The Ghoul's Forest 3 SNPCs
Released: July 4, 2018
Tags: Lua, AI, Horror
Ghoul's Forest 3 is a horror WAD for DOOM 2, made in 2006 by CutManMike. It has a really simple premise: you're in a dark spooky forest with only a bow and arrow, and you must kill the four ghouls before they kill you. Each ghoul has their own special ability and/or gimmick, so you also have to figure out how to best deal with them. I'm a big fan of the original WAD and its multiplayer "sequel" Ghouls vs Humans, but I don't quite remember why I suddenly had an intrest in porting these enemies over to GMod. I think it was mostly the fact that I wanted to do some work in AI, and Ghoul's Forest 3 had a relatively small roster with pretty varied abilities.
I wrote an animation system to mimick how ZDoom's DECORATE works, so that those could be as faithful to the original as possible, and then I got to work on the AI. These NPCs use a mixture of custom movement code and Source Engine's Navigation Meshes to help them hunt down the player. The addon was praised by CutManMike for being "surprisingly faithful to the source material".
The abilities of the Ghouls are as follows:
- Jitterskull, instead of moving, teleports a few meters towards you in an erratic pattern every second. Upon getting close enough, he will charge directly at you.
- Sjas flies really quickly around the map. When hit, he teleports to a random place in the map.
- The Creeper slowly moves towards the player. When hurt, the creeper flees really quickly.
- The Yurei slowly teleports around the player, appearing only for a second before disappearing. Each time she pops into existence, she's closer. If she gets close enough, she kills you.
