Pinkies on Parade
There's just something about the Demon monster in Doom. Why wasn't it given a more descriptive name? There's Cacodemon and Cyberdemon but this one was just simply called Demon. To me, it has come to embody the personality of Doom. It's not that I don't appreciate the other monsters in Doom. Its only variant had been the mostly invisible Spectre version of it. As a map author, I've found myself completely bored of that particular parlor trick.
My first experience with an alternate color scheme for the Demon was one called Mauler where its pink hues were exchanged for red. This was part of the ZDoom Monster Resource wad which I enjoyed borrowing from to recolor the Demons in Chap DM 3. As I recall, I'd made a further enhancement to it of recoloring its eyes from yellow to green for that extra pop.
Back then, I had no idea I would continue dabbling in recoloring this monster for the next three years! Throughout that time, I've had multiple brainstorms regarding how the monsters' behavior could be altered and/or enhanced. Some of those enhancements weren't quite right the first time through and required additional tweaking.
So, what I have to share here are what I consider my state-of-the-art, 2025, versions of pinkie enhancements. There are six and a half versions of Doom's Demon included in the file I built. Some were initially made to match a map's theme such as lava or nukage. One was rewritten because I wanted to have a replacement for Doom's Lost Soul. I realized I was fine with the Lost Soul as a behavior model for a monster but hated that it was an outsized human skull. I can't say I absolutely have a disdain for out of proportion sprite artwork though, or my Cyberdemon derived Ultimate Zombie wouldn't exist!
Here are pictures and descriptions of the Demons included in the dmonpool.wad file:
Electrodemon
| Chap# | 16166 |
| Health | 300 |
| Speed | 10 |
| PainChance | 180 |
| Projectile attack | Electroshock therapy |
| Melee attack | standard Demon gnawing |
| Appears in | Mining Praxis, Yavin's Clone, Monsta BBQ, Mo'Tanky Enemeesh, Imaginate |
This is a Demon with double the Health of the normally Doom Demon. Besides its default face-gnawing melee attack, the Electrodemon has a ranged attack which takes the form of electricity. The attack works similiarly to an Archvile attack but instead of flames, the attackee sees lightning and is affected by "electric shock". The actual damage inflicted from this attack is as close to zero as I could make it as I wanted the player to initially have WTF?! moments.
Furthermore, when I used this monster in the Mo'Tanky Enemeesh map, I discovered a side effect of using an Archvile attack with this demon. Due to the sky-high ceilings and vast open distances in that map, I was able to experience the player getting tossed quite literally any time the player was already in some way airborne. As a player myself, I found it frustrating to not land where I thought I was going to go. However, this behavior has been an experience with no end of marvel and amusement to my Doom editing self.
While it doesn't seem too dangerous, remember this Demon takes twice the hits to put down. The monster closet in Yavin's Clone's UV deathmatch mode springs seven of them at one time. That little damage number adds up really fast when it's multiplied by many of these assassins! Super shotgun lovers are going to be the most frustrated with these pests since the ranged attack accumulates damage over the added time it takes to wipe out the monster's health.
There's an included Pod for this monster which may be used by map authors to place inert monsters in a map. No pursuit of the player by Electrodemon occurs until the pod is destroyed, either by the player or the attack upon it by other monsters.
The original concept was by Enjay. I've placed the original description here
which was harvested from
the Internet Archive's rememberence of NiGHTMARE's haunt. Know that MY
DECORATE code does NOT match this description, however.
For instance, MY Electrodemon has 300 hitpoints and of course, all of the
ranged attack is different.
Fyredemon
| Chap# | 16161 |
| Health | 75 |
| Speed | 10 |
| PainChance | 180 |
| Projectile attack | None |
| Melee attack | FASTer Demon gnawing |
| Appears in | Dystopian Playground, Monsta BBQ, Imaginate |
Fyredemon in this newer incarnation has lower health which is a deliberate choice. Upon death, its head pops off and becomes an independent monster with behavior eerily similiar to Doom's Lost Soul. Player is awarded no kill for dropping the original bipedal monster, but rather is finally awarded kill points when the now floating head is vanquished.
There's an included Pod for this monster which may be used by map authors to place inert monsters in a map. No pursuit of the player by Fyredemon occurs until the pod is destroyed, either by the player or the attack upon it by other monsters.
Mechademon
| Chap# | 16209 |
| Health | 150 |
| Speed | 9 |
| PainChance | 120 |
| Projectile attack | None |
| Melee attack | standard Demon gnawing |
| Appears in | Mining Praxis, Monsta BBQ, Mo'Tanky Enemeesh |
Mechademon, a.k.a. "Pegleg Pete", is a demon carved from the rock experiments of the Baddies while Mining Praxis. He has one mechanical robotic leg and his vision is augmented by virtual reality goggles. Upon death, there's a 25% chance that those goggles will be left behind intact. Beware, however, they're not made for humans!
The genesis of this monster was me wanting to have a demon who was partly camouflaged in levels using brown ASHWALL textures. The demon was adapted from one I'd begun in Chap Deathmatch 3 as Blue Demon Clone and got recolored from blue to purple in my current projects which use a modified color palette. Well, with this current recoloring, it no longer has any of that palette left on its "skin". I would like to thank Neoworm and Vader for the use of Pete's pegleg. He's a bit gimpy...
Nukagedemon
| Chap# | 16136 |
| Health | 150 |
| Speed | 10 |
| PainChance | 180 |
| Projectile attack | None |
| Melee attack | standard Demon gnawing |
| Appears in | Imaginate |
Nothing special about Nukagedemon really. I just needed one that could play around in nukage acting like he belonged there. It turned out so well, I ended up making a Hell Knight to match the color scheme.
Techademon
| Chap# | 16212 |
| Health | 150 |
| Speed | 9 |
| PainChance | 120 |
| Projectile attack | None |
| Melee attack | standard Demon gnawing |
| Appears in | Imaginate |
Techademon is just Mechademon with its undercarriage repainted with elements of tech instead of dirt/rock. One may copy in and use the same dismembered leg and trip view goggles as drop items. Also, as I coded, there are no resurrection frames as Techademon's death has him de-rez into thin air.
Test Pattern Junkie
| Chap# | 16101 |
| Health | 225 |
| Speed | 10 |
| PainChance | 120 |
| Projectile attack | None |
| Melee attack | standard Demon gnawing |
| Appears in | Yavin's Clone, Monsta BBQ, Mo'Tanky Enemeesh |
Test Pattern Junkie is really just a stronger (more hit points) Demon. At 225, it sits halfway between the standard Demon's 150 and the Electrodemon's 300. The color shifting stripey pattern is actually semi-modeled on an old arcade game's monster called "Baddy", believe it or not, in Mr. Do! In that game, the baddies could only travel in pre-dug hallways. If they got stuck for some reason, like on the edge of a blocking apple, then after some time, they'd change into this striped character which could dig through dirt as easily as the game's player character and namesake.
I'd put a monster closet into Yavin's Clone with the intention of it only being opened by a trigger monster in Ultra Violence DM mode. I stocked this closet with Electrodemons and Mechademons. Very late in the process of creating this level, I began testing that monster closet. Mechademon's death-spawned mechanical leg monster would wipe out too many of the Electrodemons before they'd had a chance to properly terrorize the player. This nullified the closet as the gimmick it was meant to be. Therefore, I sought a different monster to cohabitate with the Electrodemon. I didn't really want to go back to just using stock Demons either. More time at the drawing board yielded just what I needed in the Test Pattern Junkie.
Fast forward to me monkeying around with doing replacements of the health bonuses in Darkwave's Moonhenge, this just for my DooM playing pleasure. I had a vision of making some pods like from the movie Alien to spawn monsters. I never put invisibility spheres in any of my maps anymore so the PINS graphic was just there doing nothing. I ended up doing a recolor of that as well as adding one more frame to the animation. Now the former invisibility sphere is an obstacle with a height and width. As a monster, it has the hit points and stats of the zombieman. But unlike zombieman, it never fires a shot. Too, its speed is zero so it won't pursue you either. If you're dumb enough to kill one, however, it spawns the Test Pattern Junkie demon. Lotso fun!
The half in six and a half
| Chap# | n/a |
| Health | 150 |
| Speed | 10 |
| PainChance | 180 |
| Projectile attack | None |
| Melee attack | standard Demon gnawing |
| Appears in | ZDaemon version of Mo'Tanky Enemeesh |
This purple/pink combination colored Demon is just a standard Doom Demon. In fact, there's no DECORATE code for it. Simply put, all of the sprite names begin with SARG which are the same letters for the built-in Demons of Doom. Therefore, one can run this file along with any Doom port and expect to see purple/pink Demons. For ports that do recognize DECORATE though, one might want to write a small bit to change the blood color to match the blood in the sprites like so:
ACTOR DeepMon : Demon replaces Demon
{
BloodColor "green"
}
A final note:
There's a custom palette in this wad file. It swaps out the dark blues
of Doom for a split palette of a dozen shades of purple and another
dozen shades of teal/aqua. Used straight up in Doom this palette will
make other things look a bit different. One who is not me must
make a choice on which direction he/she/they are willing to travel:
- Put up with the differences this entails
- Make custom textures, flats and things which would be affected by this palette to mitigate the freakishness of it
- Recolor the relevant purples and teals out of the desired monsters
- remove the PLAYPAL lump from the wad file and let the indexing recolor those purples and teals back to stock Doom dark blue but put up with the Demons themselves possibly looking freakish instead
Have fun!
