FRAG: First Draft of New Rulebook

Below are screengrabs showing a first pass at my next rulebook FRAG. FRAG is a simple d6 based wargame where squads of FPS heroes fight hordes of monsters. The artwork is just stuff found online and added to look pretty for my gaming group, so I’ll be looking for commissioned pieces of art closer to final release.

Current armies are: Space Marines, Hell, and the Old Ones. The Old One list is only half-done, and the list is already so huge it’ll probably end up pruned or split off.

Work on the system is ongoing. Future updates will add The Order (Heretic/Hexen) and the SS Paranormal Division. I also want to make a list of themed NPC-type characters who live on the worlds each faction visits, like cops/guards/WW2 GIs, etc.

28mm Doomguys

You can make Doomguys pretty easily using Maelstrom’s Edge plastics and Pig Iron’s system trooper helmets. I’ve gone one step further and used Hasslefree weapons to equip mine with shotguns, chainguns, plasma rifles, rocket launchers (minor converting required) and super shotguns. There are also engineer and medic variants, and an officer with an oversized pistol. I’m still painting the 7 objective markers – 3 skulls, 3 key cards, and a small pet rabbit.

These guys are being used for my wargame FRAG, a mass battle system inspired by 90s FPS games.

Quake and Texturing in Video Games

I can get quite anal about texture alignment in levels, so it’s nice to spot even minor errors in the commercial Id games. Quake’s e2m1 has a fairly infamous misaligned wall, but Doom and Quake both have lots of tiny, barely noticeable instances of textures misaligned or cut off due to awkwardly sized or sloped rooms.

Doom: Demonsteele

The Doom community is full of fantastically creative people and the above pictures are one example of this. These two characters are from TerminusEst’s mod Demonsteele. It turns Doom into 1st person Devil May Cry.

The first picture was originally posted on Tumblr by a user known as greenlegacy. The second picture was posted on Tumblr by a user known as
nankakurashiki.

E1M4 – Security Control

An empty version of E1M4 from my Doom 1 Episode 1 remake.

Knee Deep Again was my first foray into serious level design. It was made in Doombuilder 2 and is vanilla-compatible (it runs on the original software).

The aim was to remake Doom Episode 1 but offer remixed versions of the most iconic moments (ie, the stuff I remembered from playing when I was a kid). Level roster is as follows:

E1M1 : Spaceport
E1M2 : Nukage Tunnels
E1M3 : Processing Facility
E1M9 (Secret) : Excavation Site
E1M4 : Security Control
E1M5 : Specimen Lab
E1M6 : Silo Complex

There’s no E1M7 or E1M8 as of yet. I’d like to finish the whole episode but I’ve since started learning some advanced gzDoom tricks and DECORATE functions, and want to finish a project using some of those.

E1M2 – Nukage Tunnels

Knee Deep Again e1m2 – Nukage Tunnels. Part of a Doom 1 episode replacement I made in 2016, my first grown-up exploration of Doom level design.

This is only the second level, so I’m still new to the software in this screenshot, but you can see an increase in complexity as my confidence with the software grows.