Somehow Antarctica Returned
Revenge of The Cyberpenguin
Last month I finally got back to playing some singleplayer FPS games, which got me wanting to make my own game. Then I remembered I still have to finish a Doom mod. So, since the last edition of The Hydromonthly I’ve largely been focused on that.
ANTARCTICA MUST FALL - The Return
After an almost two year hiatus I’m finally back to working on this mod! The three monsters I’ve added so far are now all feature complete (outside of some particles for the Cyberpenguin). Below is a short overview of what they all do, with more specific details on the newest developments further down.
Frost Fiend
These guys used to be called Snowdemons, which was an old placeholder name from when I thought it’d be funny to have snowman monsters.
Outside of a name change, I also updated the function that determines the trajectory of its arcing projectile. It now uses some trig and calc to figure that out instead of whatever wonky function I’d cobbled together for the previous version.
You can check out the code for the arcing projectile below. Feel free to use or modify it for your own mod, just put me in the CREDITS.txt.
Surprise Elemental
I finally added a death animation for these things, shown in the video above. The confetti sprites started as placeholders but I think they’re good enough to keep.
Cyberpenguin
The Cyberpenguin finally has proper sprites! Like I mentioned in the video, I still need to make some particle effects for one of its attacks and I might want to tweak the knockback a little, but other than those things it’s good to go.
For some context, the Cyberpenguin used to use the following placeholder sprite I’d thrown together out of some random images.
I threw together a rough sketch for the new look and then proceeded to model it in Blender. There were a few iterations before I settled on the final design.
You can check out some more high-res renders of the model over on Newgrounds.
Mapping
I’ve made some pretty major changes to the old MAP01 layout, but I’m still not super happy with it. It feels like there’s too much going on for a first map so I’m gonna shift gears to working on a more difficult map and return to MAP01 later. I have a rough story/map progression plotted out so I’m gonna do something with one of the other ideas I have there.
Other Monsters
I have some ideas for more monsters to add and even sketched most of them up, but I’ll share them when I’ve actually finished the sprites and whatnot.
A Bookwheel of Fireball Tomes
This is a model I made for Low Poly Day on Newgrounds. It combines a Bookwheel (an actual 16th century invention) with a gatling gun to create a massive automatic fireball cannon piloted by a wizard. I was originally planning on making the wizard the typical pointy hat and beard guy but making him a funny Shadow Wizard Money Gang fella was much simpler.
I made all the textures for this model using Blender’s shader nodes. I really didn’t want to bother with UV unwrapping the model so this was some good procedural texture practice.
Getting the spellbooks to rotate the way they do took some finagling with empties and constraints. I can share more details on how I got that to work if there’s interest.
Foodland Feat. Fancy Flapjacks
Last time I teased some fancy flapjacks I made using a Michelin recipe from a YouTube video. And now you can see photographic evidence that I did indeed make them. Twice, even!
The recipe is very meringue-like which is where the super porous structure comes from.
Here’s that pancake video I mentioned:
Next up we’ve got some pasta and meatballs. I cooked the meatballs in some olive oil and then cooked down some tomato sauce on top of whatever was left on the bottom of the pot when those were done.
And then there’s some chicken teriyaki, where I marinated the chicken and peppers in the sauce (plus some seasoning) before cooking it on a skillet. When the chicken pieces were fully cooked, I removed them from the sauce, let it reduce, and then tossed the chicken back in along with some corn starch.
Lastly there’s an assortment of things that don’t really warrant as much explanation.
I didn’t make any progress on the next proper video but I’m planning on rectifying that sometime this month. Same deal with the short story I shared in the previous issue.
I’ll see you again next time for another newsletter.
Have a good one,
-Hydro