Supplice - Out now on Steam!

[Steve D]

roadworx said:

wat

It's based on an American phrase, "Sex-bomb-baby," used to describe a woman of exponential beauty and sex appeal. ;)

[Mechadon]

I'm flattered by you guys, thanks so much! We're going to be focusing pretty heavy on the project for the foreseeable future, so I'm going to try very hard to keep this thread updated. Also don't hesitate to ask any questions, I will happily answer them :)

Lutz said:

Will the textures/palette be released as a separate .WAD for use in other projects (I'm asking for a friend...)?

Yea, I would like to release a "modding pack" after the project is done so other people can play around with the assets and make their own content.

We could probably do a separate texture pack release as well, but it'll be limited to ports that support large flats and texture/flat mixing. After we moved to ZDoom, we decided to cut out flats in favor of normal textures. So there aren't any dedicated 64x64 flats. We're also using an entirely new palette, and that will present problems when using them vanilla Doom resources. It would be really cool to see the textures being used across all ports though, so there might be some ways around those limitations that I haven't thought of.

jute said:

This looks fantastic. Given how few Doom resources you use, have you considered turning this into an independent game running on GLOOME or GZDoom-GPL?

Cage and I actually talked about this, albeit briefly. I've been stewing up designs and concepts for a new FPS game for a few years now, but that project has been put on the backburner for a while (for various reasons).

When the idea of turning Supplice into a brand-new game came up, I was going to use the lore and core designs of my new game concept as a basis for it. But after we talked more about it, it felt like it was going to be way more work than our little team could handle. Mostly in regards to Cage because of one really big facet - the monster sprites. It's why were still relying on the Doom monsters, more or less. Making from-scratch monster sprites is just a huge job.

Somewhat related, but Cage is considering restylizing all of the monsters by drawing on top of the sprites. I've seen an example of what this might look like, and if he can pull it off they should look really fantastic.

[Gez]

Mechadon said:

Somewhat related, but Cage is considering restylizing all of the monsters by drawing on top of the sprites. I've seen an example of what this might look like, and if he can pull it off they should look really fantastic.

So, the same kind of change that Eriance did for the arachnotron and mancubus? As in, it's still pretty much the same monster with the same overall design and animations, but stylistically different.

[Not Jabba]

I'm really intrigued to see what you guys have come up with for the bestiary--this Cage guy seems pretty badass. Sounds like there are at least a few new monsters in addition to the resprites?

[Mechadon]

Gez said:

So, the same kind of change that Eriance did for the arachnotron and mancubus? As in, it's still pretty much the same monster with the same overall design and animations, but stylistically different.

Yup, pretty much. It's something Cage has been interested in doing for the project, though I was a little hesitant at first because of how much work it was going to be. We already have finished sprites for most of the monsters that are either re-paletted vanilla sprites or franken-sprites; all that's lacking are a couple of minor monsters and two big boss sprites. So for the moment I'm considering the possibility of paint-overs as the cherry on top if he's able to do them.

Not Jabba said:

I'm really intrigued to see what you guys have come up with for the bestiary--this Cage guy seems pretty badass. Sounds like there are at least a few new monsters in addition to the resprites?

Cage is definitely a badass...a very talented badass :D. He made a thread here showing off some of his spriting work which you guys might be interested in.

Most of the vanilla beastiary is still in-tact. There's been some minor changes to some of them, and 3 have been replaced with similar-but-different behaviors. In total there are 11 brand-new monsters filling a wide spectrum of behaviors and roles. So it's not going to be a bunch of over-powered HP sponges or a bunch of redundant monsters. I'll probably do a dev-blog post about the new monsters at some point (without giving too much away).

[Death Egg]

Which monsters did you drop? Just ones like the Nazis or does this include like the Mastermind?

[Mechadon]

The Pain Elemental and Lost Soul have been soft replaced with new behaviors and same-but-recolored sprites. The concept around them is somewhat similar to their vanilla counterparts (with one summoning the other). But they'll both be late-game entries and have behaviors to match.

The Spectre has also been soft replaced with a new Demon variant. Slightly different behavior with it as well. It'll be sort of a combination of an Imp, Demon, and Spectre and be quite fast.

I did replace the Spider Mastermind, and its more of a hard replacement as well. It uses a Mastermind fraken-sprite and has a boss-like behavior. So its still meant to be a boss, and it is still identifiable as a Mastermind. But it will have a different gameplay function than the spider version.

The Cyberdemon, Revenant, Baron of Hell, and Zombieman all got slight enhancements to their behaviors.

There'll be no Nazis to be seen, instead there will be something much sillier :P

[Cage]

Mechadon said:

Somewhat related, but Cage is considering restylizing all of the monsters by drawing on top of the sprites. I've seen an example of what this might look like, and if he can pull it off they should look really fantastic.

I'm still thinking how it could look and gauging how much time it would require, but potentially this could look like this:

Keep in mind that this is a test sprite and it's a little rough (hands for example)

[Tristan]

Holy shit, that's awesome.

[jute]

Mechadon said:

But after we talked more about it, it felt like it was going to be way more work than our little team could handle. Mostly in regards to Cage because of one really big facet - the monster sprites. It's why were still relying on the Doom monsters, more or less. Making from-scratch monster sprites is just a huge job.

Yeah, the monster sprites would be a lot of work. I'm probably not suggesting anything you hadn't already discussed, but there are various strategies that could reduce that workload, like palette swapping, using shaders to create enemy variations (like the spectre), designing monsters that don't need walk cycles (because they float or have wheels/treads), and designing monsters that need fewer rotations. It's just striking to me that you are already so close to a game that can run without a Doom iwad.

[Salt-Man Z]

Cage said:

I'm still thinking how it could look and gauging how much time it would require, but potentially this could look like this:

That's fantastic!

Now I'm imagining a full id bestiary replacement PWAD (same monsters, new graphics) that you could load alongside other WADs; Freedoom, for example.

[Death Egg]

If that's the alternative to a completely new beastiary, if be fine with that for sure. I was worried unmodified monsters would look strange amongst the clearly defined art style of everything else, but that looks perfect!

[MrFlibble]

Mechadon said:

When the idea of turning Supplice into a brand-new game came up, I was going to use the lore and core designs of my new game concept as a basis for it. But after we talked more about it, it felt like it was going to be way more work than our little team could handle. Mostly in regards to Cage because of one really big facet - the monster sprites. It's why were still relying on the Doom monsters, more or less. Making from-scratch monster sprites is just a huge job.

What about using the monsters from Freedoom, at least as a basis for derived art? That would allow to completely avoid any copyright concerns that might arise from using original Doom art.

Besides, the new monster sprites by raymoohawk are of great quality.

[Gez]

Unless the aim is to sell the mod as a standalone game or have it distributed by Debian, there's nothing wrong with keeping the Doom monsters.

[Mechadon]

Yea, at this point, I think we're too ingrained in keeping the project a Doom mod to really do anything else with it. Making it into a completely new game would have been a lot of fun, but the idea came a bit too late into development. The only way I could see this changing is if we basically just replaced all of the monsters with new sprites, but kept their general behaviors and roles intact (essentially making a Doom clone, I guess). The project has really ballooned into a monster as it is, so I'm gonna say that probably won't happen.

Who knows though, we might do something entirely new after Supplice is finished; we could probably recycle some of the assets too.

[Urthar]

Cage said:

I'm still thinking how it could look and gauging how much time it would require, but potentially this could look like this:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/620293/archie-prev.gif
Keep in mind that this is a test sprite and it's a little rough (hands for example)

That looks jaw droppingly good, but keeping the shading consistant over every rotation and frame would be a staggering ammount of work.

[Cage]

Also now with more blood, gore and nasty things

[Mechadon]

I've been away for a few days (so I missed posting this until now), but Cage uploaded another spriting time-lapse video. So I thought I'd post it up here.

[Fonze]

Wow; the approach, process, and execution of that was amazing to watch! Fantastic-looking results!

[Mechadon]

Thanks Fonze!

Cage has another new spriting timelapse video up, this time focusing on one of the biotech pillar objects.

[Tormentor667]

Cage is a ******* O_o

[Mechadon]

Bump! I thought I should post these in here since I'm not sure they were shared anywhere else. If they already were, I apologize.




Cage and Jimmy have been doing a ton of work in the past few months while I was busy with Counterattack. I'm going to be revving up on the mapping front soon, so expect some more teasers in the near future ;)

[Revenant100]

Assuming they haven't changed since this image was first posted, you could rename the modified Doom 64 Pinky sprite frames to make the rotations more accurate, i.e. SARGA2A8 to SARGA2C8 and so forth. The original D64 and even Doom Demon sprites used the incorrect naming mnemonic, but it only takes renaming a handful of sprites to fix it.

[Mechadon]

Oh, that's interesting, I had no idea. Renaming the sprites should be no problem at all. Thanks for the info!

[Cage]

You were hired to terraform this rock. Never held a gun before. Now you're the sole survivor.

( https://twitter.com/CagesCorner/status/828726977741873152 )

More transmissions coming soon. Until that - stay alive.

[SFoZ911]

Very cool artwork Cage! I'm really curious about this female protagonist? I have no idea what to expect from this project but the fact that Mechadon and you are working on it, I'm really excited.

[Not Jabba]

Really nice art!

[Tango]

Those shots look wonderful, love that pink range on the demons. The remade hell knights look really badass too :D

[Job]

Wow. This actually looks so polished it hardly seems to retain it's "Doom-y" nature. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's obvious that you folks put a lot of work into it.

[grahf]

This looks stunning. Really looking forward to it!

Oh and the timelapse videos of Cage editing the guns was mind-blowing.