[SUBMISSION] Wretched (Cacodemon)

Lifted from the Doom RPG game, and realized in higher fidelity.

This is a faster, spongier, heavier hitting variation of the Cacodemon with a unique plasma ball attack, and a biting combo melee attack which has been retooled to play the imp scratch sound.


Name: Wretched
Difficulty: Easy
Connections: Cacodemon
Summon: Wretched
Melee: Yes
Distance: Yes, Plasma Ball
Type: Demon
Brightmaps: Yes
Actor modification: No
ACS: No
Credits: Anonymoose
Code: Anonymoose
Sounds: Doom IWAD
Sprites: Doom IWAD
Idea Base: Doom RPG

I really like the idea of a stronger caco variant, and I like the color scheme, but tbh it's not very interesting to fight them. I don't know how much they differ from regular cacos in Doom RPG, so it could be intended that they are very similar, but maybe make them more aggressive and let them shoot fireballs in a pattern or something like that?
Also I noticed the projectile's spawnheight is a bit too high, 24 looks about right I think.

DeVloek wrote:

I really like the idea of a stronger caco variant, and I like the color scheme, but tbh it's not very interesting to fight them. I don't know how much they differ from regular cacos in Doom RPG, so it could be intended that they are very similar, but maybe make them more aggressive and let them shoot fireballs in a pattern or something like that?
Also I noticed the projectile's spawnheight is a bit too high, 24 looks about right I think.

Yeah, sorry, I know it's pretty boring.

I fixed the spawnheight using your value. I was carelessly following the zdoom wiki without realizing it was describing the Baron combo attack. There is no example to follow for the Cacodemon in the gzdoom.pk3 or anywhere I can find.

I wasn't really sure how to make a Cacodemon more fun. In the update, I've experimentally adjusted the behavior so that the Wretched Caco can occasionally blink in or out, becoming invisible and unshootable while still pursuing the player. This emphasizes the way Cacodemons tend to sneak up on you. They will always unstealth with a audio/visual cue, giving the player enough time before attacking. In my personal play-testing it was an interesting challenge, hopefully it's not too annoying.

Maybe you could use SunMadcat's CacoBrute as base then recolor them?



It could spit multiple fireballs, or maybe a homing attack.

I like it. The sprites are basic but the recolour is very well done. I like Warhawk's suggestion if you wanted to make it a bit meaner and spikier looking. It kind of reminds me of the blue teleporting guy from the X-men.

Maybe if you make its movement more erratic or aggressive in stealth mode it will be a real menace.

It often appears in the same spot where it vanished, so I agree with Captain Toenail.
I think the easiest method to make it more unpredictable would be using A_Wander instead of A_Chase during the stealth phase.
And if you shorten the frame duration from 3 to 1 it will wander around three times as fast and can end up pretty much anywhere around you when it unstealthes to ambush you.

edit: i would also like to suggest to put an A_Stop in the Stealth and EndStealth states, so it doesn't float away endlessly in the same direction

Thank you all for the suggestions!

I did look into SunMadCat's monsters and searched through his pack but I wasn't able to find the Cacobrute. It looks like they are paletted PNGs so if I put the effort in I could re-translate. There was a lot of manual touch-up required across multiple frames to achieve the current result, however, so I'm not in a hurry to do that again.

I've gone ahead and uploaded an update following current suggestions/feedback. Thank you again!
This includes adding A_Stop while transitioning from stealth to unstealth, and using A_Wander with 1 frame duration while stealthed. Along with a few other adjustments, it's becoming more interesting to fight.

Reversed the stealth sound effect to create distinct stealth/unstealth sounds. I believe it fits quite well.
Adjusted the application of A_FadeTo to create much smoother, more satisfying transitions
Cleaned up general behavior and code. They now stealth when first sighted.

anonymoose wrote:

I did look into SunMadCat's monsters and searched through his pack but I wasn't able to find the Cacobrute. It looks like they are paletted PNGs so if I put the effort in I could re-translate.

Search for "SPIK" in the wad, that's the CacoBrute's sprites. All sprites in the pack are in Doompal, so you should have no issues translating the colors like you did with the vanilla caco.

Actually, since I already converted/extracted all the sprites that were interesting to me some time ago, including the Cacobrute, I might as well upload them so you can have an overview, maybe you wanna use one of the others instead. Sifting thru the whole wad was a bit of a pain since there are over 39000 sprites all in the same root directory. Hooray for PK3s! Anyway, here are all the caco sprites that I extracted from Madcat's pack and converted to palletted PNG:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j4B8BeFA5NiGJH_NFllTqUlHW5U0frAl/view?usp=sharing

I would also recommend using either SunMadCat's CacoBrute or anything that makes it look more distinct from the regular Cacodemon, even if it's minor details like more spikes, tendrils, etc.
Also you need to remove the "replaces Cacodemon" bit from the code, and convert the sounds to ogg.

Any update on this?