AGDoom mod

Better late than never.

The new version is out, after much stress and a painful development cycle toward the end. While I'm quite proud that I've gotten this far... well, it was a lot of work for what may be a somewhat underwhelming update. But that's for you to judge and me to worry about.

I'm rolling the monthly update into this post as well, as both the monthly update and this release were meant to be released April 10th, AGDoom's 2-year birthday, but oh well.

WHAT'S NEW?
-New class: Surturian Ice Giant! The Ice Giant uses ice magic to freeze his enemies, and can shatter them with followup attacks. Be careful; your enemies escape their frozen prison. He also has a high resistance to ice damage, though is weak to fire damage. Most of his attacks are projectile, so the Surturian is a fairly complicated class to play.

-New enemies:
*Keeldrone (Lost Soul replacement), supports its allies by giving them energy shields, and is capable of firing energy bolts at enemies.
*Terror Wing (Cacodemon replacement), performs aerial sweeps while continuously firing, can fire energy bolts at unfavorable ranges/angles, and can crash into the player on death.
*Holo-Unit (Pain Elemental replacement), a stationary projector that projects a hostile hologram that performs an Archvile-like attack. The Holo-Unit is non-physical, cannot be killed directly, and can phase through physical objects to chase you. Its projector, however, is immobile and incapable of attack. Track down its projector to destroy the Holo-Unit.
*Tormentomech (Mancubus replacement), fires an arc of energy projectiles at long range, and a whole salvo of grenades at close range. Explodes on death.

-More HUD additions. Powerups no longer color tint your screen and instead have timer bars on the left side. The ammo indicator trades an icon in favor of a color-coded box (which matches the weapon class) containing the number. Selected inventory item appears where the inventory bar pops up when changing selected inventory. Acquired keys appear at the bottom-left side of the screen. As always, the classic Doom HUD is always available if you would prefer it.

-New feature: The PDA. It's an inventory item all characters have and is never "consumed". Your PDA will tell you all sorts of helpful stuff regarding your class, acquired weapons, and slain enemies, as well as tidbits of lore. If you're ever confused about the way a class or its weapons are meant to function, maybe check the PDA. The PDA is meant to eventually phase out the Hitchhiker's Guide manual.

-New feature: On-the-fly enemy swap. Change the entire enemy faction you're facing in AGD's options menu under "Enemy Forces". Supports original AGDoom enemies, Doom enemies, Heretic enemies and Hexen enemies. Doom, Heretic and Hexen enemies have also been adjusted graphically to fix minor bugs and sprite positioning problem to make them a bit smoother and better to look at, and support new blood FX.

-Overhauled Fire damage. Fire damage weapons (The Bodark's Molotov, Sandman's Demon Shotgun and the Sentinel's Dragonbreath Shotgun) generally deal less impact damage, but set targets on fire and deal damage over time. Burning enemies can also cause fire damage to nearby targets, but fire doesn't spread since burning targets will run around -- sometimes even into you if you're not careful.

-Overhauled friendly AI. You can issue commands to them to change the way they move. Follow (Default bind: I) will have your ally or allies follow you and stand still when next to you. Hold Position (Default bind: O) will have them stay put. Patrol (Default bind: P) will have them walk around the area randomly, like they used to. Your commands are vocal, and so only affect nearby allies, to keep you from accidently changing the minds of allies you may have positioned somewhere else in a map to subvert a possible ambush or cover you. You can change the binds of your commands in the controls section in the settings menu.

-New pickups/powerups:
*Deployable Regenerator, slowly heals everyone within its radius for 30 seconds.
*Gravity Pad, a deployable item that vertically thrusts anything that goes over it for one minute. Great for getting out of annoying death pits without cheating!
*Vortex Grenade, sucks in anyone from a wide radius continuously before exploding.
*Box-O-Revenants, will drop a crate that spawns four friendly mini-Revenants.
*Invulnerability Charge, will grant you invulnerability for two seconds once used. Great for avoiding massive damage in a short period of time, like a parry.

-Class selection and difficulty selection screens have been restored to be more helpful and accessible. If they appear with small text and no icons or only blue in color when not selected, refer to Options>Miscellaneous Options>Disable Menu Clean Scaling and set it to 'Off'. This will not only make AGDoom's menu appear the way it's meant to be seen, but all of your Doom mods. Kinda funny it's set to 'On' by default then, huh?

-Nova Beam is now hitscan instead of projectile, and does 1d8 x 10 damage to make it more like Doom 64's Unmaker.
-The Legionary's Death Sheller (Class-7 Weapon) has been changed to have a manual charge before firing, and will fire until the trigger is released.
-A small degree of environmental destruction. UAC tech lamps and columns and such can be destroyed, sometimes varyingly.
-Bodark pain sounds replaced
-Bedran sounds replaced
-Algonquin/Cicconian taunt replaced
-Fixed Sentinel difficulty names
-Updated help screens
-Legionary 3.5 weapon sprites adjusted so he doesn't change his clothes when swapping weapons.
-Various fixes to weapon sprites to eliminate odd-colored pixels and choppiness.
-Bruiser will no longer stay idle until a player attack when summoned.
-Fixed minor issues with player walk animations.
-Fixed a bug where Keelborgs can have infinite health until taking over a body
-Fixed a bug involving player pain states being triggered without taking damage via Wire Wraith projectiles
-Fixed a bug where the Bodark class wasn't getting the right Transient Curse pickup
-Tekseer beams now turn purple when fired, and deal Nova damage
-Algonquin Agent has been renamed to Cicconian Agent
-Bedran Soldier has been renamed to Bedran Scout
-Beraltian weapon cast was (mostly) renamed
-A ton of various bugfixes and tweaks that I've forgotten about because it took a while (and two hard drives) to reach this update.

Small Cyborg In A Big Galaxy

This may surprise some of you, but AGDoom is just a mod set in a collaborative writing project that predates the mod by... a while. It only offers a small glimpse into the setting and a lot is constantly changing about things even grander than the mod (even though the mod is, effectively, the only public outlet of this setting's storytelling). So you may be surprised that I'm going to start taking measures to give a Doom mod an EXPANDED UNIVERSE but you should realize that it's been this way the whole time. Just a quick disclaimer moving on here...

The development for this latest version of AGDoom was absolute hell, not helped by life happenings and the occasional existential crisis. Now that this release is out, there may be a smaller-scale update down the line to reintroduce some stuff that is (in my opinion) not fleshed out enough, or was cut from release. Most alarmingly is this unfortunate fact: The Battleroid has been temporarily cut from AGDoom.

He probably wasn't the most played, important or loved class but I absolutely hate the prospect of removing such a significant element to the mod. But, his overhaul was giving me a really hard time and he needs a lot of rebalancing and adjustments. I didn't want him to hold the update back even further than it already has been so I decided to drop him from this release. He will make a comeback, new and improved. There's some other stuff I wanted to do, a Sandman overhaul, adjustments to Bodark and Rogrinian weapons (their weapons suck), but I didn't get around to it and I've been getting very burnt out working on this release.

So, the mod's going to be on a bit of a slowdown for the next few months. I'm not sure how much I'll be working on it in the time between now and then, but I know 'then' is vaguely around August or so. If you want more immediate and personal updates, I've established a Discord for AGD as a setting overall. Updates about AGDoom and related projects are there as are some of the other guys who've worked on AGD before. You can join here.

The next few months I intend on working on things that'll appeal more to my broader interests and hopefully help me return to AGDoom a bit more refreshed. I have a soundtrack remix in mind as well as a short story. In terms of larger projects I also intend on working on AGD20, a tabletop RPG set in AGD. I know a lot of that probably doesn't interest any of you much but worth mentioning regardless I'd say.

Hangar Ninety Six

Story time. I'm one year older and spent a little time in Chicago. I only narrowly survived.

In my personal side of things I haven't really been doing much in life lately besides working on AGDoom with minimal enthusiasm and tackling the occasional issue like fixing my car. I considered opening a Patreon for AGDoom and related projects handled by me, but considering how lackluster this update is, and how rough AGDoom can look at certain points, I decided against it. I'm going to try and pursue some freelance writing, but also probably end up doing some work at either a steel mill or warehouse to continue making ends meet.

I haven't really been doing anything especially exciting I can recommend to you. I saw the Mario movie, I guess it was alright. I've been playing Risk of Rain 2 and Barotrauma a lot. Those are good games. That's about it. I've also been trying to eat healthier, that's something I can recommend to anyone really.

I don't really have much of an outro. Maybe I'll see you guys next month. Who knows?

This has been Dewm. See you starside. Song for the month.