But dopes might also be too stupid to realize that they can’t smell something unpleasant. Yes sure hurray problem averted. and maybe i can restrict what other monsters are damaged by it, or make them become more dangerous if they ARE damaged by it, to dis-incentivize the player trying to hit them with durian clouds on purpose. Or maybe accept that they have it coming if they are dumb enough to get tricked by a dope.
I started to draw a pineapple for a second variant but did not get far enough on any frames that it is worth showing. I thought that pineapple might be considered played out and expected from me. or maybe i just want to reserve it as an upgrade for a monster that attacks with pine cones. And so I switched to a potted cactus instead.
but THEN i thought that cactus is good to swing at an adversary in a close-up attack, and it seems wasteful to make two animations with the same item. But I haven’t started on drawing a close-up attack yet. not every monster needs one. this creature might just awkwardly try to hop out of the way to return to projectile distance. I have not drawn the projectiles yet either! ideally i will decide on the cactus’ fate before drawing one in flight because once I do draw that i will be reluctant to not use it.
I like the idea of pulling out a big clock for a near proximity attack but i ALSO have had for a while an idea for a minotaur-like monster that carries a grandfather clock as a multi-purpose weapon. then yesterday the name “minute-taur” struck me. which doesn’t mean i have to use that; letting puns control the flow of design leads to an idiotic product.
maybe i should change it to a lizard-person since lizards amuse me more and then it no longer has taurine-traits that make the pun “work” and seem like that came first, and 1994 Heretic already has a minotaur in it.
the escaping into the hat “death” i have a misgiving about since the hat looks like it should be collectible, especially by a dope that picks up/absorbs stupid things, but I want there to still be evidence that the monster had been there if the hat is collected. Maybe a lemon will appear underneath it. Functionally stupid! But there could perhaps randomly be a durian which will explode momentarily with an effect similar to the launched type. And then THAT can leave a lemon behind. The dope cannot pick up lemons. Or at least I have never seen one attempt to.
five direction walk animations for creatures that i have not yet decided if will do other things apart from walk around providing stupid atmosphere. the second angle on the fish is probably too wide but i will wait until implementing it to assess if that actually makes a difference amidst how awkward it is apart from that.
not all details have necessarily carried across coherently but they aren’t necessarily all necessary
i drew this thing years ago but never gave it a way to explode. Now I have. However it appears that it was only immediately after drawing the original sprites for this creature that i standardized the [minimum] scale that i was drawing these at so i spent a needless fraction of the past week slowly awkwardly upscaling many of its frustratingly intricate sprites in an effort that approximately nobody will notice except in the form of extra seconds spent loading yet more oversized sprites in-game if it ever actually reaches a releasable stage of development which seems as likely as ever, which is not very.
a lot of its glop goes missing, something that used to bother me about similar animations in heretic and hexen, but i plan to have this also shoot out a number of glop objects separate from itself (including the eye balls, probably, although i like how the pink glop covers them) that will successfully land and remain on the ground. See there IS some good news this week.
I suspect i used that “title” line already but if I did it was before 2006 and who cares if I don’t?
flopping lerd. compare to
the old version from 2003 that I only drew quickly from the front and never gave further thought to.
for as big a time destroyer as this was, i rather like some of the results, including the facing away angle (the lower right sequence here), which i almost never like. Its arms seem to diminish at the end since wide “corpses” never work very well, especially ones that spin as you move around them.
hopefully the hardest step of this deceptively difficult to draw monster is concluded with these. obviously I will still touch it up at length after separating it into separate pieces for each angle and will probably have to separate the bodies from the tails again, and an additional frame between the first and second ones may need to be created, but unless I have forgotten something, which I quite well have, this is the hardest part of the most complicated legacy monster redraw sequence concluded. I still have yet to redraw any of the “spof” monster because I never definitively concluded what it should look like rather than nemitz, but its own defeat merely involves it falling over sideways. its gruesome “explode” destruction is more complicated but i spared myself from multi-angling any monster explode or melt animations so far, so my obsessive compulsion will likely not force me to think I have to start then, if I even think that monster is necessary.
it occurred to me that dopes, meant to be the primary figures, do not have any non-melt, non-explode decimations, nor do fopes or yiths, and I do not at present think they need any. Why did I think this thing did?
also I seem not to have designated a website entry about the fope melting or apparently anything do to with fope but it does melt.
indeed