Games like this are why I love NewGrounds. The challenge in this game ramps up perfectly
- leading to high-tension runs with an RNG that feels fair yet challenging at the same time. The 15k target is perfect for mastering all the details.
Reviews for "Gloom"
Kwing responds:
Glad you liked it! I wanted the difficulty to be a bit more interesting than "enemies have more HP and do more damage" so I thought the variable speed of the Specter enemies would be cool. When I experimented with having logs spawn farther away the difficulty curve just kind of fell into place.
As a devoted DOOM fan you know I was a liiittle disappointed there wasn't more DOOM in this, but it's a nice idea otherwise. Hella difficult with how you continually have to adjust your aim though and move with two sets of keys in parallel to work around that. Maybe you eventually figure out a camera pattern that lets you avoid paying as much attention to that though... will probably come back to this when I'm a bit less aggravated by the challenge.
Otherwise I love the atmosphere! Good games back in the day were always all about the essentials, and it feels like this plays on that early aesthetic a bit... even if it might've been more so a limitation they had to work around way back when.
Good game albeit with a little high initial difficulty; multitasking requirement.
-cd-
Kwing responds:
Admittedly this game has little to do with Doom. The original project was just kind of a "I wonder if I can do 3D in Flash" but once I made the engine I realized walls, environments, or even just more than a dozen or so objects would be difficult to render on screen, especially in a way that looked good. So rather than having mazes with keys and doors, I opted to make a desolate forest, and the result was that it didn't make much sense to have traditional Doom-like gameplay. I ended up settling for Gloom as a name for three reasons: one, it was a cute play on the original concept I had for making Doom clone; two, making a dark and gloomy game allowed me to hide the lack of objects in the distance behind darkness; and three, having a campfire and a light mechanic (hence the gloomy aspect) as a central mechanic was an effective way at keeping the player close to the center of a map where all of the rendered objects were (tricky to do when you can't make traditional walls.)
I did really want to make the camera work better (I've talked about this in some other responses already.) You're definitely right that the initial difficulty is the worst part, as it takes several games to get comfortable with it.
As far as aesthetic, thank my buddy Shin for the art - the atmosphere wouldn't have been anywhere near what it is without him doing a fantastic job.
I've got to respect your making a 3D game in a 2D engine. The big downside is I felt I could only turn around and aim fast enough to be playable using the mouse, but the mouse won't lock to the game canvas so if you move outside you stop turning, and that put a big damper on the game's fun factor for me.
Kwing responds:
Thanks! This game was basically a result of "hey, I wonder if I can make a 3D game in Flash" and developing the proof of concept into something substantial. Funnily enough, the function that does all the heavy lifting - called render() - is only about 20 lines long (feel free to check it out in the game description if you're curious.)
The camera was a big hair-puller for me when I was making it - hence why there are so many different controls for it. Each change I made (arrows, duration-based rotation speed, shift lock) approached something that felt natural but never quite reached the smooth, intuitive feel that I wanted.
I can play pretty smoothly using the mouse and shift lock, but it took a pretty significant amount of practice for me to start doing it fluently (IMO it's easiest to re-center the mouse before you hit the edge, so that you're never fussing with the camera lock with enemies breathing down your neck.) You can 360 noscope enemies by panning the mouse in the opposite direction, but this also requires some practice.
Awesome!!!
based