the hat and the “gun” get launched as separate objects that land vertically and so I can give my self to excuse to only draw them from one side. This gif is actually from april, but I neflected to mark that post as “motional” when I went looking at first and just assumed it wasn’t here, but it is. Anyway I have by now inserted all the sprite pieces from this one into the “game” and know that so far they work.

this one is from today. Evidently I exported these gifs in a different manner, but I assure you inside the “game” they match. Or at least the non-falling versions I already put in match each other so far. This shows the alternate version of the upper imp because i decided they shouldn’t fall down the same way, even though that defeats a large swarth of the point of having this be an alternate version of the same thing rather than a totally new creature. but hopefully this is the last animation I do of this setup from multiple angles. Just too gosh darn many parts. Even something as simple as providing the sweatshirt? as an alternate for the scarf means I need to be conscious of what small area is covered by the scarf that suddenly isn’t covered and might need to be filled in long after I thought I was done. And then even more gets uncovered when I try to export the separate parts as separate parts, which I then feel compelled to correct, even if there is no need to correct it since it will never be seen by anyone else, since *I* will still see it. oh bo fo. I thought it would go quickly since this fall doesn’t turn and I wasn’t making alternate legs or heads for it, this whole fall sequence being an alternate. Though knowing me I still might. Though I often think I will do things that I won’t, as I rarely know me as well as I assume I do.

I don’t show the other hat or the scarf in the second gif since the scarf and the shirt use the same palette range and would possibly have layer priority conflicts so that one might be behind the other inconsistently, and both hats occupy the same coordinates, at least in aseprite. after I export all the parts and import them into the gzdoom data heap, I can put as many hats as I want into any part of any sprite. Why would I want more than one? Why would I ask infinite numbers of hypothetical questions? I don’t know me, so I can’t tell you.

Hm hm hm this is the first time I compared the two fall types and suddenly realize that I will in fact need to make an alternate gun landing mode since despite both being vertical, the second is “facing” up rather than down. whupth. Guns really never stop causing problems.

the first three frames can also be played repeatedly to make the creature appear confused or amidst a very stupid dance. some other monsters can already be knocked over temporarily if hit a certain way, maybe this can be an equivalent situation. Or just a stupid dance.

yet another of these.
It took longer to make than was justifiable, and i will definitely avoid spinny motions for anything I want to give extra angles to in the future, or draw over this one, ideally. Or so I reckon right this moment.
The hat and the green thing will be launched as separate objects on the second or third frame and for now I imagine i can get away with not full-rotating them, but the green thing may be too tall like that. We shall see. Or I shall see.
I ought to make another comic page before doing more. Failing that I will periodically acknowledge that I have not made any comic pages in a while.

this idiot again. still not done, even with these frames, with additional motions yet to be started on, but I am no longer concerned that the object being carried is too boring or looks too much like I think it looks like a gun. A trumpet plunger with bells or hershey kisses hanging off the back is indeed preferable, yes.

I presume the fired-out bits will be similar to the old version, but I think that every time and change my mind after I already started trying to keep it like the old version.

An earlier attempt that is less like a plunger but I was concerned it might instead be compared to a body part popularized in a famous Kurt Vonnegut illustration.

holding a frosting tube

like I drew in cholesteronslaught (except too small and not riding a pie) after making the very old sprites, but then forgot about until after I had already started on the new sprites. this looks alright for the moment but I would need to redraw the arms for every angle, rather than creating a stringy monstrosity that needs to be drawn around the arms and that unlike a tube has no real world counterpart so that I can never know if it really looks correct or doesn’t and may spend an indefinite period trying to bring to that point.

armless (and yet toeless) variant, wearing something more like what the less violent, tattooed version of this creature had on in my december 2006 website header, and as is typical i didn’t bother to consult what that was since I was surprised to see that I included such a classy flower all those years ago when I finally got around to checking, and I only checked so I could have the correct link to it.

the first head variant. i thought i could include a leg variant also, that makes the creature slightly shorter. Neither really works! If you look closely, I mean. Most people never look at anything closely, but I cannot help doing so. I can try and fudge their positions in the sprite assembler but if nothing else and I can’t ultimately recycle any parts inside the game it is a foundation for a separate idiot. what is the fun of giving two different foes the same weapon? because they aren’t meant to be different, they are meant to be of equalish rank but look different despite that.
The line weight looks different simply because my drawing tablet of 4.6 years told me last night that it was done so I did this up to now with a mouse again. I’m worried this might actually look better and I have made things worse by freaking out so much lately when the tablet increasingly refused to work without being done, so that I needed to stop and restart the whole system, wasting time and rage in the process, but for any other sort of drawing the non-rodenty way is preferable.

because this is what i have this week

another old thing being redrawn, and as usual I cannot help making the job more complex than it needs to be. I have “designed” the new version to have separate parts that can be customized, possibly including species/racial traits, though i have not made any alternates for that yet. note, however, the present lack of toes that allows me to later give more than that. which I tell you to note because in fact I almost don’t, so maybe i won’t bother adding any. the way sprites get clipped to the ground, depending on what settings “players” use, which I have no way of predicting or controlling, they may never see the feet at all anyway!

the hat, jacket and scarf currently are separate, though there really is no reason to have the scarf without the jacket, and this particular hat complements them, and I might do well to merge them all and have any replacement outfits be complete in themselves (in frap on january 20 in the a m I did so and have updated the gifs from what was here previously). “complete” in a partially dressed sort of way, I mean. ironically, parts that get covered, like the arms, I drew in more detail than the toeless feet that don’t.

the old version, from 2003, has not aged as poorly as some others, and unlike a lot of 4 frame doom monster animations, actually looks like it is walking from the side angles. at least inside the game it does. Right here it looks like it is dancing poorly to whatever music you have playing, and if you aren’t playing any then I imagine the creature looks even stupider.

the new “gun” is simple since I am not really any better at creating convincing imaginary guns than i was in 2003, considering how easily this one is mistaken for a mario pipe in its present state and placeholder color, but i also think i might give a custom embellishment even to that. BUT considering the way it is held more or less requires this shape and likewise precludes the creature carrying a differently shaped object i might save myself some effort to merge?? I think I accidentally uploaded an incomplete version of this text since I remember removing that sentence since it was redundant and went nowhere, yet here still it is.

OF COURSE at this point i have evaluated the idea of guns in this “universe” more so, and imagine that they should be rare, so should a creature so numerous that i want to give it customizable features so as not to appear TOO monotonous, have guns at all? or does these not being very powerful guns excuse their proliferation?

I had also in the past resolved to entirely remove any monsters from the comic strip, such as lope and nemitz, since they are too conspicuous to have hundreds of violent clones, yet I left in pog, and obviously the dopes. A version of this thing does appear over there, and exhibits no aggression whatsoever. However it appears quite briefly, and was never important enough to have a name, and it is almost less “real” of a character than the [gz]doom one is. despite rendering its bell in greater detail than required, I abstained from drawing its forehead tattoo, which you will find is present any other time I have posted drawings of it, and maybe that particular variant belongs to a cult that preaches non-violence, but perhaps also encourages some worse activities, such as delivering unmarked packages, tolerating bow tie impeciles or having toes.

this sure took a while to make! too many moving parts for this many angles. no more ribbons on these weirdos. hopefully anything else I need this one to do can be done in three or fewer frames per viewpoint. My hopes are typically misplaced.
in fact these angles don’t match very well and there is a hard break between front and back views rather than them being evenly spaced from each other, but that is unlikely to be evident in action, and unlike most things that are unlikely to be evident in action that I want to fix, this one I cannot fix so I must accept it or even better forget it!

The hat is put into the “game” separately from the rest of the body, and, due to a frustrating oversight, the shadow for its hat also. however, the discovery that I can assemble individual sprites without needing to separate them by angle after drawing them greatly cuts down on the time necessary to insert all these dumb little things and simplifies the process of updating those graphics if I see something fixable other than what I already said I couldn’t. Having the hat separate –I determined it was the element most feasible to keep separate, the shadow issue not withstanding– allows for the creation of an alternately-powered hatless or alternately-hatted version, once I draw another set of hats. or

this might be TOO stupid.


Having this settled for the moment I hope also to have another comic page completed before the year ends, because it would be depressing not to. it may also be depressing to do so by virtue of containing the virtually virtueless meepmere along with a pathetic lizardoid that isn’t angry at meepmere, but not to the degree that a dope with a recycled hat doing the world’s stupidest dance is.

10-16-2021 1201am: i thought i would make a quick video for today/yesterday so of course it isn’t quick at all but it is already late so i am not going to not do that to save time either.
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the new snikpel graphics seem to be “working.” there is still plenty to do, though!

for example something urgently needs to be done about THIS.

these monsters I still have yet to begin redrawing/redesigning. I forgot I made so many of them! the nemitz and lope became too specific of characters since I originally inserted them into this mess and no longer seem functional in these roles, particularly since they condone dopes so much.

the new pog can walk at least, and doesn’t need to do much more than that, mercifully.

only five angles now but I do not think the asymmetrical highlighting was necessary.
There is something very determined and stupid about the old version that I still like, particularly on the east-facing angle,, and maybe I shall use it as a base for another imbecile eventually. Because why would I allow for the possibility of this ever being finished?

844pm jeepers big animated gifs sure are rough on my slightly older computer. I forgot about how insufferable this used to be!
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8-25-2021 353pm and TODAY my proper computer’s battery is dead and it won’t start even on direct electricity so now I need to deal with all that involves. My hard drives are fine, just impatient.
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8-24-2021 1149pm hello this site wasn’t working at all, giving the “apparently that’s not allowed” error when i tried to access it or any other page around 11:27. for a few minutes? a few hours? days? I have an important rygar update but it won’t be feasible to present effectively in eleven more minutes. that is just how things are these days!

snikpel the snokpeal runs in five directions, gets hurt from 8 and then flops over in a needlessly difficult to draw fashion from 8, because that is what I drew happening the past week. The angles aren’t evenly spaced but they follow from the standing pose well enough and ideally nobody will spend much time walking around staring at the “corpse” to check on how consistent the angles are. I made the little orange bits that splash off dissolve instead of stay on the ground anyway, as much as I hate to remove any detail, since those would definitely mess with a coherent rotation.

I also expect to draw it flopping over in a less complicated manner because I already drew the legs for that in an earlier botched version of this flop. Like seems to be usual, I make something more difficult for no real reason on a whim and commit to finishing it rather than cutting my losses once I realize I have made it harder. there may be yet more defeat types related to the more upright agony poses, because my life has no meaning.
actually getting these sprites all into the game and programmed to appear properly will probably also take more days, and I still haven’t given it attacking frames! in fact the original low resolution snikpel from 2003 simply played its running frames out of order for attacking and “dying,” with a single flat on the ground pose.

some of the fun of a game like this is beating up dumb little beasts and having goop fly out of them so I ought to have at least one melting animation also. I would like to have little marshmallows fly out of it when it takes a regular hit, but that stuff is even harder to control than my ability to not do needless things. I am fortunate I still haven’t made myself give toes to these things.
I had terrible tools then and was much more easily pleased. I have not yet become displeasable enough that I force myself to properly animate the “pain” sequences; i can make them jump in the air when hurt as I did with dopes and wah beasts previously, but after excusing this awkward full rotation flop it may be more difficult than previously to not excuse any additional tediosity. So many of my endeavors end in flops that maybe it was inevitable that I would make flopping a full time endeavor for my-self.

ehhhhdit: yes it looks better after today’s alterations but I feel uninclined to replace the video right this moment!
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a fairly annoying video. i under-estimated how noisy it would be, since I had increased the frequency with which they make noises in order to ensure they were making noises at the correct times, and then only recorded in rooms that contained about fifty of the dumb things. particularly the ignoble noise they emit after being defeated is conspicuous here, playing at intervals of 8 to 64 game-time units rather than 256 to 1024, and one of the sounds it can play is louder than I thought it was.
because the sounds themselves were recorded between 2003 and today, in sometimes less than adequate accoustical circumstances, because I couldn’t find the thing that lets me use a microphone with this incredibly shoddily designed combined earphone/microphone port, or it was before I had a microphone at all. I have both now, thank you, good luck.
I will hopefully give them a means to explode when hit with exploding objects since that they lack one here doesn’t seem at all fair.

^{this link is copied off my pay-treon page and I am concerned its “token” will expire and it will stop functioning in the intended capacity}

tentative gz-doom walking frames for a creature deliberately resembling ziv (orange lope-like lizard) from the airplane cartoon fragment. actually creating this scene in the doom engine, the thing that the cartoon was originally created to prevent me trying to do, seems like it may yet be necessary, but also possible with developments from the past few years, and regardless of whether my doing that is feasible i took it upon me to make isolated walking sprites for the lizards. or one of them, anyway. even though they are identical apart from their head protrusions and snout thickness i believe i will not be able to recycle their bodies. But only one actually “walks” during the scene. everything else i will probably have to import just as it is and use it only for this, awkwardly, frame-by-frame. I swear that almost makes sense in the context of gzdoom.

these colors are not quite accurate, deliberately, because it is presently mapped to the in-game palette, which I can replace ranges from within the “monster” definition data. the palette is stupidly designed, with the darkest oranges separate from the lighter ones, but the reds are all together, so replacing reds is easier than replacing oranges. Had my initial goals been grander and more focused I would have designed my own palette possibly but that is not how things worked and fortunately they are no longer incredibly relevant apart from how i go about replacing its ranges.
even though the dork is supposed to be orange, i don’t necessarily want it to be doom-palette orange, and if i want to place other generic lizards elsewhere that have blue or yellow skin this will make that simpler. Its spines are orange because i was not expecting to care about those but oops i did. it might need some tail points also but the original lacked them and they did not seem to be a priority.

despite my having drawn these with those dopes‘s frames as a guide this still took much of two days. were i a real artist i could have used a 3d model i already made and just loosely drawn over it and have been done in maybe four hours. I did not make a video with this because now the month is july and i am overcome with urgency at preparing comic book 4 and also cleaning up and coloring in beet cartoon 3. there is always a task that can’t ever end to break any momentum I might have developed on another one.

however i made a different video showing something less significant a week ago and did not even bother to edit or frame it properly. One of these days will definitely be one of these days.

here are dope “pain” frames. of course it is rather un-dope like to show pain, so some/most of these may be repurposed as templates on which to draw other in-pain imps. I do not know how many more imps will need to be included. I fear there is a great many imps to whom retribution is owed.
This one will hop a bit when damaged. I do not know yet what effect causing the sprite to hop will have on the actual player dope’s control, but enemy dopes (all dopes are my enemies) should at least do it properly. This should NOT be taken as evidence of their competence and general ability to do any thing properly.
Also by now i can confirm that the player dope can indeed hop when struck. That does not mean I am impressed!

The second one has 8 views rather than 5 because i do not want its unusual pose to be mirrored when facing left. I do however want to have a full rotation of mirrored poses so I have a third pain frame. it will look bad at the front and back views since for them the alternate pose would be mirrored versions of themselves rather than the view across from them.

and so on this third set I included fresh, not totally mirrored alternate poses for the front and back, so that they cannot awkwardly switch to a backward version of themselves if harmed again before recovering. It is hard to see but I redrew the faces, moved the ears, changed the shading and things like that. I forgot which one actually IS facing forward so I made what turned out to be an alternate for facing front left also. Because I have a poisoned brain. Anyway this means this dope now has 5 potential pain gestures for each direction, so even if minimal effort to make the mirrors look less so is not sufficient, the chance of jumping from one to its backward clone is only 20% and would only be a factor when facing straight at or away from the player. I also went and added a manually reversed and resurfaced alternate for the second pain pose’s front view. Does that make sense? It shouldn’t!

When I have my dopes in a row I will present a full comparison of these beside the “original” dopes from 15ish years ago. In this one state you can see that while they got sad, they maintained their composure.

in the “game” the rendering engine was instructed by me to warp the graphics for this pain state. the warping unfortunately works in a very limited range of ways and it looks somewhat sloppy when it only appears for an instant, for there is no transition in and out of warp.

beyond that the sprite needs void of a height and width to prevent the warped part from wrapping around one edge to the other. Ths warp effect was designed to be put on floor graphics, you see.

Having all the extra space is no big meal for 1994-style low resolution sprites, but when I make them extra large, so that I can barely see them full sized in the Slade editor, and am drawing loads more frames, void management becomes yet more cumbersome.
you really don’t care, do you! Alas I must proceed as if you do.

the only warp currently in effect is on the pink brute’s wing-like attachments. the unseemliness of the warp effect is less obvious when it only affects a part. However, that also means that for this state at least the creature must be inserted into the game separate from its wings, which is its own bigger-then-necessary hassle. Doing that for EVERY frame would be a hassle ludicrous in size beyond already being ludicrous since I would need to spawn and remove the wings for every single in-game tic due to my lacking the presumably meager coding prowess necessary to make the separated wings merely follow what the pink dork is doing.
Observe also that one of the test dopes is in a pain frame even though it is NOT being struck; that is because I inadvertently gave the whole run of new pain frames internal names which conflict with the names I already gave to the idle frames I showed two weeks ago.

I forgot I had reserved the prefix “dopi,” with i meaning idle. I was today thinking i meaning injured! I didn’t want to go with dopp for pain or doph for hurt because I wanted to use just the vowels, not expecting I would need more than 4 extra sets of dope animation frames beyond the base “dope” I use for the normal stomping around animation. Each four letter frame set name can have up to 29 frames in it. I apparently was worried that 116 would not be enough stupid garbage to draw from 5 or more directions!
I used up to F — not using B in case I decided to also do mirror alternates with that first set I showed here — so only G of the idle frames still shows up!

ALSO! The first one is DOPIE7E3, which means it should be E facing right (angle 7) and E mirrored facing left (angle 3). However, its accidental replacement,

DOPIE7F3, is frame E ONLY when facing 7 right; it is F when it is mirrored to 3! Which means??! What SHOWS UP as DOPI-E3 in-game is no longer that standing graphic mirrored but actually

THIS graphic DOPIE3F7 NON-mirrored! Oh what a situation!
and then this graphic MIRRORED replaces

DOPIF7G3, which should be forwards! What a catastrophe! And DOPI-G3 is not replaced at all which means while this graphic DOES show up, it will only EVER be seen BACKWARDS! Why aren’t I in jail?

But nothing exploded so I should be safe to fix this and then all that will no longer be relevant! In fact I can fix it faster (I merely rename the second DOPI series to DOPO, O for “oh no”) than it took me to make all those pictures and text explaining it! But please believe I regularly screw up bigger than that and take longer to realize both what problem there is and what I or anything else did to cause it. I of course blame nemitz.

This is important to me for some reason. The sooner I conquer it, the better for everyone. For dope detractors and supporters alike. Although if you are personally acquainted with any dope supporters please refer them to the jail that I somehow am not in.