Supplice - Out now on Steam!

[Mechadon]

 

Supplice is a brand-new FPS game being created for GZDoom.  It is heavily inspired by Doom and other retro first person shooters from that era.

 

For those unaware, Supplice started out life as a Boom-compatible Doom project sometime in 2009.  Since then it has changed forms many times, from a simple megawad projects, to a total conversion, and finally to a fully-fledged original game.

 

We're on Steam now!  Head on over and add it to your wish-list, it would really help us out :D

 

You can also check us out on our Twitter and Facebook pages!

 

Here's what's planned so far:

• A full-length campaign split into 6 distinct episodes, each representing a different setting and theme.  Every map will be filled with things to kill, hazards to avoid, items to grab, and secrets to find.
• An original story told through gameplay, environmental set-pieces, intermission animations, and secret terminals.
• An arsenal of 10 new, highly destructive weapons, brought to you by PillowBlaster.  Each weapon has primary and alternate firing modes.
• Tons of items, power-ups, and gadgets to aid you in combat.
• A legion of biomechanical beasts, grotesque creatures, and ethereal nightmares that you'll have to contend with.
• A beautiful new set of artwork that will paint the entire game, courtesy of Cage.
• An original soundtrack crafted by Jimmy, with a special arranged version produced by esselfortium.
• A vibrant soundscape crafted by Bouncy, allowing us to bring maps to life with ambient effects, powerful weaponry, and otherworldly abominations.
• Possible extra features
  • A modding resource pack that will contain all of the assets that you need to make your own maps and mods.
  • An extra 2 episodes, planned as DLC, if things go well.  This would likely include 1 new weapon, new monsters, and maybe a few extras.
  • Extra game modes, such as Deathmatch, could be possible at a later date.

 

Dev Team:

• Mechadon: Project leader/organizer, mapper, and I've done a bit of graphic and coding work too.
• Cage: Main graphic and sprite artist.  He's also helping out with project planning, running social media, and is tackling the business-side of things.
• Jimmy: Musical wizard, mapper, and helpful person/good friend. He’s been with the project since the beginning.
• esselfortium: Another super talented musician, she's working with Jimmy to create the arranged version of the soundtrack.
• Pillowblaster: DECORATE and coding maestro, responsible for making things go BOOM!
• Bouncy: Sound effects craftsmen, he has also contributed a lot to the story and lore of the world in Supplice.
• Xaser: Resident GZDoom expert and all-around extra helpful guy.

Screenshots:

 

An album of older screenshots can be found HERE!

 

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave a post!

 

Edited April 6, 2023 by Mechadon

[40oz]

Heh, looks like you strategically took screenshots with a lot of blue in them so your shotgun/machinegun thing wouldn't look weird. Nevertheless it looks cool, albeit in a slightly Harmony-like cartoony way.

[Mechadon]

Nah, that's just the way Cage shaded it (it a faster firing rifle which replaces the pistol by the way). Though in hindsight it does make more sense against the blue sky, heh. Thanks 40oz :)

I guess I'll just trickle some shots in slowly since I can't post them all at once. These are of the E1 concept map that I spent forever working on which delayed our re-announcement :P

[Memfis]

ahhhhhh assymetrical weapon sprites make me cringe in the same way these pictures do.

[Mechadon]

Aaand here are the rest:




@Memfis: LOL...currently it is the only finished weapon, so definitely give any feedback you have. Though in this instance, I really like that it's asymmetrical :P

[TwinBeast]

Looks pretty! Are you going to use colored lighting?

[Mechadon]

Thanks Jimi :). No colored lighting, mostly because Boom doesn't support such a feature. Though this project was almost going to be made for the KEX engine (Doom 64 EX) so colored lighting was almost in its future :P

By the way, here are some shots of the E4 concept map that Jimmy made:

[Shadow Hog]

I'm really liking how much the cyan, bluish-green and salmon colors pop out, here. There's a few colors you don't see in Doom-engine games much. (Unless those specific colors are in Heretic or Hexen or such; played through them to an extent, but never paid that much attention to their palette.)

Fuchsia, too, but the Doom palette actually has that (if not many shades thereof).

[chexwarrior]

Looks very cool, the shotgun graphic is especially sweet. Can't wait for more.

[DeathevokatioN]

New weapon sprites and the screens look amazing, I really wish you well on this project and I hope you finish it.

Memfis said:

ahhhhhh assymetrical weapon sprites make me cringe in the same way these pictures do.

I can understand symmetrical level design but whining about symmetrical weapon design is taking the whole anti symmetry trend a bit too far.

EDIT sorry I misread that one... I guess reading coherently is a good value. ;P

[jute]

This looks really lovely. Could you divide the huge map into multiple smaller maps?

[Acid]

DO WANT. GIVE. GIVE. GIIIIIIVE

[Alfonzo]

So this is what was responsible for the delay of the TTV Jimmy interview!

I must say, Mechadon, this is most impressive: You have my attention and my unreasonably high bar of expectation. You may need a vaulting pole.

[Pottus]

It looks really nice but there is certainly one thing that stands out, it looks like a completely new game and just like Doom tosses in sprites from other games that is what the Doom monsters are looking like now. The re-coloring of the Demon dampens this effect somewhat but the lost souls look really out of place I think I'd make sure all the sprites are re-textured in the same style as the textures in the MAP's. I'd also probably consider doing something as wonderful as this in ZDoom namely UDMF MAP format rather than Boom considering that majority of players will probably be using GZDoom anyways. Good luck on this project it indeed looks like a lot of work given the timeline of development so far it is going to take a huge amount of dedication but certainly that level of dedication already shows!

[Death Egg]

Out of curiosity are you planning on replacing the enemy sprites too and making this an IWAD or just keeping it a PWAD? Either way I've been looking forward to this ever since I first read about it, and I'm glad to see it's getting somewhere.

[Mechadon]

Thanks again for all of your wonderful feedback guys! It feeds our motivation and I know Cage and Jimmy were really itching for me to hurry up and get some of their hard work public :D. We plan on trickling in more content as time goes by. Graphically speaking, there's still a lot of work we've done that we haven't shown yet.

jute said:

This looks really lovely. Could you divide the huge map into multiple smaller maps?

Ah, probably not :(. Generally the way I make my maps, they are interconnected like a web. So it could probably be cut up, but it would get really complicated. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it just yet, but I'm leaning towards vanilla-fying it and then releasing it as a stand-alone.

Pottus said:

It looks really nice but there is certainly one thing that stands out, it looks like a completely new game and just like Doom tosses in sprites from other games that is what the Doom monsters are looking like now. The re-coloring of the Demon dampens this effect somewhat but the lost souls look really out of place I think I'd make sure all the sprites are re-textured in the same style as the textures in the MAP's. I'd also probably consider doing something as wonderful as this in ZDoom namely UDMF MAP format rather than Boom considering that majority of players will probably be using GZDoom anyways. Good luck on this project it indeed looks like a lot of work given the timeline of development so far it is going to take a huge amount of dedication but certainly that level of dedication already shows!

Yea, I can say that I do partially agree with you. We actually had to manually rip, re-palettize, and merge all of the monster sprites into our resource because the new palette broke many of the vanilla graphics we weren't planning on replacing. So we turned that issue into an opportunity by using some community-made edits and some of our own to make the monsters look more unique. It actually plays into the story a bit. Then Cage tossed around the idea of painting over all of the monster sprites; essentially re-stylizing them but keeping their shapes and dimensions intact. I think this would solve the conflicts between our new resources and the vanilla stuff. But it would take FOREVER to do all of that work. It took Cage and myself a few weeks just to do the repalettization stuff (on and off, of course).

So as far as monster sprites are concerned, our focus is on two monsters which we'd like to do from scratch - a flying infantry monster and a new boss. If we can knock those out in a timely manner (by we, I mostly mean Cage :P), then we'll see about possibly doing the other monsters.

Port and map compatibility was something I wrestled with quite a bit at the start of the project. I raelly, really wanted to make this for Doom 64Ex, but at the time the editing capabilities weren't really there. I settled on Boom ultimately because it offered the perfect balance of features, limitations, and portability. Plus I spent close to 40 hours working on all of the dehacked and things that went along with it, so I really didn't want to throw that work away.

Death Egg said:

Out of curiosity are you planning on replacing the enemy sprites too and making this an IWAD or just keeping it a PWAD? Either way I've been looking forward to this ever since I first read about it, and I'm glad to see it's getting somewhere.

I guess I indirectly answered your question above, heh. Originally it was never our intention to replace the stock monster sprites. But when we forced ourselves into that position because of palette changes, we went ahead and added some edits to help bring out that new look. Ideally we'd be replacing all of the monsters, but that is a pretty massive undertaking for a lone artist. So unless we get some more sprite artists on board to help out, it probably won't happen. If it does happen, I suppose it would be possible to turn this into an Iwad. I don't know the specifics on how to actually do such a thing though.

st.alfonzo said:

So this is what was responsible for the delay of the TTV Jimmy interview!

I must say, Mechadon, this is most impressive: You have my attention and my unreasonably high bar of expectation. You may need a vaulting pole.

Yea I had a giggle when Jimmy mentioned the project in the interview :D. I think he was nervous about saying something about it since I really haven't been very open about the project's specifics. But actually I'm glad he mentioned it because I suck with public relations and don't say enough on my part.

You should lower your expectations. It makes life on us so much easier that way! Haha, thanks man I hope we can continue to impress you :)

Ok, to end this silly quote-fest, here are the last few screenshots of Jimmy's E4 concept map:

[Pottus]

Mechadon said:

Port and map compatibility was something I wrestled with quite a bit at the start of the project. I raelly, really wanted to make this for Doom 64Ex, but at the time the editing capabilities weren't really there. I settled on Boom ultimately because it offered the perfect balance of features, limitations, and portability. Plus I spent close to 40 hours working on all of the dehacked and things that went along with it, so I really didn't want to throw that work away.

I dunno, it just doesn't seem to appealing to have those limits to me when using UDMF format could improve the quality significantly as I mentioned most people will play it in GZDoom anyways. As for throwing away 40 hours I don't really see that particularly significant to the project as a whole with certainly dwarf this amount of time although I agree it sucks to throw away work but the benefits outweigh the losses I think. But ultimately it's your project and I encourage you to do what you think is best it's irrelevant if myself or anyone else disagrees with the choices made it comes down to what you enjoy doing that is my 2 cents on it all.

Cheers!

[Death Egg]

Well, maybe he doesn't really NEED those extra features though. Why switch to another engine that will be able to run this just fine regardless and end up losing quite a few people that use Boom compatible source ports?

[Pottus]

Don't worry Deathegg, he's already decided I personally would like to see it done in ZDoom UDMF but it doesn't matter and sure you don't need the features to have a really good Wad but the colored lighting, alignment features alone certainly would make it worth it but again it doesn't matter really as I said I want him to do what he thinks is best.

[esselfortium]

In my experience, the more advanced the port and map format, the longer it takes to finish something that doesn't suck.

[Ed]

Wow man, looks incredible! Loving the color scheme (and pretty much everything else I see).

[Mechadon]

Like you said, I'm pretty much stuck on Boom compatibility and that most likely won't change. But there are what I think valid reasons why I chose Boom over, for example, ZDoom UDMF. I'd like to explain them so you can better understand my position :)

One reason, albeit a small reason, was to force myself to stay within the Boom-set static map limits. I really don't want to make something like this or this for 32 straight maps. And I'm pretty sure no one wants to a play a megawad full of 2-hour long maps. But like I said, that's a pretty small reason. I could [or should] be able to make small maps no matter how large the static limits are.

Another reason why I went with Boom was because I needed no more or no less features than it offered. My goals really didn't call for lots of additions or changes; there's still the core of vanilla Doom resources there which the project would rely on. Boom's dehacked format allowed me just enough wiggle room to add and change what I want without the need to escalating to a format like DECORATE. The map actions in Boom provided me with plenty of room to get creative; there's the generalized action format, voodoo dolls, MBF sky transfers...and that's all I really needed. Even with the scope of the project steadily expanding, Boom still offered all I needed.

Probably the main reason why I went with Boom, though, is because it is considered a standard format. Because of that, many source ports are either derived from Boom or are compatible with Boom features. So it is very portable, meaning it can be played in all sorts of ports - (G)ZDoom, PrBoom+, Eternity...hell, even the original Boom engine if you wanted (ok technically you'd want to play it in MBF, but it should still run in Boom). If, for example, I restricted the map set to GZDoom, it would only run in GZDoom and only people who play wads in GZDoom could play it. I wanted a wide playing audience, and Boom certainly provides the opportunity for that.

There are downsides to working in more advanced formats as well, at least for me personally. I could start on a relatively humble project using an advanced format. As I work, I keep seeing those nifty features dangle over my head, and eventually I decide to try and make use of them. That continues until all the bells and whistles I've made use of creates something way more complex and huge than I intended. And the more complex it gets, the harder it is to maintain quality throughout. This happened with a previous project of mine and it ended in disaster. That also sort of happened to me with Vela Pax, where my port of choice got support for a node format which allowed me a huge amount of breathing room for my maps. And that's how those maps became so gargantuan (I set the bar so high so now I gotta keep it up for 3 more maps UGH).

I can understand why you might want to see this being made for GZDoom and UDMF. Ultimately those more advanced formats don't automatically create a better end-product. If anything it can make it much harder for the final release to be of high quality. Boom offered everything I needed and nothing more, so that's why I went with it ;)

*edit*

essel ninja'd me about the whole advanced port/features thing making it harder to maintain quality :P

Also thanks Ed!

[Pottus]

Sounds good to me, and I appreciate that you took the time to write such a lengthy response and again good luck on this one I know it's going to be a mountain of work!

[Fletcher`]

esselfortium said:

In my experience, the more advanced the port and map format, the longer it takes to finish something that doesn't suck.

Don't I know it. That's why I'm to treat Zdoom as if its Hexen at times. :P

[skillsaw]

This looks fantastic! I love the palette and the new graphics, although the right side of the gun sprite being blue seems odd to me.

I'll admit that I'm a little skeptical of your decision to use Dehacked instead of decorate/edf but I do understand the desire to avoid getting bogged down in advanced port features and keep things simple.

Anyways, looking forward to this.

[Katamori]

Oh my f*cking God, this is awesome!

[Da Werecat]

Very nice screenies. The new graphics are kick-ass. I was reminded of Marathon Infinity a little bit.

Memfis said:

ahhhhhh assymetrical weapon sprites make me cringe in the same way these pictures do.

Probably one of the weirdest complaints I've ever heard. :)

[kristus]

You'll get used to them, this is DW after all.

[Guest]

Seriously Mek, this looks even more amazing than when we first got clues of its existence, like, ages ago. And having Jimmy and Cage on board only means even more good things. :D

However, I imagine this means that the release date for Vela Pax has been moved from 'Never' to 'Even more Never'. Dagnammit.

[Avoozl]

It's a shame you dropped the idea of making it on the Kex engine.

I feel the aquamarine colouring in the textures looks a little out of place but the sky looks fine.