june gloom

More new work from my favorite wad author ever? Finally, some good news this year!

Something concrete might be forming...

Way ahead of you.

Consider this post a +1 for Eraser. One of the most atmospheric, even kinda scary, maps I've ever played.

I might be underestimating my own skill but I had a good time with eater29's Mudman.

This was honestly Cacoward material.

Not sure where else to put this. Doom is, at heart, a sort of sci-fantasy kind of deal. On just about every level it's a mishmash of ideas, of themes, of aesthetics. You've got the Aliens meets Evil Dead theme of the original game, the more epic apocalyptic feel of Doom II; the music, especially in the first game, swings wildly between heavy metal and MIDI dark ambient. The art assets are all over the place -- a wild mishmash of clay models, photographed assets (especially the weapon sprites), stock photography, a few textures converted from Wolf3D. A lot of the textures just don't gel together very well. Some of them -- the photographed ones especially -- stick out like sore thumbs. We all make fun of FIREBLU but TEKWALL is just straight up madness, no cohesion with the other textures. Everything is just bodged together. But the way it treats hell and demons is very much out of old-school fantasy, leaving aside the sci-fi trappings. But I've been playing the excellent ERASER and poking around with the weapon pack and it got me to thinking -- I want to see more like this. I don't know if it's just because I'm using a non-GZDoom port for the first time in a long while, but there's a gritty cyberpunk feel to this thing that I honestly haven't seen in a long time. Doomworld used to do a lot of stuff like that -- NIMROD, STRAIN, hell even Dystopia 3 kinda counts. And sure, you can kinda put something together using gameplay mods and themed wads... but I dunno, I guess this is just me asking for more cyberpunk horror stuff. Even if it takes on the slightly more abstract cyberpunk-House of Leaves/Marathon Infinity-but-evil aesthetic of ERASER, I just want something darker, less overtly fantasy (this includes the pseudo-Lovecraftian horror of Quake, for what it's worth) and more psychological. And yes, I'm aware of Augur;Zenith -- that's not quite what I mean. (If this is better suited in Doom General feel free to move it.)

In the original box art he's holding the spine in his left hand. The new art flips it I suspect for compositional purposes. (The image itself is clearly not flipped as he's wearing the flower on his left lapel.)

I appreciate Goldsource's clean, solid movement. I also really like the anarchic jank of Build. I'm full of contradictions.

You got me to install Nugget for this (I'm normally a GZDoom ride-or-die) and the atmosphere in this is just dripping. It's like if Marathon were evil.

Wasn't there a Lost Civilization 2?

This u? I get that you're feeling put-upon because you were (rightly) called out on your frankly insulting lowball offer -- and I remind you, you saw someone suggest $45 as a low end and you couldn't even meet that. But this is just childish. I'm not interested a dragged-out shouting match with you. You seem to have gotten what you wanted, so take your ball and go home like you said you would already, and let's see this thread locked.

I'm not your sigma. Prefacing this with the disclaimer that I don't want to turn this thread into yet another AI argument (and honestly it probably should be locked soon, I agree with that much.) Anyway, I think the two issues are coterminous in that both reflect contempt for artists. The same people who would pay Michaelangelo in "exposure" for the Sistine Chapel are the people who write pages-long thinkpieces about how artistic talent is an undue privilege and that AI is some kind of great equalizer that allows the average talentless techbro to rub shoulders with ivory tower elite artists. At the end of the day, it's about people like Mach not valuing the effort and time that artists put into their work, only the end result. And to answer Mach's earlier question: while I do have some artistic inclinations I wouldn't consider myself an artist -- I mostly just doodle. (I'm more of a writer.) But I am friends with a great many artists and I have a pretty clear idea of what the kind of work that, say, Don Ivan Punchatz or whoever can do would go for in today's economy. A measly $35 ain't it.

This is very much a lowball. It's far more realistic to expect the piece to run you $100 or more. Even if it's ultimately intended to be low-resolution it has to be scaled down from something and that's what's going to cost you.

Boohoo. I don't have any money either. You don't see me trying to get professional quality art for the price of a few burgers. Because artists have bills to pay too.