Design

Although not a lot has been shown or said from me about Supplice, we have been working on the project since its initiation over three years ago! Some of you may remember my initial announcement. And then if anyone has paid attention to some obscure posts I’ve made at Doomworld or my Google+ page, you may have noticed some small trickles of Supplice’s activity. Since then, Supplice’s scope has steadily widened to something even more ambitious than the goal set there. This past year has seen a lot of activity for Supplice, mostly in terms of the resources needed. So finally my small team decided that we needed to put together some of our work to show off and officially re-announce the project. Just to let everyone know the project isn’t dead and that are, in fact, still happily working on it!

For those of you not familiar with Supplice, I’ll go over the goals of the project once again. They have changed slightly from my first announcement.

• To create a set of 32 singleplayer (possibly COOP) maps from scratch for Boom compatible engines (using MBF sky transfers). Targeted ports are mainly PrBoom+, ZDoom, and Eternity.
• The maps will be separated into 6 different episodes, 5 maps long each. Each episode will contain it’s own theme and setting as well as it’s own difficulty curve.
• Map gameplay will be focused on short-to-medium sized maps with some large maps dotted across the project. We will try to focus on interesting layouts and encounters with moderate amounts of detailing.
• The setting takes place within the Doom universe and the story is loosely connected to the stories in Doom and Doom II, only further in the future. Because of this, we are creating all new textures, new graphics, many new sprites, making alterations to some monsters and weapons, and adding new monsters. The goal is to bring a slightly different look and feel to the project, somewhat inspired by Doom 64 and Quake II. There will also be a brand-new soundtrack courtesy of Jimmy and possibly new sound effects as well.

You are a UAC terraformer worker stationed on a faraway planet named Methuselah. Methuselah is an ancient planet which orbits an odd binary star system. The UAC is interested in Methuselah because of some unknown temporal anomalies that surround it. It’s extreme distance from any other settlements prompts the UAC to experiment with a very powerful teleportation network called the Flux Engine. In order for the Flux Engine to be able to reach inter-solar settlements, a number of flux gates have to be created on other worlds so that teleportation traffic can hop out to distant worlds. It is the job of the engineers that traveled to Methuselah to build a flux gate which will link up to a another distant UAC base on a transitional world called Bellerophon. Shortly after the gate is activated for the first time, an old, withered man tumbles through the gate, his sanity completely lost. Hidden in his ramblings are the tells of a horrific invasion by otherworldly beasts. Rescue parties are sent through the gate, only to find a decrepit base, nearly falling apart at the seams and completely devoid of any life. Battle scars from long ago plaster the rusting base. Fearful of the unknown, the military stationed on Methuselah send a massive army through the gate to the base on Bellerophon in order to retake and repair it. Orders are sent to the the engineers on Methuselah to close the gate behind them. Days later, the gate reopens on its own, and a few marines shamble through, some missing limbs, others with their skin torn from their body. Before the engineers have a chance to react, demonic abominations start to flood through the gate. They quickly overwhelm what is left of Methuselah’s military and millions are slaughtered; the planet is overrun. As the population is decimated, the demons being to die out slowly. You resolve to try and make it to the flux gate while the demons are dying out before being caught and slaughtered. You hope to make it back to the hopeful safety of an inter-soloar world. So you set off to get off of the dead planet before it’s too late. Although unbeknownst to you, it is already far, far too late.

Currently the team consists of Jimmy, Cage, and myself. Jimmy has made some really great tracks for the project so far and he is also looking to help out with the mapping. Cage stepped into the graphics and sprites position when it became abundantly clear that my art work was mediocre at best. He has done an amazing job so far working with me in fleshing out the look and feel of Supplice. I’m managing and directing everything in the project and I’m still doing some graphic work. Oh, and of course I’m still planning on doing the majority of the mapping as well . As of this post, we’re still working on textures and sprites before starting any serious mapping. But we are well over the halfway point so mapping should start pretty soon!

Jimmy and I did create some showcase maps to show off some of the texture and sprite work as well as give a glimpse as to what E1 and E4 might look like. Here are some screenshots, finally!

E1 Showcase Map – Mechadon

E4 Showcase Map – Jimmy

Now that we’re officially showing off content, we plan on dribbling more progress as well make it. What you see right now is still work-in-progress, so it’s likely that some of the art assets will be tweaked or redone entirely at some point. But we are always open to feedback and comments! We hope this will be as fun to play as it has been to work on so far. So please do keep your eyes peeled for future updates! Good places to check for updates will be the Doomworld thread, the ZDoom thread, and the Supplice project page here on Mekworx