The middle frame of that set also appears while the player is firing continuously (regardless of damage), so I couldn’t really make it match the left and right ones. You may notice that where Doomguy bravely faces the source of the pain, I drew myself wincing and recoiling away from it. If the player takes damage, the status bar will briefly show one of these frames to indicate where the damage is coming from.
The fifth through seventh are also a set. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty rare occurrence when playing straight through one of the Doom games you keep your weapons between levels. The fourth frame is a wild-ass grin (even named STFEVL0), which shows for a short time after picking up a new weapon. I probably could’ve exaggerated those a bit more, as well! Still, I love how they came out - especially in the simple looking-around frames, where even a two-pixel eyebrow raise is almost comically smug. I did much the same for the eyebrows, which was especially necessary because Doomguy has more of a forehead than my Eevee does. I suppose Doomguy has the advantage of having, ah, a chin. Now I even kinda wish I’d exaggerated that effect a bit more, but I was wary of going too dark when there’s a shadow only a couple pixels away. I’d never tried drawing a sprite with a large palette and a small resolution before, and the first thing that struck me was Doomguy’s lips - the upper lip, lips themselves, and shadow under the lower lip are all created with only one row of pixels each. I tried to take a lot of cues from the original sprite, seeing as I wanted to match the style. The forward-facing sprite is the one I finalized first. The first three are the “idle” state, drawn when nothing else is going on the sprite usually faces forwards, but glances around every so often at random.
#ORIGINAL DOOM SPRITES FULL#
The top row shows all eight frames at full health. (I only notice right now that some of the original sprites are even a full 31 pixels tall and draw over the top border that I was so careful to stay out of!)Īnyway, this is a representative sample of the Doom mugshot poses. I extremely can’t be assed to check all of those offsets for over a dozen sprites, so I just told ImageMagick to center them. I drew all of my sprites at that size, but the originals are all cropped and have varying offsets (part of the Doom sprite format). The available space in the status bar is 35×31, of which a couple pixels go to an inset border, leaving 33×30. The original sprites might not be quite aligned correctly in the above image. Oh, well I didn’t even notice until I zoomed in just now. I also notice that there are two columns of identical pixels in each eye! I fixed that in the glance to the right, but must’ve forgotten about it here. You can see some of the side effects of that here: the face doesn’t actually turn when glancing around, because hoo boy that would’ve been a lot of work, and so the cheek fluff is visible on both sides. In the end, I made the eyes basically black, though with a couple pixels of very dark blue in them.Īfter I decided to make the full set, I started by making a neutral and completely healthy front pose, then derived the others from that (with a very complicated system of layers).
The Doom palette doesn’t have a lot of subtle colors, and its blues in particular are incredibly bad. The blue eyes in my original just do not work at all. Doom Wiki has a whole article on the mugshot if you’re interested.) (This is STFST20, a frame from the default three-frame “glacing around” animation that plays when the player has between 40 and 59 health. The most significant change I made between the original sprite and the final set was the eye color: I ended up using a lot more dark yellows than I would normally, and thankfully it worked out pretty well. I even struggled with the color of the mane a bit - I usually color it with pretty pale colors, but Doom only has a couple of those, and they’re very saturated. I originally wanted the god mode sprite to be a Sylveon, but Sylveon is made of pink and azure and blurple, and I don’t think I could’ve pulled it off with this set of colors.
#ORIGINAL DOOM SPRITES SOFTWARE#
(And nowadays, GZDoom includes a truecolor software renderer, so the palette is becoming less and less important.) I guess they had no reason to optimize for people trying to add arbitrary art to the game 25 years later, though.
Thank goodness Eevees are brown! The game does have to draw arbitrary levels of darkness all with the same palette, which partly explains the number of dark colors and gradients - but I believe a number of the colors are exact duplicates, so close they might as well be duplicates, or completely unused in stock Doom assets. Speaking of which, Doom’s palette is incredibly weird to work with.