User blog:ElectricFire 169/A VenturianTale Game - in the Doom Engine

No, not the 2016 remake. I mean the original 1993 Doom. The one that spawned a million mods and WADs and spods. I would use the Build engine were it not for the incredible number of bugs the engine has.

What!? Use a game engine 25 years old for a game about our beloved channel? Have you gone off your rocker, Electric?

Well, no. And here's why.

The way I see it, a 2D engine that emulates a 3D engine is the best of both worlds - you're getting a full experience for half price. If we made it in a full 3D engine like the Source engine or even something as low-tech as the Quake engine, id Tech 2, there is still way too much work involved for people like us for all the mapping, the modelling of the assets and the characters - there's too many factors involved in higher engines that we just aren't ready to deal with.

The Doom engine, the id Tech 1, doesn't have any of these problems. You still need to map, certainly, but in this case you're only mapping in two dimensions - yes, you can manipulate the distances and the sizes to make it appear you are shooting at targets higher or lower, but there's no actual looking up or down involved - just turning left or right.

Because iT1 doesn't actually render in 3D, this means it can't support 3D NPCs and instead uses 2D sprites that can be animated to appear 3D. Whilst this may seem like a step backwards, I believe that this is actually a benefit to us - sprites can be created by literally anyone with something as simple as a Windows 97 copy of Paint. A 2D object is easier to create than a 3D one, especially since literally no-one on this wiki is a 3D modeller. And if you are, then shame on you for not revealing yourself sooner. 2D sprites can be cool too, and watching If Doom was made today by Chubzdoomer proved to me that it is more than possible to create a fun shooter with really engaging characters and story out of a set of less than 100 pixels per sprite, and to put that in context, in terms of comparing that with the 2016 Doom that's the difference between 144p and 1080p. Like, it is possible to run iT1 games on a calculator, that's how simple the engine is.

Same with the weapons - no modelling involved, no using CSS textures you ripped from GameBanana the night before - just draw the weapon you want and code the weapon type to choose whether it's melee, projectile, explosive or incendiary. Thank you, GNU license for open source codes.

But Electric! It's so... so... low quality! How can you possibly think that any of them would ever want to play this when he didn't even want to play the vanilla Oblivion, a much more HQ game than Doom, without a graphics enhancement mod?

Simple. Because we, the fans, made it. We made it for them out of sheer devotion to the channel and the five people that run it - Paula, Jordan, Bethany, Cierra, and Isaac. They appreciate the fans, they love the fans, they'll do these things for the fans. And I can promise you that we will make it the best VenturianTale-inspired piece of work to date. Don't believe me? Just watch. We're gonna make something that you will all be proud of, and it'll stand among the classic 90's video games such as Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D (without the inherent sexism), William Shatner's TekWar, Heretic and Hexen, and of course the original Doom itself.