making a doom wad - replacing the status bar doomguy sprites

around 3 weeks ago i was messing about with my windows 2000 laptop (her name is penelope :3) and figured "hey doom's pretty old,, i bet its not that hard to make a map for it" and thats how i decided to recreate the rotfront area from signalis in doom :P

my initial intent was just the map itself with no custom textures or anything like that but i feel like to make it actually interesting i should do a bit more so i decided to put the signalis textures in the game since i already had those from the time i was making blender fan art for the game and why not replace doomguy with elster too??

my first idea was simply grabbing and cropping this elster image from the signalis game files

I was going to simply draw the different facial expressions on top of this and then downscale the whole image to the size the game required but this just didn't work, the portrait is already only like 80 pixels wide but for it to display properly in doom it needs to be around 30 pixels wide which is just not enough pixels for the downscaling to look at all legible,,,

So I decided to just kinda trace over the downscaled version and tweak it from there,

This was the very first version of that,, I actually kind of like how she looks but she didn't really look right inside the game, her face was a bit too long and the hat wasn't helping,,

Here she is without the hat and with slightly more saturated colors since in the previous version her skin rendered as gray inside of doom. Tho her face was still a bit too long and her hair isnt the right color :P

After a couple hours of tweaking and testing in game I ended up with this design,, the hair color was by far the hardest thing to get right considering doom’s color palette, it’s not just 256 colors but also there’s barely any blues and they’re all fully saturated which proved to be extremely annoying when trying to get certain signalis textures into the game,,,

This is the full spritesheet,, it replaces every doomguy sprite except the godmode one since it isnt used in my wad,,

the higher damage levels are just elster's outer faceplate breaking away revealing her robot parts underneath similar to the scene in the beginning of signalis where her face melts away,, also the highest one she loses her right eye like she does in the game after her encounter with adler at the red gate.

another detail i think is kinda important is her eye color,, in some of her signalis portraits its depicted as blue with a little red dot right in the middle since i only had 1 single pixel to work with i decided to go with red for all sprites except the death one. i interpret the red eyes as some sort of combat mode (this is not an original idea i just vaguely remember seeing someone on twitter suggesting this like over 2 years ago, it might have been @arainydancer since im pretty sure i've seen her make use of this idea in her animations but this is just a guess i have no way of finding out who exactly originated the idea >.<).

to me the blue eye in the death sprite is her instinctively disabling combat mode as all her memories with ariane flash before her eyes when she dies,,,

i had never really done pixel art before this and these sprites arent like amazing or anything but im still really proud of how they turned out, i think i managed to do a pretty good job all things considered :3

it'll still take a bit before the wad is ready for release but when it happens i will post about it here and most likely host it for download on my neocities or something :3