Pipprojects 2̶0̶2̶4 2025

[thhrang]

Okay, I've still been thinking about this because I really want to try getting a ball rolling on something relatively soon so that time doesn't creep up on us like it did last year. Earlier I had an idea, inspired by the fact someone earlier in the thread was trying to make a Phase RPG, but cancelled it - what if instead of a ground-up game, we repurpose some concepts and make a mod (or map) for a game this year? Those are character/enemy designs and sheet art, sitting here within this very thread, waiting to be potentially riffed on for other purposes (assuming of course @ChilChakSack wouldn't mind that idea since it is his art, and also the RPG maker guy hasn't been online in a year).

I don't really have any true experience with modding anything myself, but I think we may have enough talent to make something work? I do like the idea of perhaps a DOOM WAD? I'm throwing everything at the wall here including the kitchen sink - we have folks like @Security who knows a lot about Doom, and I'm also pretty sure @RedRage has talked about modding before. Would this be reasonable to achieve homegrown?

The main issue I see right now is we need to get something started or at least in heavy brainstorming phases to gain momentum.


e: After thinking about it even more, I think I really do like the idea of a Doom WAD. As I said, we could utilize/repurpose/Doomify ChilChakSack's enemy ideas, and the setting could be a huge demonic Walmart or some shit to loop it in with a running joke. There are also users who are really good at pixel art, like @somethingfarworseinthehorizon, and again ChilChak himself too. The background music could be Doomified PTR. And we could even make a short 'behind the scenes' pamphlet thing too with the art of the enemies and some of its' development process in a similar vein to the aesthetic stylings of last year's cookbook (though obviously not as long)? There are a lot of opportunities with this idea, like having an actual secret room where the credits are hidden too (which is where some forum circlejerking would be more acceptable, I suppose). KF has had Doom WAD Community Projects before (and has a dedicated thread for modding too) - I don't see why we couldn't do something similar.

 

[thhrang]

So, roll call so far:
Security - Possibly design, map making, and sound
AO Cody - Art, can offer small help with his team too
ChilChakSack - Art, concepts
kanpainiggi - Knows how to code, however has no Doom experience; counteracted by having Pipprograming Sock buff

I think we may still need a proper experienced Doom coder? Unless @kanpainiggi can rush and crunch to become a master at it in a few months, I guess (there are tutorials). Regardless though, we also obviously still need to finalize a cohesive vision for how everything will function, and have a solid grasp as to what we're aiming for - I.E. what the baseline idea for the mod is, settling down on basic concepts and the like.

I was told that the ideas for the cancelled Phase RPG were along the lines of the following:

The Phase Connect "basement" was being corrupted and growing extra floors that were modeled after different hollow earth stories. The first would be the basement itself, modeled after an insane asylum, the second would be a mine or gemstone cavern, the third a stereotypical RPG dungeon, the fourth a prehistoric lost world, the fifth would be hell, and the sixth would be a glacial underworld.

We obviously don't need to take this one-to-one but something similar to this could be adapted for the 'story' (re: baseline reason for why the connected series of levels exist, nothing fancy and it doesn't need to make particular sense either - this is classic Doom after all). And of course, I feel like we would need an obligatory Walmart level (if we can manage to squeak out a map prototype actually in time for the anniversary like @Security suggested we may earlier, I feel like it should either be that or maybe a map based off Phase Warehouse tbh? And also we at some point would need to have a Classic-Doomified Pippa The Ripper cover for at least one level. OH and we absolutely need to make a Poptart Gun weapon).

creative and distinct enemies (these would be other Phase members, like an angry Tenma throwing beer bottles at you).

Like I said, we currently are early in brainstorming, however I already think it's pretty likely Pippa will be the one who ends up replacing Doomguy - I feel like it may be a bit optically bad if we make a mod where you play as Pippa killing Phasemems (regardless of any story context). I think we should attempt to keep the enemies as personified references to things/inside company jokes or mascots and Doomify them (we can obviously have some wacky ones though, doesn't have to be True Doom if we don't want it to be).

This is seen in several of the concepts below, in new art supplied by @ChilChakSack:



Obviously we'll need to truncate down to a proper-sized enemy roster; we can't use all of them. In particular, I really like the stuff such as the Lovecraftian Slimekin design - this is something I think is particularly perfect for current thread discussion, since we can pick out favorites, decide what enemy ideas will replace which currently-existing demons, and if we wanted to get particularly ambitious, maybe even custom new enemies to fit more? That's probably a discussion for later on, though. And since @Security specifically says he has design experience, I'd say we should also let him have priority in picking what ideas and concepts he thinks would likely be the most fun to fight against and create scenarios for.

Thoughts, fellas?

 

[AGumiLurker]

I think we may still need a proper experienced Doom coder?

I'm far from being called a coder but I'm someone who played and still plays a lot of classical doom mods(WAD's), if you want to do a Doom mod you probably won't need a coder.

I played a bit with classical Doom modding(I'll post some links on the end) and from what I remember most of it is just basic asset replacement, you use scripting/coding only if you want to change the behaviour(fire-rate, damage, AI, ... not the looks) of enemies/weapons and script objects(NPC's and more).

The problem I see with doom modding is that sourceports began to add extensions over it, like how DSDA lets you have bigger maps, more enemies, more advanced scripting and more, ZDOOM has everything from DSDA plus it let's you do even more advanced scripting, use real 3d models and more but this is something I wouldn't care about it for a pippa project, I would just go to the easiest(ZDoom).

Now some links:

The WAD Editor I used was the SLADE3
There's doombuilder too that aparently works better with ZDOOM, DOOMBUILDER
The DSDA-docs for wads are on it's github
ZDoom docs
Doomwiki Forum post that could help: [Vanilla Level Editing] Lesson 1: Preliminary Reconnaissance