another moraff update.

the were rat bat looks like it has fake wings held on by shoulder straps but upon close examination that might not be the intent, nonetheless i went with that. my first sketch gave the bat legs instead of arms since a slightly less fake bat would have wings as its forelimbs, but there is another bat in module (episode) 2 that has legs and is less well drawn so i will wait for then to take excessive liberties. i was already messing with the vulture. feathers are not bones but according to a morbid image search withering ones can apparently be found still stuck to vulture skeletons, either because they don’t rot the same way as flesh or just nothing wants to eat them. in my endless wisdom i depicted the OLD version of the vulture’s head on the ratbat’s shield. the shadow variant is stored as a separate image so i have the power to give that an appearance distinct from the regular ones and maybe i will give that the more pterodactylyian traits of the original. but i also have at least 72 more monsters to draw so i should perhaps prioritize that

i started on a watery graverd –all these years i thought the name was graveyard and wondered why it was being spelled graverd in the game text development spreadsheet and also in the several years old gamefaq –that despite including contributions from me as “porticulo” i apparently never read completely since the project leader Jimbly forwarded me to it when i asked a few questions about game mechanics– but looked at my very old screenshots and it plainly says “graverd.” perhaps moraff erd in spelling it that way to begin with but i will likely never know and in any case that is its correct spelling now.

i started on a sentence about watery graverd but my digression was catastrophic. the drawing i started on also was in different ways. a comment i got a few days ago that the akismet spam detector helpfully prevented me from seeing until the commenter told me specifically two days later that it had left a comment that never appeared and i went to search for and forcefully appear it after i had already drawn my initial version suggested that what i was interpreting as antlers were actually meant to be arteries, and i wondered if maybe rather than being incomplete and awkward it really was intended to look like that. i am not fond of vestigial heads but i decided to try a “creature” comprised of other creatures stuck together, which didn’t work very well but looks better than what i already had,

although replacing the inadvertent smiley face with a blue dope was inspired and it is always a shame to NOT beat up dopes. maybe if i draw alternate variants for shadow monsters i will also draw variants for non-shadow monsters and the dope will return to have revenge enacted upon it.

the new version is still a mess and matches the old description of a being that “evolved directly from the rivers” better than then new one written by a mysterious entity called Merlin thast refers to “a menagerie of drowned corpses” since presumably a few of these would have had difficulty drowning, but it IS possible to look at this drawing and mostly determine what the individual pieces of it were intended to be. since i think the remake will only be available in the full version a hypothetical player will probably be in the place where you actually see these for less time than i needed to draw it. the full graphics is 2586×2014 and at least on my screen looks slightly better in the game than in this website sized gif.
in moraff’s world all the undead or demonic-looking creatures drain levels if they hit you but dungeons of the unforgiven makes no such effort at consistency, with the vulture of death in section 3 just being “fast” so me making the watery grave[ya]rd into a zombie mass that shouldn’t be a problem. although the best way to do that is to have it dripping with seaweed, and in the final section 20 the level drainer is a mass of sentient seaweed. and then the dorky crocodile with a hammer or axe is the evil level drainer instead. i think it would be logical to swap them but that would be the first logical event to occur.

even without the sea weed it looks rotting and wet, like a shoe that tried to walk through a puddle too deep for it. my drawings often look like this when i spend too long trying to fix bits that aren’t working and usually it works against them but for once dripping and disgusting is the intention, even if this was accomplished inadvertently. this looks like the weird soup a roommate once made with ingredients from the asian grocery store and then left on the stove for three days without saying anything about the soup or him leaving for three days. i swear i mentioned him on this website before because i distinctly remember including a lemur’s head to conceal the identity of the person in the photograph i showed but i cannot now prove that this happened and i would prefer not to dwell on that at length.
both merlin and jimbly have met steve moraff but i do not believe he was asked for insight on specific creatures, and i do not know if he gave instructions as to how the things were to be drawn either, so a few of them being utterly dissimilar to the originals is probably not of great importance. I have also been informed that he was shown one or more of my web pages but i do not know which ones or if he was exposed to any of the text. it seems likely that he does not care a whole lot one way or another so long as the finished product with his name and ownership implying apostrophe-s is not outwardly objectionable.

the “she demon” has for now marvel wolverine style claws. the original when closely examined seems to have a single knife attached in a similar position but the drawing always casually looked to me like “i’m stabbing my own wrist” and i didn’t necessarily want two single straight blades and then a club in the same drawing. better to have three distinct objects. the sword i drew actually has a CURVED blade but from this angle it looks like it isn’t. whuipth. i can potentially make the second head look less like phil and lyll’s mother from rugrats but up to this point i was more worried about the bubble fiend.

ironically the flooded zone of the original game probably inspired my ultimately unrealized attempt to make similar sorts of areas in the doom engine in pretty much every level i ever tried to construct, but always having difficulty figuring out why the water never looked right, and eventually becoming keenly aware that water just doesn’t look blue except in large bodies that are open to the sky, and now i am in a spot where i cannot proceed unless i commit to it looking blue and opaque in an interior space.
beyond THAT to create the effect that the water is not just a floor moraff had stretched the walls vertically so that the lower portions get cut off and then drawn over the edges in blue so that they would superficially appear to be actually the edges of the floor that isn’t supposed to look like a floor. no evidence exists now but i recall copying THAT also but i was trying to match it with doom’s own “nukedge” and “blodedge” textures that are supposed to look stained with toxic waste or blood rather than make the floor look bigger. and i did it in BRIGHT blue since my water texture (which does still exist because it was alphabetically earlier and so got on to the iomega zip disk before the last time the computer agreed to finish booting into windows 95 but is not relevant) was lighter blue so it would match the bright blue waterfall i also drew. oh the thought of it is uglier than the watery graverd. the present “couple from hell” i have up there DOES look light-blue stained because i drew that before i drew the water and initially would have matched with the more saturated light blue and i tried to fix it and i have gone back to take that screenshot about 12 times and it might come down to i put out this web page today or i fix that graphic and i don’t want to work on the web page tomorrow unless it was posted yesterday and the most nagging thing wrong with it is actually wrong with something outside the web page that is not at risk of being seen by anyone else for a few months probably. That might be comparable to the amount of viewers i get on the web page but the point is to talk myself into posting the thing, not whether anyone apart from me ever finds out.

thankfully i have more important things to worry about