It's been a way too long time since the last post. A lot has been going on around my personal life – some of them actually good for a change. However, that meant all my 'TAGAP time' has been dedicated to dev work and not extra content like the blog. But now my schedule has cleared up a bit and it is time to return to updates.
So, what's up in TAGAP land?
I'm still on the 'assets needed to do a proper reveal' binge I mentioned in the previous post and doing good progress. A lot of stuff has been fully implemented and some of them was faster than I expected.
But to balance things off, a few specific assets took longer anticipated to fully implement. This was because the engine underneath has had such big chances that I needed to rethink their implementation. The main asset in question are doors – the portal kind that allow you to travel between different sections of the map.
In all the previous iterations of the engine, the sequence of an entity appearing from a door is composed of several kinds of 'fakery'. Let's take Pablo emerging from a door as an example; it looks like the door opens, revealing Pablo and then the door closes behind him. What actually happens is that Pablo is already in front of the door, but his graphics are cropped using stencil masks, creating an illusion that he is behind the door as it opens.
In the new engine, there is no need for the fakery; I can literary have entities walk through the doorway after it is opened. It's may not sound much, but looks a lot better and smoother. Additionally, now I'm not limited to having straight rectangular openings for doors as I don't have to rely on the streamlined stencil trickery.
However, this also means I spent more time tinkering with the engine than the actual asset part, mainly cleaning the code base from the 15+ year old 'fakery' version and its variables. And while I was at it, I also re-did all the other map segment transitions – teleports, entity spawners, hidden transitions, etc. All of these had their own kinds of fakery going on that is no longer needed.
But hey, now that is done, it is back to the regular asset grind. I'm about half-way through the list and have over 250 megabytes of (compressed) art assets, so even though my timing estimates were off, it was so in a way that I'm still on schedule.
On a related side tangent; The Next Game has tons of new features and rendering techniques. However, the way I've managed to optimize things like the shader handling and stripping away no-longer-needed hacks mentioned has kept the code base and the binary distributable roughly the same size. Unlike I originally feared, it all remained manageable, perhaps more so than before.
It's no secret that I'm a massive DOOM fanboy and that the influence of that series on TAGAP, both tech and game design wise, has been massive. For this reason I think a dedicated section on the latest, rather divisive entry of DOOM is in order.
And there are no spoilers here.
The game takes place in the only 'undocumented' part of DOOM lore; DOOMGuy becoming the DOOM Slayer and right after the first battles described in Eternal's lore segments – and before his 'entombing' described in DOOM 2016's Testaments.
Sentinels don't fully trust this man they call Outsider, much less so now that he wields unnatural power of pure rage – and for Maykrs he is something that shouldn't even exist. Thus he is put on magical leash, a tether that controls him to a point, making him basically 'the nuclear option' when it comes to battles with Hell.
The story is surprisingly cinematic this time around, having a bigger intro- and outro cutscene for each level and set piece. It makes sense, though, as big part of the plot is how everyone one humans to Heaven and Hell see the Slayer. And there are two plot swerves so damn good they made me smile like a madman – once you see them, you'll understand what I mean.
I think the game director Hugo Martin said it best, describing DOOM 16 as a race-car, Eternal as a fighter jet and The Dark Ages as a battle tank. As in, you can go really damn fast if you need to, but you are more heavily armoured than ever and very much on-the-ground for the most part. There's a true feeling of weight to how The Slayer handles this time around, from powerful melee combat all the way to constant RoboCop-esque foot stomps.
The main gameplay gimmick is the Shield Saw. You don't dodge projectiles, you parry them with your shield, reflecting specific hell energy attacks back to where they came from. When you're not parrying, you can throw the shield Captain America way to mow down lesser foes. If you want to leap a great distance, you don't dodge-boost like in Eternal, you shield bash to enemies from afar.
However, this isn't a souls-like. This is DOOM. You're not there with a thumb up your arse waiting for enemy reactions to parry them – you push forward, shooting absolutely everything that moves and shield parry things when the opportunity raises. It's every bit as aggressive as Eternal in that regard.
And there's more; hell's armies don golden armour and shields that are basically impenetrable. Shooting them does nothing but heat the metal up – but when it is glowing how, throwing the Shield Saw rips it to hot shreds. Finally, parrying green hell energy attacks powers your melee meter. There's a lot more to melee than one punch and a chainsaw this time around; you have multiple melee weapons you can choose from, with different strengths, unlockable features and charges needed.
That's the heart of DOOM, right? Demons and guns to mow them down with.
Monsters first, the demon gallery is an interesting mix of classic monsters re-designed for the medieval fantasy look and new behaviours to fit the gameplay – and new ones. There are a couple of very radical redesigns, but they have a lore reasons why they are like that. Especially the one I've seen a lot of complaints about becomes absolutely amazing once you learn the context of it.
There are a couple of really surprising inclusions too, from DOOM 64 and DOOM 3, which warms my fanboy heart.
And to kill all of them, you have big guns. Every weapon type but one has two featured weapons – for example Combat Shotgun and Super Shotgun. However, those are the only classic DOOM weapons, everything else is new to The Dark Ages – even though they do fill similar archetype roles.
My favourite (in addition to the shotguns) is what I call 'the bonk-bonk', The Chainshot. It's a slow, charging weapon of a limited range, firing a ball on a chain that does decent damage and, more importantly, can blast those golden shields like the Shield Saw does if aimed right.
If I'd have to pick my absolute favourite part is how the combat is organically directed without scripting or any other cliches like that. When the game was revealed and was told to sport both a melee system and bigger maps, I was a bit worried. Usually big maps mean going 'Serious Sam' and shooting things from afar, which would make the focus on a melee system useless.
That is not the case, because of one, insidiously clever idea; the projectiles made of hell energy are impenetrable to your weapons. This means you can't circle strafe at a distance, but have to go in, dodging hellfire as you go, into the middle of the fight. It's simple and genius. There's a certain, almost SHMUP like feeling when you weave and parry your way into the middle of a battle and start utilising all of your combat skills to survive.
Another thing that I'm biting my tongue about is the mid-game plot curve that takes you to some really interesting places. It may be that you already know what it is, but if not, I won't spoil it. But it's good stuff.
There was once thing I did complain about in my original draft of this (delayed) write-up, but that was fixed in the first patch. In the first release, the dragon fights had moments where you had to wait for parryable projectiles to proceed, slowing the game to an unnecessary crawl. But that is no more.
As a very minor nitpick, I wasn't a fan of the score going for a more cinematic vibe in few of the story-driven segments. Don't get me wrong, Finishing Move did an amazing job and are well worth being added to the Canon of DOOM Composers. The soundtrack is a banger for about 90% of the time. However, there were a couple of parts where the Hollywood-style pathos felt off. But it can easily be forgiven by the amount of masterworks like 'Unchained Predator' or all the music involving the plot-twist-I-won't-spoil.
Possibly, yes. The SHMUP-like mechanics utilised in controlling the fights could result in interesting scenarios if reverse-engineered to 2D. Not necessarily for minute-to-minute gameplay, but definitely for special encounters, like mini-bosses.
Now that I've gotten that out of my system...
Playlist is a regular feature in our Penguin DT blog; A chance to highlight cool games both old and new that I've been playing. As always, I believe that in order to make games, you need to play them, preferably with a broad scope when it comes to genres, so each day I dedicate at least an hour to actually playing games. The rest of the free time? There is no such thing, it all belongs to TAGAP!
It's been two months, so obviously I've played games besides DOOM. Previous times, with 2016 and Eternal, the game that I played right after DOOM felt like cardboard no matter how good it was. So, this time I decided to follow The Dark Ages up with a game I was fairly sure I would downright hate. Long time readers may have noticed I'm no fan of soulslikes. Back when I tried to get into the genre due to its praise, I got most of the genre titles for relatively cheap and was going through them one by one and bouncing off of every one besides Code Vein. I still had one more from that pile of games left and went with that next.
And you know what? Not only did I not hate it, I think its the best of the bunch and utterly brilliant!
The game in question is Deck13's The Surge. Released in 2017, it set within the confines of a research complex where the titular surge has fried the neural implants almost all the workers. This, in turn, has made their super-powered exo-rigs to take over their operators, becoming cyber-zombies not too dissimilar to the Stroggs of Quake 2 / 4.
The Surge is very much sci-fi survival horror first and foremost. The combat hyper-visceral, as you upgrade your own rig via specific parts you cut out of your enemies – and you have a great targeting system for it.
As with Code Vein, the setting either side-steps or gives context to all the soulslike genre cliches I dislike. For one, your hero Warren getting exhausted easily makes sense, since you start out the game in a wheel chair – the only reason you're even walking is due to the exo-rig you wear. I also have to praise the level design, as though you do have to walk back to the boss that kills you, keeping your eyes open rewards you with short-cuts, usually straight from the medical bay to the said boss' door.
And it turns out I loved the game so much I immediately ordered its 2019 sequel The Surge 2.
The sequel is also great, but has a very different tone, being less survival horror and more an apocalyptic action adventure. Without spoilers, the opening of the sequel happens at the same time as the first one's ending cinematic, making it an almost-direct continuation, albeit with a different protagonist.
Though I ended up loving both, I do think I liked the first one more for its horror atmosphere, writing and smaller but more fleshed out setting. The sequel, however, does fix several idiosyncrasies of the first one – for example you don't need to visit the medical bench to swap implants any more – making it a lot smoother in terms of gameplay.
So yeah, I wholly recommend The Surge and its sequel – even if you're not into the soulslike stuff typically.
One thing to know, though; If you're using a PS5, these are among the few games not 100% compatible with it. They are still fully playable and with greatly hastened loading times, but do come with some issues. As in the first one had a very specific way it crashed on me and the second has one specific shader completely broken. The latter doesn't sound bad... except that shader is hair; everyone who isn't bald will look very, very funky. However, the hastened load times were enough for me to ignore it.
The Next Game; The latter half of the assets needed for the proper reveal. Additionally, I have something less splashy planned for the TAGAP Day at the end of July.
On Playlist; I did a Disgaea 4 rerun to capture screenshots for the Weekly Penguin and I'm still going through the 'Complete+' post-game content of it. There's literally multiple extra campaigns waiting there in the modern versions of the game, it's kind of amazing.
Anyway, by the time I'm done with that, the unexpected return of Pac-Man in Shadow Labyrinth will be out. All my time playing games I've kept saying there's potential for something really creepy in that series – but BandaiNamco skipped the 'creepy' and went straight to 'cosmic horror'... and I'm all for it!
