The mechanics behind Doomguy's mug shot. Music: Mystproj by Sarah Mancuso Lost City by Sarah Mancuso Drilling By Night by Stuart Rynn www.esselfortium.net Patreon: / decino
My favorite face is when your health is critical and you pick up a weapon. The smiling bleeding face of doomguy makes him look sadistic. Even though he's been through hell (literally) he wants nothing more than to kill as many more demons as he can before he dies.
Definitely the face that best captures the spirit of Doomguy. That, and the most bloody anger face. "My own intense pain, bodily damage and even very death are irrelevant. I don't give a damn about me. The one and only thing I care about is killing every last one of you fuckers." I love that the modern Doomguy aka "Slayer" keeps this exact personality. No more HUD face, but we know all we need to from just how his two arms and legs interact with the world. No ceremony or fuss. Just do what needs to be done to resume the slaughter.
decino boss forgot the exploding head in, for example, PSX Doom. It occurs when the player receives too much (threshold?) splash damage when dying. Merry Christmas to decino and all subscribers!
as a kid I always thought that shock face was meant to display when you just saved yourself by healing up at the last second after taking a lot of damage. I'd always notice it would happen if I almost died and then type iddqd really fast he would show the shock face
It is not disturbing, it's perfection. Doomguy is *the last of the Great Heros* to have ascended to Mount Olympus after having defeated both sanity and literally every demon in existence. He doesn't have to be alive to kill them, as his mere presence within the mortal plain was long enough to spawn kill every demon foolish enough to wander into the mortal plain, or if they were summoned by some whippersnapper. Doomguy has driven many of them into great lengths of frustration.
I like the little oversight where, after reloading a save, he always displays an evil grin the first time you pick up any weapon. It's like he's so stoked to be back to killing after a break that picking up anything to help him do it makes him happy!
The amount of times that the face has actually saved my life in doom is insane, it's not just a neat gimmick in the HUD, it's a tool to use to your advantage. I don't even play mods if they don't have the Doomguy face. Class vid
And it is even more useful if a computer does not have a sound card (like my first PC). Now, that I think about it, this HUD element is also nice as accessibility feature for people with bad hearing.
I experienced a moment way back when I was a kid where I had died and flew backwards -- I picked up a healthpack or weapon and the Doomguy smiled after dying... I flew out of my seat and didn't play the game until I was an adult haha I was traumatized by that.
When I was a kid and noticed the Ouch Face bug, I always interpreted it as Doomguy reacting to a shock to his system, getting a large health boost just after taking big damage and being generally overwhelmed by the opposing sensations in a matter of seconds. I thought it was very creative. Then of course later I learned they just fucked it up.
4:04 never noticed that the face looks in the direction they were damaged from. Often I am frantically readjusting and looking at the environment rather than glancing at the face. Neat to know though.
It's cool that his hair gets messy when he takes damage and it also gets better when healed so this means all health pick ups come with a free hairstyling kit
Doomguy's facial expressions scared me as a kid, but eventually i realized that everything in Doom had certain behavior, there was almost nothing of info about on my language (spanish). When i discovered your channel was like a thing i didn't knew that i needed in my life, you're like that cool, young science teacher Merry Christmas, Decino Just don't put cacodemon spheres on the christmas three 💚♥️
@Agent 005 (i knew that one, heh) On Doom betas, there was a slime-like monster that would be sticked to the walls and spitting goo to Doomguy but it was removed
I sometimes find it really unsettling during those moments where a critically-wounded Doomguy picks up a new weapon and grins through the pain, showing teeth stained with blood. It's a little paradoxical, but I think id software created a blank slate that any player could inhabit while also imbuing that player-character with a surprising amount of personality.
I find the fact people can look back and see those simple errors (like the ouch face one) and how they go wrong, in a truly classic great game truly delightful. It's a reminder that a tiny mistake can have consequences you might not even notice, but they are there.
Hi decino, could you do this kind of video on Doom platforming? What is the biggest gap you can walk over, what is the biggest step you can make upwards, how deep can you fall and still get back on the next platform, how does the walking on a thin wall work, etc.? Let me know if you need more questions about this. :-)
Damn nice mousepad at 3:39. But yeah, DoomGuy face expressions is one of the many things that made DooM so great, iconic and memorable. Having a speechless character where his emotions are only showned through his face is a awesome idea, it makes connection between the player and the character, it build a personality without dialogue and could be even used as a health bar. Great video and merry christmas Dec !
@BROWSER1100 Really cool looking mouse pad. Would buy it right now. I don't use one actually. I use a view case for documents with a sheet of paper in it. Works very well too.😀
Having a clear feedback of what your own character is doing or going through in the form of the status face makes it all the more relatable and makes the monsters and the environment more scary... in the latest versions Doom Guy is made to feel or look like too indestructible or superhuman which for me takes off a lot of the horror element that the original doom had.
Damn... That exploding head animation was something I never needed to see in my life. What was the creative process behind deciding to specifically include that for the console port?
3:52 I remember discovering this for myself, even exactly where, as a kid... I was dicking around with cheats when I just decided to make myself very hurt, using the rocket launcher against the corner in e2m1 after the pinkie elevator, I accidentally pushed myself to pick up the healthkit, and then found out I could make that face under those circumstances :D
It always amazes me that programmers like Carmack, that can write these amazing (sort-of-)3d-engines, could make such basic comparison-error in the source code. The programmer in me yells out "always use Math.abs()!". 😉 Awesome video as always!
to be fair, maybe neither carmack or romero wrote that part. or maybe it was such an insignificant routine that nobody bothered checking if it worked correctly and since everything else (in that routine) worked as intended they never saw that part of the code again.
@@sakitoshi Glitches that don't break the game are often overlooked. Final Fantasy 1 and Pokemon Gen 1 are classic examples of this. Those games worked and to the player, appear glitchless on a first playthrough, but are loaded with calculation errors that break several gameplay mechanics, some of which make the game much harder for the player. But the player is unaware of these bugs because to them, it's just a tough game.
Living Civvie 11 reference and nanobot overlord John Carmack clearly is a hell of a code monkey, but even back in the day it doesn't surprise me that sometimes simple stuff gets overlooked like that face coding.
@@sakitoshi There's this but running a simple abs formula( health = (health < 0) ? -health : health) can be a lot of instructions for a bug that won't break the game and isn't noticeable by most of the players and isn't worthy to be added onto the game
Decino: *uses Drilling by night*. Me: *headbanging to the tunes, missing every word*. Also me: *watching the video a second time, trying to understand the topic*. Decino: *sees this as an absolute win*. Great videos man, keep up the good work!
When I played Doom as a kid, I didn't know about how much health I had remaining, I always used the status bar face to know if I was almost dead or not. I would start to panic when I saw the Doomguy's face once your health gets under 40%.
The Jaguar version of Doom also used a whole set of gib animations just like the PS1 version, except this one had some differences and was a left over from the GBA port (According to The Cutting Room Floor).
I just love the facial expressions for the health. A small beating results in a bloody nose, eventually becoming a potentially broken nose. A small cut along the head becomes a large gaping gash across the head. A cut lip becomes a split open lip. They need to add this in more games
First of all - Merry Christmas :) ``damaged, grabs gun, grabs megasphere but still bloody`` - it takes time to wipe the blood of his face... and he got distracted for a second with a new shiny gun. :) BTWs... 1. Ahoy made a nice vid on the history of the idea on graphical presentation of hero status - "Chicken-o-meter." 2. The missing "ouch" got revenge with the mod of the same name (Ouch_m) :D
I like the little “art-by-accident” at 2:50 - creates some kind of genius slight variation in how he gives an expression, which is how expressions work-not always exactly on a rote formula.
5:59 This unique exploding head animation was also used in complex doom with its conditions for triggering being pretty much the same. The animation was altered a bit though
Very interesting and informative. Straight to the point and no filler! Love it! Another plus is the fact that the uploader is active and responsive in the comments. You just picked up another subscriber!
This made me remember another thing from the old manual... it was explaining the faces Doomguy makes, and says that "as you take damage, more and more blood will run down your face until your mug looks like uncooked hamburger."
Complex Doom for the Zandronum had also a wide variety of status bar faces including new expressions especially when you're on God Mode as well. And it seems to have slightly fixed the 'disappeared' gibbed status face.
To be honest, before I found out with zDoom that the ouch face was bugged, it made perfect sense to me. It was a face of surprise when you were so happy that you had picked something really good and suddenly you took a big hit. Knowing that it was supposed to trigger whenever you took 20+ damage kinda killed it for me.
I’ve never played any Doom games nor do I understand computer science beyond a surface level of comprehension. However, this video was very entertaining and informative. So glad I got recommended this video!
Merry Christmas Decino. I wish you a happier face :D P.S. In Complex Doom you can have evil God grin if you pickup a new weapon while invincible. The mod has exploding face as well. Also in HDoom, there won't be blood on your face no matter how low your health is.
I always wondered why on the old version of Doom that I grew up with, I never saw the "ouch" face. I saw it later on other people's versions and it freaked me out because I had never seen that face. I also don't remember my old version telling me when I had found a secret with an on-screen message.
The screwed up ouchface code my be the best mistake in DooM. It's so comical and the painface is so much better that it keeps the feel. I think ouchface would have become a massive joke if it worked as intended from day 1.
That's what he did last time there was an invasion @Mike Rueffer. Gave some of the scientists' PTSD. It made a horrifying sound as well. Imagine slime, but when it sloshes around, it causes people around it to look at it scared and some to start puking.
Whenever doomguy is within the threshold of 79% to 60% with the one blood drip from the nose, whenever he glances he looks like Jean Claude Van Damme to me.
it's a good day when decino uploads :) really love the design of these videos, so easy to watch even when the content is pretty complicated, and your voice is so soothing, too
Merry Christmas, decino! Here is an idea for the next analysis video: tricks and moves used by speedrunners like grabbing a key through the wall (e4m1, map12) or walking though bars (map02). I've always wondered how they do and how it works. Edit: also about strafe running, wall running
Indeed, nice idea, although i know how it works, some don't, and decino always impress with the technical detail, i wanted to see how its coded, since i'm lazy to check doom source.
I love these videos, I know one day you won't be able to cover any more such subjects, but they're gems of information for old school gamers like me. Thanks man
Just to add a few of my own observations: •On the SNES version, bloodiness level 3 appears at about 49 health and not 39, while bloodiness level 4 appears at about 29 health. •The 32X version has a slight bug where the side that certain features are on can swap when doomguy turns his head. •The SNES and 32X version lack the ouch face, evil grin and “shooting rampage/damage” faces. •The blood on the face is redder and a bit thicker on SNES. •On some versions like GBA, the evil grin lasts slightly shorter than on PC. •At 0:56 the number also changes other things about the face. For instance, his eyes are bloodshot in 2-4, his hair gets progressively messier, and his head is bowed (perhaps in pain) in 2-4. Great video, I found it interesting and informative!
