The Future of Hedon + Recent Updates

Hey, guys, I've been working on a lot of misc stuff in the last few weeks, especially based on the player feedback that I'm receiving.

I did mention I wanted to tell you something a while ago. It's related to the future of Hedon, namely the possible commercial future.

Not sure how much you're following Doom mods, but they have developed so much thanks to the modding community to the point where they have become almost a mainstream thing. On top of this, GZDoom has recently become a free to use, bare of any copyright issues, fully fledged engine. Kinda like Unreal Engine, which people can use for their own commercial projects.

Now, several people have suggested that if I'm still going through the full effort of creating a 100% original game/total conversion of Doom, I might as well.... well, make it into an actual commercial game.

It does make sense, although there are few reasons why this doesn't fully appeal to me. 

First of all, I have 0 budget for the time being, and once I fire Hedon up as a regular commercial game, it will be criticized by a completely different set of standards.

Secondly, I still want Hedon to be compatible with other Doom maps, and make it more flexible for other people to mod it and such. I also plan on allowing people to use Hedon's assets (textures, sprites etc.) in their own projects, albeit non-commercial and with proper crediting. 

This being said, my future intentions for Hedon are to release it at commercial standards (will try my best to come up with quality assets) BUT as a mod, and a free one, on ModDB, so nothing changes here. I might do a commercial release in parallel, with some extra content, like maybe a secret map or something, but for now it is hard to tell.

I've planned Hedon as a three episode (32 levels-ish) game, but obviously the first one is our main concern here. Once the first episode is finished (I estimate it will take me over an year from now, maybe two with beta testing and all), I will be able to make a better decision for how I continue the project.

This is where Patreon support can change a lot regarding Hedon's future, whether I will be able to support myself from it and keep making free content for it, or if I'll have to look for some income from commercializing it on Steam/GOG/whatever. 

Either way, thanks for the help and support so far, I've been getting a lot more positive reactions than I was hoping for, and hopefully more people will pitch in some bucks to help the project out. 

Now, regarding the last updates, I'll be brief:

- Various fixes for maps, thanks to tester feedback;

- Visibility updates for item pickups, minor adjustments to help clear some confusion;

- Various balancing to monsters/weapons, few additions and improvements like the Forge Elemental's magma projectile or some tweaks regarding the spike throwing cultists which should make them more balanced (they are still intended as a weak but dangerous/stealthy enemy).  Cultist spikes are a bit brighter and spray blood drops while in air. This should give them a slight visibility improvement.;

- The screen now flashes in different colors depending on what damage type is inflicted to the player. Crawlers also do cold damage now, and I intend to implement some freeze-death sprites for all monsters later on;

- New voice sounds for Conscripts/Cultists, Initiates, Iron Maiden; planning on updating the Crawler soon;

- New voice sounds for burning enemies, it's more of an experimental phase as I find high-pitched burning screams to be annoying in the long run, but I guess the players will decide how it's better;

- The flee mechanic on low hp Cultists/Initiates has been improved, the monsters now gain +50% speed when fleeing, which should make it more obvious that they are running away instead of glitching into walls (apparently it was a bit confusing to some players);

- The Warlock has been fully developed, it's up for future balancing and testing now;

Wew, this is it, have a bit of a busy week ahead, but I should come with some more updates soon enough. Still have a whole bunch of stuff to do before I can resume working on the new level.