Let's Play Doom, The Roguelike.

[7hm]

Let's Play Doom, the Roguelike

I'm not done with the DCSS LP, but I wanted to try something different for a bit. So without further ado, my DoomRL LP.

DoomRL is a roguelike game based on Doom. This game doesn't have the depth of DCSS, so my intro will isn't going to be quite the same length as my DCSS intro.

A brief description of DoomRL:

DoomRL (Doom, the Roguelike) is a fast and furious coffee-break Roguelike game, that is heavily inspired by the popular FPS game Doom by ID Software.

Straightforward enough?

Great. Let's play.

...

Ok so before I actually start, some notes on this LP.

DoomRL is ascii, no tiles. If that bothers you, that sucks. The graphics are well done for ascii and don't take long to get used to.

I haven't played DoomRL before starting this, except for one character to figure out the controls and get a feel for it, and to make sure it was fun. This LP will pretty much be blind and spoiler free (initially at least). If you've played feel free to tell me what to do of course.

Similar to the DCSS thread, feel free to post your own characters and stuff if you're inclined to play the game.

You can download DoomRL HERE.

 

[7hm]

John Connor

Part One

These games are going to be played on the second difficulty level for now - Hey, Not Too Rough

John Connor will be the first marine to brave Phobos.

There has to be some kind of RPG element in a roguelike. DoomRL introduces various traits that you get to pick when levelling up. I decide to go with the pistol trait - Son of a Gun. It increases both the firing rate and damage of pistols.

Cool story bro.

I think (based on the two games I played, this being one of them) that the first level is always like this. That means there will be a building in the middle with some monsters and the down stairs.

Yep. John Connor spots his first enemy in the building - it's a former human. They have pistols and are pretty easy monsters.

Easy kill.

A couple more former humans, including a former human sergeant. They die pretty easily.

The sergeant had a shotgun, which John Connor will be able to put to good use.

After clearing out a couple more former humans, John Connor is ready to go down to level 2.

Stepping off the staircase, John Connor is greeted by an imp and a former human sergeant (I'm just going to call them humans from now on).

The monsters really took John Connor's health down, but he made it through in close to one piece.

John Connor finds some green armour. Green's the basic armour, but it's a lot better than nothing, so he puts it on right away.

John Connor kills a couple more monsters and finds a Combat Shotgun. It holds 5 shots instead of the 1 that a normal shotgun holds, but it does a bit less damage.

After clearing some more of the level, John Connor advances to XL:2. (Apparently I didn't screenshot the trait I picked, but he grabbed the Son of a Gun trait again.)

John Connor finds a knife, for that in-close action.

There's a small health globe on the entrance to level 3. That's good - it brings John Connor's health up without using a medpack.

John Connor clears out the level.

And then finds a computer map. I have no idea what this does.

Hell's Arena? Sounds cool, I wonder what this is.

Uh oh...

This isn't that bad.

A cacodemon? That doesn't sound good.

Aw crap. That was quick.

John Connor, level 2 Human Private, smitten by a cacodemon
 on level 3 of the Phobos base. 
 He survived 11127 turns and scored 4720 points. 
 He played for 12 minutes and 59 seconds. 
 He didn't like it too rough.

 He killed 34 out of 38 hellspawn. (89%)

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    13 former humans
    10 former sergeants
    7 imps
    2 demons
    2 lost souls

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  He started his journey on the surface of Phobos.
  On level 3 he entered Hell's Arena.
  On level 3 he finally was killed by a cacodemon.

 

[Jim Cojones]

Good choice of a game. I'm not going to give you any detailed hints, finding good way to play is huge part of fun after all, but there are couple of important things that can be found rather unintuitive for someone new to the game.

- you have a chance to dodge missiles if you're moving - well, this one makes sense and is easy to acknowledge if you read messages. You won't dodge if you move to a tile that would lie in a path of a missle,
- it is possible to see monsters without being seen. They will start to move in your direction if they are hit but they won't be able to shoot. Experiment with shooting from behind a corner and surrounding tiles.
- AI works in such way that monsters are going to move to the centre of maps and if there's a big room in the middle, you can expect them to group there after a while.

Last messages from one of my recent runs:

 Fire -- Choose target...
 You see : blood
 Fire -- Choose target...
 You see : blood
 You don't have enough ammo to fire the BFG 9000!
 You have no more ammo for the BFG 9000!
 You swap your weapon.
 You dodge! Boom!
 Fire -- Choose target...
 You see : a Cyberdemon (mortally wounded) [m]ore | floor
 The missile hits the Cyberdemon. The missile hits the Cyberdemon. The
 missile hits the Cyberdemon.

He's almost dead, surely there's no reason to be cautious. Dodging or retreating to heal is a waste of time, I can take him...

 Fire -- Choose target...
 You see : a Cyberdemon (mortally wounded) [m]ore | floor
 The missile hits the Cyberdemon. The missile hits the Cyberdemon. The
 Cyberdemon fires! You are hit! You die!... Press <Enter>...

Edit: another thing; it will probably take you some time to go that deep but if you have a chance, you absolutely need to go to the mortuary. And have fun there.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Son of a Gun is not a good trait to pick unless you're either willingly restricting yourself to pistols, or playing a Markmanship game. But if you do find one (or more) of the powerful pistol-weapons while packing the Son of a Gun traits, you've pretty much won the game.

Some better suggestions for starting traits would be Tough As Nails (reduces incoming damage, it's like wearing armour), Son of a Bitch (extra damage on all weapons) or Eagle Eye if you feel that your weapons aren't accurate enough.

Hell's Arena is a tricky place. If you've been lucky with weapons (and armour) before encountering it, you should have too much to worry about. Otherwise I recommend either skipping it or just fighting through one wave of monsters, maybe two. Just watch out for the consequences if you do beat all three stages of it... ;-)

There's a setting in the ini files that allows you to have your character start at the other side of the building on the starting map, i.e. almost right in front of the door. That way it's only a short run to the front door instead of having to go round the whole building.

Keep this up, it's always fun to watch people die in messy ways in DoomRL.

 

[Black Bart Charley]

Dont stand in the middle of the Arena. Pillerdance round the top square.
Good luck! ^^

 

[Azael]

One of my favorite roguelikes, also one of few that I have conquered more than once. Like the others said, Son of a Gun is only good if you plan to limit yourselves to pistols. This is somewhat harder than other, more powerful weapons, but there are some awesome unique pistols to be found if you're lucky and later you can go all John Woo with them. You should all Son of a Bitch to make guns pack a little more punch, maybe Finesse to make you fire even faster. Otherwise, traits like Hellrunner work good with this build since you want to move around a lot.

One build I've had good success with is a SoB/Triggerhappy one going for chaingun and later plasmagun (depending on what I find). SoB ups the damage of every shot and Triggerhappy adds and extra shot per burst and rank. Depletes ammo faster, but totally worth it.

Never had much luck with melee builds.

EDIT: Haven't played with the later versions. Master Traits change some things around I wager.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Son of a Gun isn't all that bad on HNTR, since you get plenty of ammo relative to the enemies you need to kill. It also makes the cyberdemon pretty much a free kill once you get to him. That said, I'd prefer ammochain in general, and I think the consensus among the best players is that you want eagle eye first, since it works with everything but shotguns, has the biggest improvement on damage/efficiency, and the traits it leads to are insanely useful. But honestly, go with whatever you want, all the different styles are fun, and I hope we'll get to see you make some challenge attempts eventually anyways, and trying out the relevant weapon styles is good practice for that.

Another thing to note: Shotguns are extremely good early game. That combat shotgun in particular. Combat shotguns, aside from the listed stat differences, have a couple other traits: they spread a lot less, and their damage doesn't drop of with distance nearly as quickly. You can pretty much guarantee a kill against a human or sergeant from your maximum visual distance with a combat shotgun.

The other reasons shotguns in general are great early on, is that you can hit multiple enemies, even lined up one behind the other, and best of all, at closer ranges you'll deal enough damage to cause knockback. So against those nasty demons early on, you can fire, step back, and fire, and just kite them until they die. Just make sure to be careful when reloading, takes a while for combat shotguns. Later on shotguns drop in usefulness, as they suffer double armor penalty, and enemy armor climbs deeper in, and more foes have effective long range attacks.

One final tip: Enemies have separate ranged and melee attacks, and will ALWAYS use their melee attack if they're next to you. For a lot of enemies, this is a lot less painful than eating a faceful of lead or what have you.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Later on shotguns drop in usefulness, as they suffer double armor penalty, and enemy armor climbs deeper in, and more foes have effective long range attacks.

This. Motherfucking this. The lastest build introduces a new "unique" enemy that not only has a high armour rating, but actually heals itself. Against this enemy all standard shotguns are pretty much useless, as you need to force-feed it the shotgun to do any serious damage, and it'll tear you a new one while you're reloading.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I hadn't realized .9.9.2 was out. I'm suckered back in now. Started a HNTR run, cleared the arena so far, saw lots of cool new stuff on the wiki.

 

[Damned Registrations]

.9.9.3 is out now. New uniques are kinda crappy, but new level quirks are very cool. I was wanting to do a LP of this myself but can't seem to get any sort of screenshot program to work, especially with DoomRL. What the hell did you use? There's gotta be something that just saves screenshots to a folder in PNG format every time I hit a button, but fuck if I can find anything that does that. Fraps won't save anything at all, and I've tried Taksi and Zscreen and had no luck getting them to do anything useful either.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

Try MWSnap.

It has it's quirks, especially with the Infinity Engine, as I've found out, but might be able to work. If you try it, set it up so you have a convenient keystroke combo to capture the current window as you play. That's how I've been rolling with LPs lately.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Doesn't seem to work. It'll only save windowed mode shots, and pulls me out of the game to do so. Hardly better than pasting the shit into paint. In fact, after some rummaging around google, apparently it's simply not possible to perform a normal screenshot of a fullscreen dos program. I can get shots of the windowed mode (Hell, you can do that just by taking a full screen then cropping) but apparently someone out there is vehemently opposed to letting me take 2KB screenshots of a fucking dos shell in full screen mode.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well it's not a LP or a screenshot but I finished off Ao100. Was trying for a perfect kill rate but I must have gotten jewed by the friendly fire bug somewhere. Blaster is fucking OP now that you can have SoaG 4 or 5. If I'd known I was going to get that many nice pistols I'd have gone for Gun Kata. Was hoping for a 2nd blaster but no dice, basically gave up trying to dual wield and just kept the guns for trophies. Oh, I also nuked a unique at some point. I thought they were supposed to be invulnerable but apparently not.

--------------------------------------------------------------
 DoomRL (v.0.9.9.3) roguelike post-mortem character dump
--------------------------------------------------------------

 Ilya Bely, level 21 Cacodemon Sergeant Major, completed 100 levels of torture
 on level 100 of the Phobos base. 
 He survived 252502 turns and scored 700577 points. 
 He played for 6 hours, 31 minutes and 35 seconds. 
 He didn't like it too rough.

 He killed 1657 out of 1660 hellspawn. (99%)
 He was a real killing machine...
 He was an Angel of 100!


-- Special levels --------------------------------------------

  Levels generated : 0
  Levels visited   : 0
  Levels completed : 0

-- Awards ----------------------------------------------------

  UAC Star (bronze cluster)
  Experience Medal
  Armorer Gold Badge
  Centurial Gold Badge

-- Graveyard -------------------------------------------------

  ###########################################################
  #.........................======...........................
  #..........................======..........................
  #...........................====...........................
  #............................==.................=..........
  #................===..........=................=.=.........
  #................===..........==...............====........
  #.................===.........................====.........
  #................===.=.=......................===.....=.=..
  #.................===.=.=....................===.....====..
  #.................=.X...=.....................=.....==.==..
  #............................................==........====
  #.............=..=........................................=
  #............=..==.........................................
  #...........=...===........................................
  #...........=..==.=........................................
  #..........==.====.........................................
  #.........=.====...........................................
  #..........====............................................
  ###########################################################

-- Statistics ------------------------------------------------

  Health 115/45   Experience 444888/21
  ToHit Ranged +4  ToHit Melee +4  ToDmg Ranged +0  ToDmg Melee +0

-- Traits ----------------------------------------------------

    Ironman          (Level 2)
    Finesse          (Level 2)
    Hellrunner       (Level 3)
    Tough as nails   (Level 2)
    Son of a gun     (Level 4)
    Eagle Eye        (Level 2)
    Dualgunner       (Level 1)
    Intuition        (Level 2)
    Whizkid          (Level 2)
    Badass           (Level 1)

  EE->EE->Int->Int->Fin->Fin->WK->Iro->Iro->TaN->WK->SoG->SoG->SoG->SoG->DG->HR->HR->HR->TaN->Bad->

-- Equipment -------------------------------------------------

    [a] [ Armor      ]   Necroarmor [6/6] (100%)
    [b] [ Weapon     ]   Trigun (3d6) [0/6]
    [c] [ Boots      ]   tactical boots [1/1] (100%)
    [d] [ Prepared   ]   modified blaster (2d7) [26/26] (B1P3)

-- Inventory -------------------------------------------------

    [a] modified plasma rifle (1d8)x6 [88/88] (B3P1T1)
    [b] Anti-Freak Jackal (5d3) [0/6]
    [c] modified onyx armor [4] (AP)
    [d] Berserker Armor [0]
    [e] large med-pack
    [f] large med-pack
    [g] large med-pack
    [h] large med-pack
    [i] bulk mod pack
    [j] blood skull
    [k] Hell Staff
    [l] Hellwave Pack

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    86 former humans
    153 former sergeants
    181 former captains
    95 imps
    24 demons
    114 lost souls
    37 cacodemons
    204 barons of hell
    1 Cyberdemon
    59 hell knights
    109 arachnotrons
    4 former commandos
    11 pain elementals
    157 arch-viles
    133 mancubi
    92 revenants
    19 nightmare imps
    41 nightmare cacodemons
    87 nightmare demons
    19 nightmare arachnotrons
    3 nightmare arch-viles
    21 bruiser brothers
    3 shamblers
    2 lava elemental
    2 agony elementals

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  On level 11 he assembled a gatling gun!
  On level 11 he assembled a nanofiber armor!
  On level 12 he assembled a tactical shotgun!
  On level 13 he assembled a micro launcher!
  He nuked level 14!
  Level 19 blasted him with unholy atmosphere!
  He nuked level 19!
  He nuked level 20!
  On level 24 he assembled a tactical boots!
  On level 27 he found the Hell Staff!
  On level 29 he assembled a elephant gun!
  On level 29 he found the Anti-Freak Jackal!
  On level 39 he found the Trigun!
  He nuked level 40!
  Level 41 blasted him with unholy atmosphere!
  Level 43 blasted him with unholy atmosphere!
  On level 44 he found the Hellwave Pack!
  On level 49 he encountered an armed nuke!
  On level 52 he stumbled into a nightmare demon cave!
  On level 54 he stumbled into a nightmare cacodemon cave!
  On level 55 he encountered an armed nuke!
  He nuked level 59!
  On level 62 he stumbled into a nightmare demon cave!
  On level 63 he found the Necroarmor!
  On level 68 he stumbled into a nightmare demon cave!
  On level 68 he encountered an armed nuke!
  He nuked level 69!
  On level 73 he ran for his life from acid!
  On level 76 he stumbled into a nightmare cacodemon cave!
  On level 79 he stumbled into a nightmare arachnotron cave!
  On level 80 he found the Acid Spitter!
  He nuked level 81!
  On level 84 he ran for his life from acid!
  On level 87 he found the Berserker Armor!
  On level 88 he stumbled into a nightmare demon cave!
  On level 92 he stumbled into a nightmare demon cave!
  On level 93 he ran for his life from acid!
  Level 94 blasted him with unholy atmosphere!
  He left level 97 as soon as possible.
  On level 98 he ran for his life from acid!
  He left level 98 as soon as possible.
  He left level 99 as soon as possible.
  On level 100 he finally completed 100 levels of torture.

-- Messages --------------------------------------------------

 direction! There are stairs leading downward here.
 Just one more! Just one more! Will you die here? Press <Enter>...  
 You see : an armor shard | floor
 Do you want to use the dangerous Angel Arm?? [y/n] You activate the Angel
 Arm! Your life is drained! You feel relatively safe now.
 You use a phase device. You feel yanked in an non-existing direction!
 You use a Hell Staff. You feel yanked in an non-existing direction!
 Run - direction...
 Run - direction...
 You feel vulnerable again.
 Run - direction...
 There are stairs leading downward here.
 You swap your weapon. There are stairs leading downward here.
 You swap your weapon. There are stairs leading downward here.
 You did it! You completed 100 levels of DoomRL! You're the champion! Press
 <Enter>...  

-- General ---------------------------------------------------

 Before him 15 brave souls have ventured into Phobos:
 10 of those were killed.


 And 3 couldn't handle the stress and committed a stupid suicide.

 Some rumours though, say that the Cyberdemon was killed already!
 Is he immortal? 2 souls claim to have killed him...
 2 killed the bastard and survived.

--------------------------------------------------------------

 

[7hm]

.9.9.3 is out now. New uniques are kinda crappy, but new level quirks are very cool. I was wanting to do a LP of this myself but can't seem to get any sort of screenshot program to work, especially with DoomRL. What the hell did you use? There's gotta be something that just saves screenshots to a folder in PNG format every time I hit a button, but fuck if I can find anything that does that. Fraps won't save anything at all, and I've tried Taksi and Zscreen and had no luck getting them to do anything useful either.

I'm using greenshot.