#110: Nocturne in Yellow
From source port to commercial game engine? Not for another few years
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 10, 2019.
Initial release: August 7, 2015
Platform: PC (Doom mod using a modified GZDoom source port)
Developer: The Laughing Company
The greatest thing about Doom, that classic gory shooter from 1993, is the sheer dedication of the community. For over 25 years nerds have turned Doom from the terror of Congress into a springboard for all manner of creative projects. The Aliens total conversion was just the beginning.
First, some background. Doom has been playable on modern PCs for years thanks to a variety of rewrites of the game code to work on differing operating systems, known as source ports. Many games of the era have source ports —Quake and its sequel, for example — but Doom has a ton. Nearly all of Doom’s source ports derive from DOSdoom (the coder of which coined the term “source port,”) though DOSdoom itself was derived from an official Linux port of Final Doom. Anyway, to make a long story short, the most popular source port these days is GZDoom.
GZDoom began life as an openGL-capable port of ZDoom. ZDoom and its forks are notable for a huge variety of modding tools and engine features, such as colored lighting, sloped surfaces, true 3D floors, the works — and the capabilities have only grown in the last decade, and in recent years it’s seemingly transitioned from merely a source port for a 30-year-old game into an engine unto itself. (You might recognize GZDoom as being the source port of choice for everyone’s favorite Klebold and Harris simulator, Brutal Doom. The features GZDoom offers are what makes Brutal Doom’s myriad of stolen assets and spaghetti codebase possible.)
While ZDoom is discontinued, GZDoom has kept on trucking, and from GZDoom we get GLOOME — a fully GPL-compliant, commercial-friendly port of GZDoom 1.8.10. The idea behind GLOOME was to allow developers to use a ready-made, low-intensity engine for commercial purposes. It’s a pretty neat idea, hampered somewhat by the fact that 1.8.10 was already quite deprecated by that point and not likely to see many updates thanks to a desire to make GZDoom work on a wider range of hardware. Unfortunately what this means is the rendering code was already showing its age at the time of review.
In any case, while we’ve yet to see a commercial project materialize for GLOOME (as the need for GLOOME has disappeared in the face of GZDoom’s main branch achieving GPL compliance), it’s worth looking at one of the original showcase projects, and really the only one of any note. Enter Nocturne in Yellow. Rreleased shortly after GLOOME’s initial release, The Laughing Company’s weird little fantasy horror mod gives us a few hints at what GLOOME was capable of.
Made entirely within a single month for the 2015 RPGMaker Indie Game Maker competition, Nocturne in Yellow, while at its core a somewhat mediocre set of maps, at least manages to bring a creepy style to the proceedings.
It’s 1915 and the Great War is raging. A young Russian librarian prefers to ignore the world falling down around his ears and just stick to his books, until he happens upon a mysterious tome, the investigation of which eventually leads him to an isolated island in the Black Sea. When he gets there, he sees that it’s already populated by shambling zombies, as well as a mysterious woman in black who urges him to go away. He pushes on anyway, working his way deep into a castle as reality slowly begins to unravel.
The lovecraft influence is obvious here, and of course with a name like Nocturne in Yellow you can expect references to everyone’s favorite sinister sovereign — and indeed, he shows up as the boss of the fifth level.
Before I get into the levels, I’ll state that I liked that this game tried to have a story with dialogue boxes, character art and everything, and the character art is really good (albeit clearly intended for 4:3 resolutions.)
The various boss enemies especially are charming in their different personalities, and yes, Hastur’s appearance is exactly as scary as you would expect. Sadly, actually fighting him is a pain. And that’s really where the game falls down: most of the combat is pretty basic, but bosses are another matter entirely, throwing far too many projectiles your way and taking entirely too much time to bring down. And the King in Yellow is the worst of the lot, appearing only as a faint shadow in a dark room, until he gets near you and suddenly lights up yellow before doing tremendous damage (it’s clearly melee as he needs to be near you.) What starts off scary as hell quickly becomes tedious.
The level design in general, I would consider to be amateurish at best. while it’s not exactly a “my house”-level of design incompetence or anything, there’s a certain sub-Duke Nukem 3D vibe in terms of aesthetic and design. It’s functional, but abstract and boring.
Still, though, it’s quite the achievement to get this thing out in a month. The overall presentation of the sprite work is fantastic — the HUD is completely original, and amazing looking. It’s just saddled to maps that were obviously curled out in short order.
And I do love the creepy cosmic horror vibe. The island and castle feel alien in that way that only old FPS games with under-detailed levels can do. It’s like stepping into a twisted mirror of what you know the world looks like. I’d like to see more work in this thematic vein, though ideally in an engine that isn’t a deprecated, buggy mess. I don’t know if it was the old render code or my computer, but I had frequent moments where the game would just freeze for a second.
Nocturne in Yellow, in short, is a showcase for a project that offers something no longer necessary. And yet, while GLOOME may have fallen short of its goals, it was a good idea, and in the eight years since its release, GZDoom has become a promising engine for a community that has never stopped being amazingly creative. Go on Steam and you’ll find games like Hedon, Hands of Necromancy, Apocalyptic Vibes, Dismantled (and its Directors Cut edition,) the recent Early Access hit Supplice, and the long-in-coming Selaco. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Nocturne in Yellow can be downloaded for free here. You don’t need a copy of Doom to play it.
Also, the project lead has written a post-mortem about it here.
