This is a crosspost from my newsletter.

Welcome back to The Hydromecha Monthly! The title of this installment is not, in fact, a sentence describing a monster that mines, but is instead describing the creation of one of the major attractions of this edition. Let’s get right into it.

The Monsters

Previously I showed off some placeholder art for a couple new monsters for Antarctica Must Fall, a Doom mod I’m working on. They and a new-to-the-newsletter monster all got sprites made from 3D models.

Gallu

As stated before, the Gallu are based off of Salps, a kind of planktonic tunicate that can be found off of the coast of Antarctica, among other places, while their name derives from demons in ancient Sumerian and Mesopotamian mythology.

I thought the model looked kinda plain just going off of the concept art, so I added a bunch of tusks to make it more interesting from different angles.

Although very frail, the Gallu’s projectile can still be rather dangerous as it pulls the player in whatever direction it flew in from.

Mazzikin

This was the other monster I revealed earlier. The Mazzikin is loosely based on the Antarctic Springtail and takes its name from a kind of demon from Jewish mythology.

Mazzikin are melee monsters that leap at the player when they’re far away, letting them potentially jump over other monsters to close the distance and attempt to slash you apart with their razor-sharp proboscises.

Aberration

The Aberration is based off of a kind of Isopod that can be found in Antarctic waters that resembles Trilobites. Its name was taken from the eponymous type of creature from D&D.

Aberrations launch a large, slow-moving projectile that spawns damaging spikes on the ground as it moves and zaps the player with lightning for its melee attack. The rows of spikes should cause some interesting area denial in combat that doesn’t exist in the base game.

The projectile-related sprites were all made by throwing some placeholder art I'd drawn into an Explosion Texture Generator, and then editing its outputs in Krita.

Once I finish the sprites for the rest of the original monsters (there are three more to go, not counting bosses), I want to redo the materials and some of the animations on the Gallu and Mazzikin.

In the meantime, a good friend of mine has done a ton on the code side of things for the monsters (he made the Aberration’s projectile work) and has also made some major progress on one of the maps.

Whataboutpageism

I’d been meaning to redo the render on my website’s About page for a while but I wanted to get the recent funny video out first. It doesn’t show in the above screenshot, but the scanlines and noise texture on the shades are both animated on the website! The moving bits are in a separate .gif that was painstakingly positioned atop the larger static render. There’s also a new secret page you can access by clicking on the fancy new cranium. If you aren’t seeing any of the website changes, try clearing your browser’s cache (Ctrl+F5 on desktop).

Pizza Reprise

After a decent break, I’ve finally returned to making my own pizzas! You can see them below alongside some other interesting stuff I cooked.

I made a really nice batch of the Michelin pancakes I mentioned a while back. I’ll link the recipe video again here in case you’re just tuning in.

And that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll see you again next time with another newsletter!

Have a good one,

-Hydro