Kill 'Em With Kindness

The aim of most first person shooters is to - well - shoot things, and kill things, and win at things. A lot of FPS games (especially ones made in the 90s) follow this rule; Quake, Wolf 3D, Rise of the Triad, and of cause, Doom (so most games made by people around id, really) all follow the rule of to kill 'em all with big fucking guns. Again, a lot mods for Doom follow this rule of killing things, after all Doom is not a sweet game for little children.

It is then quite nice, and almost left field to see that Amber Graham not only made a Doom WAD where she took a "masculine and violent" game, and completely flipped it to turn it into a "feminine and gentle" game, but it is also very cool to see that this WAD was used as her final project on her course in late 2017 for a class by Patrick LeMieux.

Kill 'Em With Kindness running on QZDoom version q1.2.1, with Doom I

Only a handful of Doom WADs come to mind when one thinks of cute mods, such as A Boy And His Barrel, Pet The Cacodemon, and of cause Gloom Busters.

In the README file found in the WAD's ZIP folder, Amber writes that;

It was extremely interesting for me to create something so feminine and gentle out of a game so masculine and violent. I realized that what I was creating became so much more than just a wholesome environment. I was modifying death animations so that when you water a flower "enemy" with your watering can "weapon," the flower starts to dance rather than die. Or the dog, a modification of the demon, goofily wobbles around and follows you out of a need for love rather than out of a desire to kill.

The WAD as a whole has a very relaxed, and chill tone to it. You start off in a garden, where you can pick-up a watering can, so that you may water the little cartoon flowers, placed all around the map, all while your dog follows you around. There are no monsters to kill, no unholy images, nothing. All you can do is just water your plants, and pet your dog.

Of cause, you are unable to do any of this in vanilla Doom, so to get around Doom's limitations, Amber needed to affectedly break Doom, so that she could do custom damage types in ZDoom. The process of her working this out, plus betas of the mod, can be found on the projects webpage.

---

References

I. KEWK - Doomworld/idgames
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/Ports/j-l/kewk

II. Mini Mod Madness - Kill Em With Kindess
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcfVqeuBTMQ

III. "This year I taught a class on Doom and it was one of the best teaching experiences I've ever had."
https://twitter.com/alt254/status/946088252020178944

Written by Clive "James" Python, 29/09/18

★