For the 3 of you out there that read my blog entries, your probably aware of the little game I was working on for Game Design class. Well I had a partner and he did all of the programming…but I did 90% of the original graphic work as well as a large chunk of testing ;) But anywho, the game wad due a week from when it was assigned to us (Monday). We we’re able to finish the game and I think the entire class was really impressed. Most of the other people didn’t put nearly as much work into their games as we did. But anyways, I decided that it would be cool to release it for people to play!

Grab it Here!

As I said before, Blast TV is a rip-off of the classic game Smash TV. There were various versions of the game but the ones I’m familiar with are the NES and the SNES version. It had a cool (probably unwieldy) control scheme you could use which utilized played with two controllers at once. I’ve never tried playing that way, I just thought it was a cool tidbit of information :p The basic theme is that your on a TV show and you’ve got to collect as many prizes as you can without dying a horrible, arena-related death. There are various weapons and power-ups that you can collect to help you through the game.

In Blast TV there are two types of baddies that you’ll face. There’s the foot soldiers who wield pikes. And then there’s the bugs who are much larger and can take a lot more damage. You will face two types of each enemy; normal and hard versions. The hard versions of the baddies are red and they can have extra attacks like shooting fireballs or they can be harder to kill. On some levels there are even land mines, so watch where your running. There’s also a boss you encounter on the last level! We wanted to add a few more enemies but we just didn’t have time. Some things we though about were a rolling land mine that would roll around the perimeter of the level and then explode, flinging shrapnel all around the level. I made some sprites for stationary turrets that could be place in the corners or the middle of the map and follow the player’s movements. We also thought about making a mine layer robot which would move very slowly around the level and occasionally lay mines to obstruct the player’s movements.

There’s also a fairly wide range of pickups in the game. Again, we didn’t get to add all of them but I’m happy with what we did get in there. There are three types of projectile weapons; normal gun, spread gun, missile launcher. Your default and starting weapon is the normal gun which fires small round pellets at a decent rate of fire. It has infinite ammo so you don’t have to worry about being weaponless. The spread gun fires a stream of 3 pellet projectiles in a V-shaped pattern. It does a little more damage than the normal gun and it can take on large waves of enemies quite well. The missile launcher fires large rocket-propelled explosives which can cut through multiple enemies at once. It does heavy damage so be sure to grab it when you see one! Some weapons we didn’t get to add were the grenade launcher and the laser gun. The grenade launcher was going to work a little differently than the one from Smash TV; it would fire a large, round grenade which could bounce off of the walls until it hit a baddie or it’s fuse ran out. The laser gun was going to shoot a steady stream of energy. In effect you would have been able to ‘wipe’ away baddies with the laser gun :p There are also numerous power-ups. There’s a shield powerup, 1-up, speed-up, and a nuke. The sheild power-up is pretty self-explaintory; it gives you the shield that you spawn with for a limited amount of time (it won’t protect you from projectiles or mines though). The 1-up is self-explanatory. The speed-up will increase the moving speed of the player for a limited amount of time. And the nuke kills all of the enemies that are on the screen (but not bosses!). Aaand there’s also pickups which increase your money which range from stacks of cash to diamonds!

Unfortunately we didn’t get to do a lot of things. Besides the above, we wanted to create our own room graphic. But due to lack of time we had to rip the one from Smash TV. We also wanted to give the player more angles to shoot instead of just 8 (we we’re thinking 32 would be alot better). But due to lack of time we couldn’t do a lot of what we wanted For a week’s worth of work though, I think we did an exemplary job. Hopefully it’s fun!

If you’ve been in the Doom community for any length of time, then you have probably heard of Dylan “Toke” McIntosh. If so, then you are probably also aware that he was tragically killed in a car accident at the age of 23. He was a respected member of the Doom community and his death was a horrible event.

Before his death, he was interested in contributing some deathmatch maps to the FreeDM project. He sent a set of 21 deathmatch maps made specifically for 1v1 games to fraggle, who was compiling the FreeDM maps at the time. They were created with layout and gameplay in mind and they had no detailing work done. However after his passing, fraggle decided to start a community project with the maps to honor Toke’s memory. The project started in August of 2006.

It is now October 2008 and the project still is not finished. I found out about this tribute wad about a week ago via this blog entry by Naked Snake. I was really disappointed to see that over 2 years have went by and the community still hasn’t finished this tribute wad. So I decided to put some of my personal projects and school work aside to work on some of the unfinished maps. Be sure to check out the “Toke It Up!” page for info on the project (I’m going to be adding the link to my list of Doom links soon).

The first map I worked on was Map03. Out of the three maps that weren’t done yet, this map had the most appealing layout to me. It played very well for 1v1 and the layout was very aesthetically appealing to me. It’s also wondrous to me that the item placements are very sparse yet it is more than enough to fulfill the gameplay needs. The bare-bones layout gave me lots of inspiration for detail and texture work. However I forgot something; the maps need to be Vanilla compatible. Let me say something about mapping for Vanilla compatibility from a guy who loves decorating; I have a new-found respect for Vanilla mappers. Sure I was wholly aware of Vanilla’s rendering limits when I started the map, but it became apparent to me that reaching those thresholds happens a lot faster than you might think. I probably finished almost all of the decorations with what I thought would be Vanilla compatible before I actually tested the map in Chocolate Doom. I am certain that I removed 60% of said decorations after totally destroying the drawseg and visplane limits You learn to optimize lines pretty quickly as well as removing unnecessary, repeatable decorations. At the time I was very frustrated with trying to make the map Vanilla compatible. But after finishing my second map, I rather enjoyed the limitation. It forced me to be a little more liberal yet creative with my decoration and texturing, and I really liked how the map came out on the other end of Doom Builder.

I was artistically pumped after finishing the first map, so I decided to do another one. This time I chose Map11 after I tinkered around with Map05 (which was a really simple map). The layout of this map is also very nice and it’s a little more open than Map03′s layout. I already had my texture theme in mind before I even started the map and I also tried my best to keep in mind Vanilla Doom’s rendering limits during production. It wasn’t hard for me to incorporate my theme into my texturing and detail work and before long I had something looking great. Esselfortium said it reminded him of Scythe 2…I suppose it does in some aspects. Anyways I was extremely happy with how the map came out. Thankfully I only had a handful of areas that were going over the drawseg/visplane limits and I was able to fix those very easily. I may do one more decor job (Map05 might be a bit tough to do since it’s pretty basic in terms of layout and it’s really wide-open).

I can only hope my work has enhanced Toke’s maps and not destroyed them. Unfortunately for me I didn’t get a chance to meet him in the community before his death; I’ve only played his past works. His oldschool mapping definitely could have helped me out when I first started mapping. They are about gameplay and fun coming first and not about grotesque amounts of decoration. That’s definitely a concept lot’s of Doom mapper’s today could learn from, myself included. I’m am unsure exactly how maps maps are truly open to work on; there are some maps that have been claimed but they have not been finished. I didn’t know Toke at all yet I took the time to help out. I encourage anyone who is reading this that knows how to map to please contribute your skills to this project and FINALLY FINISH IT UP. It should not take more than 2 years for the Doom Community to detail 21 small, vanilla compatible deathmatch maps. Especially when it’s being done in the memory of someone who was respected and beloved by the Doom community.

Check out the Toke It Up! page under the Design tab for more screenshots and information on the project.

Hey now, another blog post! If I keep this up…well, I dunno, something bad might happen. Also OMG GEORGE W. BUSH IS GONE DEAR GOD THANK YOU. Truthfully I didn’t care who got in office as GEEDUB got out. I had a feeling that Obama was going to win the thing anyways, but it doesn’t matter because I didn’t have a fucking free minute all day long to get the chance to go and vote T_T. Either way, I didn’t like Obama or McCain at all…though I think that Obama is the lesser evil out of the two. Hooray for that I suppose. I dearly hope that he doesn’t fuck up the country anymore than it already is.

Anyways onto the meat of this post. I’ve been working diligently on my Game Design assignment Blast TV with my partner. I sent him the player sprites the other day and he sent me back a working demo of the guy running around…I must say I impressed myself with the spriting work…though I was more impressed with my partner’s programming. CHECK IT OUT, YO; you can’t really to much, but I think it’s really neat. Use WASD to move/strafe and the mouse to aim. Smash TV didn’t have the advantage of using a mouse to aim the player, but in this game you will! I probably walked around making shooting noises and pretending to shoot bad guys for almost 15 minutes before I got back to work . Speaking of work, I finished a large chunk of the sprites today.
The first thing I focused on were the pick-up sprites.These range from power-ups to weapons to prizes (to increase your score). Not all of it is original work though; I made the base for the pick-up icons as well as the money stack, present, and the spreadgun pickup pellets. Hopefully they’ll look good in-game. I modeled the base graphic off of the Smash TV sprite version of pickups, so we’ll see. I even got a little fancy and made animations for the missile and spreadgun pickups; Smash TV didn’t have that now did it! I also focused on the projectiles for the 3-4 weapons in the game (the 4th is questionable at this point). There will be the normal gun which shoots a slender bullet and has a decent rate of fire, a missile launcher which is a larger projectile and it shoots through baddies, and a spreadgun which shoots 3 rays of large round pellets in a V shaped pattern. We aren’t going to go through and replicate every single weapon from Smash TV though; some of the weapons are kinda redundant and it would just take more time to program them in and make/find graphics and sounds for them. The questionable 4th weapon is more of a powerup than anything. There’s a powerup in Smash TV that gives the player a little floating/orbiting ‘add-on gun’ which gives you twice the firepower and coverage. I’m kind of hoping my partner will be able to do the coding for it because I think it’s a really cool powerup and it will make the game that much cooler to play. I even went ahead and made the sprites for it (erm…not made but found, heh). He hasn’t gotten back to me on it yet, so fingers crossed. Anyways, like before, all of this work here is free for anyone to use! Just please credit me somewhere and I’ll be happy

All I have left to do is make/find some of the generic bad guys (the ones that horde into the game all at once…and you just kinda slaughter them like you would a colony of ants with ant killer). I also need to make/find sprites for one or two higher up bad guys (preferably something like a robot or a small tank or something)…aaaand then make/find one or two bosses. This is easier said then done; top-down sprites are really hard to come by I think I may have found a decent boss or medium-grade bad guy, but I’ll have t color him in. My partner found some top-down Contra sprites that I’m going to use for the generic baddies and he also found some possible medium-grade bad guys. I just need to make the diagonal frames for both (and maybe an attack frame) and that’ll be done and ready to go. Lastly I have to find sounds. Thankfully I have access to a pretty large library of sounds; it’s called /idgames. So between the rest of the graphics and sounds I may have to make some misc. stuff…but other than that, I’ll be good to go. If anyone has any recommendations for good top-down sprites, please send me a link! I can use anything; since this is a class and nothing will be released commercially or otherwise, we can use ANYTHING we want, content wise. My partner and I would greatly appreciate the help

So uh, I changed the theme and a few other things related to the site. I liked the previous theme just fine, but I found a better one that I liked better. It has a little more color and the font is smaller…which I like. I also figured out a way to enable comments for the static pages. Looking back I don’t know why I wanted to do that in the first place…but yea, you can comment on the other pages now if you really want to. If things get too stupid I’ll just disable them again :p. I also merged the ‘Contact’ page with the ‘About’ page because having those two seperate pages seemed a little redundant. Also I wanted an ‘Other’ page so that I can post content that doesn’t really pertain directly to Doom/Game projects. Oh, I also thought it would be cool put up an RSS widget for the Wads-In-Progress site. It’ll show the 5 latest entires at WIP, so that’s cool. Let’s see…anything else?

Today I had my Game Design class. The class isn’t all that bad actually though it’s focused more on the game development process and the history of video games than the more technical side of game design. Throughout the semester we pair up into groups of two and make an original game based off what we’ve learned so far. Oh, did I mention that we use GameMaker? Yuck, I know…that’s one thing I don’t really care for in this class. But I digress, we had another original game assignment assigned to us tonight. I paired up with this guy who is a programmer at his job, which is really cool for a number of reasons. The previous game he made was pretty awesome in respect to the programming, so I’m really looking forward to working with him. We decided that we would try to make a Smash TV clone, named Blast TV [heh]. It’s going to play pretty much like the original just with new graphics, sounds, etc. My job tonight was to help search for some sprites, namely a top-down view player sprite with 8 rotations. For some reason they are incredibly hard to come by, so I decided to make my own. I found a pretty good base graphic to work off of, and this is what came out the other end of GIMP:8 degrees of rotation and walking frames (with and without a firing frame). I think they came out pretty good considering that I made them in a few hours. Hopefully he’s not too big though…we didn’t really get around to discussing sprite proportions or anything like that. If anyone wants to use these sprites, just let me know and I’ll upload a .bmp version of the sprite sheet. I’ll also eventually upload two other original games that I made in this class; both use sprites from id games . However both are pretty uninspired and sucky…but what do I care, I did it for school.

I had a pretty decent Halloween holiday. The day started off with me getting up late and then helping my mom fix some of this god-awful cabbage stew. From there I went to go and pick up my grandmother and bring her to our house…and then we just kind of didn’t do much of anything but talk. I was going to carve a pumpkin…but it was getting too late. Around 7 pm I we started out to take my littlest sister to go trick or treating. A few days before it was really cold and I was sort of dreading that it would be just as cold on Halloween. But thankfully it had warmed up quite a bit…though towards the end of the night it started to get pretty chilly. Anyways, we get about halfway around the block (not a traditional block, just a big circle that connect back to our street) and we’re getting ready to walk over a hill. We’re right at the top of the hill when some fucking idiot with North Caroline tag flys over the other side of the hill and nearly runs us all over. On Halloween. When there are hundreds of kids out alongside the road. And this guy has got to be over the speedlimit by many times over. Naturally, I was pissed. I grabbed a rock and threw it at the car but he was already gone.

Thankfully we all made it out of Halloween alive and my little sister scored a nice chunk of candy (which I then proceeded to mooch off of :p). When we got back to the house everyone ate that nasty stew, so I made me some tomato soup instead. Everyone left, I went to my room to play some 360 then went to bed…it was a pretty good day. I took some pictures of the pumpkins and other things, but my camera seems to be on the fritz :/. If I can get it cooperating I’ll remember to plaster them here. Though I’ve got pictures from last year…I think. Maybe I’ll just post them instead…or maybe not.

In other news I started a new game of Crackdown this Halloween night since, for some reason, my savegame went corrupt. I actually haven’t touch my 360 in a few months so it was kinda nice to just completely start over. I was contemplating whether or not I should grab the DLC for the new weapons and stuff because I have some points to spare. I might hold off until the new Halo 3 maps are out, just in case. Anyways, I really enjoy this game…it’s sorta like an over-the-top GTA with the roles reversed. By now the game is old-hat to most people since it’s been out for a while. But it really is fun, I can play it and the hours just melt away. I haven’t tried the online COOP yet though. If someone has the game, hit me up sometime and maybe we can play some COOP

And that’s it for now. I gots schoolworks to do