[Vanilla] [Doom 1] (Episode replacement) Grejsimojs (On /Idgames now)

[Alper002]

This is a project I started work on during NaNoWADMo 2023, and was intentionally meant to feel like an amateur home-cooked thing. This was in the hopes that it'd make the project easier to work on (seemingly less pressure and all), but it still took a while because it turns out that burn-out still exists when you have fun!

It features a few pieces of photo-sourced graphics (some of which see more use than others), with all pictures being taken by yours truly (Also some other new graphics that aren't that). The music is all essentially randomly chosen from bitmidi.org based on what I was able to find and recognize, and features things like Can-Can, Gimme Gimme Gimme, and Money Money Money.

 

There will be occasional mandatory fake walls and the like, but they've all got hints of some kind. If they still tick you off, I hope you can still find something about this that makes you smile!

 

 

You can find a download here! (/idgames)

A silly story is included in the text file. Not mandatory reading, but please do :)

This works in Chocolate Doom, but I currently haven't tested it on DOOM.EXE (Don't have DOSBox handy, and I'll just keep finding something more to delay this thing), but it SHOULD work in vanilla if you load the dehacked. Please report if it doesn't.

With the release of the second version, this project has received accommodation for the vanilla executable. It should by all accounts work as intended.

Edited March 2 by Alper002

[Yugiboy85]

Congrats on getting this out, looks cute as hell :D 

 

 

[galileo31dos01]

Loved that block of cheese and the airplane on the sky. So cute stuff, and entertaining gameplay. Thanks for making this!

[Walter confetti]

Congrats on the release! I remember seeing this in Nano Discord...

 

Sure that's a huge "early years of mapping"/90s style maps revival recently: Pandora, Back to 1994/Doom Island, Doom part 2, Wang, Warrior,Akeldama... Not that's a bad thing, mind you! I like to see and play more in this style!

[LadyMistDragon]

 

[Cacodemon187]

Played up to E2M4 in Chocolate Doom; very lovely wad!

Its gameplay takes a step back to give the exploration aspect the most spotlight, leaving you to your thoughts mostly while wandering George's weird world. It really captures that "innocence" that I attribute to 90's wads!

 

There's a bunch of memorable things like the plane and the cheese block mentioned a couple posts back, the mafia circle, the George statues, the lift fight at the end of E2M2 (my favorite part btw), the hilarious midi choices, etc...

 

Thank you for making this, it's a nice break from everything :)

[Uni]

Played the first map and thought it was excellent. This type of mapset is exactly up my alley, I'm almost obsessed with the 1994-95 experimental stuff nowadays, and it feels like something you would find in Maximum Doom or the archive, except it's much more competent and approachable. Neat stuff.

 

Thanks for sharing, I hope the other maps are as good and I look forward to check what else this WAD has to offer.

 

Spoiler

I really liked the secret area where you go inside the little hole, especially with the "Beware" sign. I thought it was really ominous and cool.

 

[RiviTheWarlock]

i leik teh ratte

 

[Peccatum Mihzamiz]

George is love. George is life!

I played through the first two maps and had a reasonably good time! This must be what a lot of 1995 wad playing experiences were like? Feels like a lovely homage to that atmosphere, with all sorts of purposefully whacky and awkward things. Thanks for making and sharing!

[Alper002]

Very happy to see people responding so positively to this!

 

Got some time to test in the real^tm vanilla doom through dosbox (patched via DeHackED, of course!), and while the maps themselves seem perfectly functional I may have bad news...

The MIDI2MUS conversions automatically done by vanilla are lossy and make them sound incorrect, which'd be alright on its own, but... it appears there are memory corruption issues!? With music enabled the game may occasionally crash with errors like "Z_CheckHeap: block size does not touch the next block" on map transition, but when it's disabled these issues don't occur at all. Of course, playing this mapset without music doesn't really jive with my idea of how it's meant to be...

 

I can't in good conscience say that vanilla really supports this if issues like this exist, and I don't exactly know what I'd do to fix them at all. I may consider it specifically chocolate-compatible if no good solution shows up.

 

EDIT: My friends helped me out, turns out the midis were formatted in ways that MIDI2MUS weren't expecting to handle... I'll release an update sometime soon which fixes this!

Edited February 8 by Alper002

[Alper002]

Feels weird to double-post, but... I've made an update!

You can find the download back at the original post!

These are the changes:

- All file names are now all-caps
- Text file has been revised to be a little more informative without context
- Midis are messed with to prevent crashes in vanilla
- E2M9 has a forced secret so the intermission displays 100% secrets
- E2M9 also now includes a previously-unused texture somewhere.

May throw this to /idgames soon if nothing problematic shows itself!

Edited February 8 by Alper002

[Cacodemon187]

Just finished playing through the rest of the mapset (E2M4 to E2M8). The circus map is definitely the highlight of the set, it's so precious <3

I also read the riveting lore in the textfile, it all makes sense now lol

Overall a cute set of maps to relax. Pistol starters might have some trouble in the later levels though, I imagine those get pretty tough if you don't have the plasma rifle and 30 rockets in your pockets.

 

Spoilers for the ending:

Spoiler

I adore the end screen :o Is that your bedroom? The palette did it a huge favour, it looks so comfy :)

 

[Alper002]

8 hours ago, Cacodemon187 said:

Pistol starters might have some trouble in the later levels though, I imagine those get pretty tough if you don't have the plasma rifle and 30 rockets in your pockets.

I can definitely see it for M7 and M8. M7's difficulty is quite route-dependent, and M8 has rockets + lost souls (plus partial invis being actually useful early on).

Won't change them just for that, though! Continuous is the way for a casual and relaxing playthrough!

 

Quote

Spoilers for the ending:

Spoiler

Thanks! :D

Yes, it's my own bedroom! You can even see the wall I made one of the textures from!

I ended up having to mess with the colors of the original image a few times to get it to palettize nicely (iirc I lowered both brightness and contrast to avoid a tiny section of the pillow from looking transparent), and I'm really satisfied with the result!

 

[Alper002]

This thingamajig is now on /idgames! Well, it's been on /idgames for a few days now, but I waited a little bit on announcing it because I noticed I accidentally put "difficulty settings: Not Implemented" in the text file at some point. It's fixed now though, so I'm alright with saying it's out!

 

Bonus fun facts:

• "Grejsimojs" is a Swedish equivalent to words like "thingamajig" and "doohickey"
• The title screen music choice was originally gonna be a different midi, but due to the duration of Doom 1's title screen being way shorter than doom 2 (nearly half as long), I ended up not going for it.
• The dastardly George became a little bit of an in-joke among my friends, and as a result he has made a cameo appearance in a project which happened to release before this one. I've still yet to play it for myself, but from what I've seen it looks like a jolly good time! :D
• I am bothered by airplanes flying overhead more times per night than I'd like (a number greater than 0 and less than 1, but still!)

[bioshockfan90]

Gimme gimme gimme MIDI - sounds like you and I have similar tastes in MIDI... reminds me I need to finish a project that I've been procrastinating on.

 

This looks cool, I dig goofy silly WADs made for fun. Would play today but I'm out for a night on the town. Will try to check out on like Sunday or somethin.

[Lisaancelle]

Fun set, the secret map especially got a smile out of me. Reminded me a bit of some of Monti's early maps.