Warren’s Weird Dream

One of the themes for our last November Mini Jam was “Doom, but you can talk to the monsters”.  Coincidentally, the same theme was also suggested to the Indie Buskers 2, which was taking place on the same weekend, and Tametick created a game based on that concept.

What I did was take an open source implementation of the classic Doom, concretely PrBoom, and hack it to make the monsters talk.  I removed shooting, both from the player and the monsters, and started writing text that the monsters would say to you when you interacted with them (by standing in front and pressing the shoot button).

Hasn’t it ever happened to you that after playing a particular game a lot you end up dreaming about it?  I’ve heard about people dreaming about Tetris, and myself I have had a dream where I was inside Doom2, many years ago.  Warren, the titular character, has been playing Doom a lot too, and he ends up having a strange dream where he is inside Doom and the monsters talk to him.  Soon, he discovers that what they say is related to his real world life.  Your task is to put the pieces together and find out what that story is, who are the characters and they relationship with Warren.

Because you can’t shoot, since I wanted to remove the violence out of the game, there might be parts where you are blocked.  I used the original shareware levels for the content, at some point you’re supposed to shoot a wall to continue.  Plus, on the last level you have to kill all the monsters to escape the room where you are.  Because this is just a mod, I didn’t bother figuring out an elegant way to solve that, unfortunately you’ll have to use the classic doom cheats in those parts if you want to continue.  To disable collision you have to type idclip or idspispopd.  To kill all the monsters you type tntem.  Sorry about that.

If you want a clue about the background story, there are nine characters, counting Warren himself, and all are named.

• Download the game ( Linux + Windows + Mac OSX )
• Get the source code ( GPL )