Hello. Today's tutorial is short and sweet, since I plan to have it be part of a longer series. I'm sure this tutorial series is going to take A LONG TIME to complete so I will try to do them in parts day by day, and there will be a lot of trial and error and shuffling around with the ideas, but the general goal for this one is to make a top-down Doom mockup, or maybe even a few screenshot variations of it because I don't think I can fit everything I wanted into just one screenshot of the mockup. This first part of the series is very relaxed and just getting started on a fun project idea, but nothing complete and polished. I just got the idea "What if I combined Zelda and Doom?"
Well I'd have top-down Doom basically! Classic Zelda games were primarily top-down adventure games, but I want to replace the assets with Doom assets. The first step is just loose planning. Key word: loose! because it's very hard for me to know exactly how I'll want the final result will look, so I just start with the general idea and figure out the rest as I go. The first thing is we need to try our best to plan the composition or layout of the mockup. I figured some important elements I wanted to have were a hellish environment, a variety of Doom enemies, some lava, some corpses, and some dungeon elements, so I started sketching the idea. This layout may change in the future, but I think it looks okay for now. The grid units are 24x24 pixels each.
So as you can see, I have everything labelled just in case you can tell what some of the stuff is supposed to be, but I think this layout could work. The next thing I'll usually start with for mockups is trying to get some of the environmental details down before I start detailing the characters. I generally start with floor tiles, then the walls. So here I render in some rocks and lava, but again, it's very simple for now and polishing happens later.
Then I just copy and paste these tiles around.
The dungeon-y stuff is really lacking right now, but a few simple shapes can help with the bridge and the dungeon entrance. I'm not using much reference yet, but will do later. I have (what are supposed to be) some mummies beside the door entrance.
And then we still need the rock walls and lavafall. Now, unlike your typical pixel art waterfall, lava is droopier. so the shapes are a bit wavier.
And this is the final result so far of the mockup.
Ok so I'm fully aware that all this stuff is brain-dead simple, but it has to be for now because this stuff takes a long time and I'm trying to not burn myself out in one art sitting so we will need some patience, but I think it will be fun! I will try to keep this series updated in the near future! I work as an artist full-time, but we'll see where this goes!