A downloadable mod

Once every 700 human years, a warrior, skillful in the art of battle, is born to fight evil.
But the universes have collided.
It's up to you to find how, and take on this adventure with your favorite character!


Welcome to my 15th mod, and 23rd contribution to the Doom Community overall!

Stray Jackals is a multi-class mod where past, present and future meet, and each class has different playstyles that change the way you approach your maps.

Learn more about it in the following sections, and download the mod to have some fun!

Also, it wouldn't be a Cosmobyte(tm) mod, if it didn't had compatibility with Hexen, Heretic and Chex Quest!

Try it with all kinds of maps and monster mods out there!

S L O T   M A C H I N E S

Whenever you find a secret, a Slot Machine will spawn in the beginning of the map.

Interact with it as you would do with a door and get your chance to win an ammo prize!

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C O I N   T O S S

When playing with the Desperado class, you start with three coin tosses, located on your slot 6. Call a game of Heads or Tails. If you win, a random buff will affect your next shot!

More coins can be found in Backpack spots, or you can refill all your coins once you complete a stage.

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A M M O   A N D   B A C K P A C K S

The ammo limit for all weapons is 99. While it might seem something frightening, keep in mind that all your weapons are pretty effective and you'll rarely encounter yourself in a situation where you can run out of ammo for all of them.

Backpacks, instead of giving all kinds of ammo or expanding your ammo limits as usual, contain useful tools or weapons for each class, as to balance the lack of ammo pickups.

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B L A C K   C O F F E E

Instead of the usual Blursphere, you'll find this charming and tasty coffee cup. Once you drink of it, you'll feel speed blazing through your veins.

In other words, the Black Coffee powerup affects your movement speed AND, in many cases, the delay of your weapons, turning melee and boring shooting into something way faster!

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S T A T U S   B A R

If you haven't turned this off in the Mod Options by now, you'll notice that one of your HUD options has this colorful bar laying in the bottom right corner.

Each letter corresponds to a powerup, while the bar below corresponds to the timer. If you have two or more active, the bar is organized in a way so the powerup with less active time (invulnerability in this case) will be displayed first, so it won't affect other powerups.

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W I L L   O'   T H E   W I S P

Instead of the usual nightvision powerup, this little shiny bug will keep you company for around 45 seconds while lighting where you are. Keep an eye on your status bar so you won't be left unprepared when he goes away!

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Updated 5 days ago
StatusReleased
CategoryGame mod
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(1 total ratings)
AuthorDr_Cosmobyte
TagsDoom, gzdoom

Download

Download
Stray Jackals (120524).rar 7.6 MB
Download
StrayJackals_Credits.txt 14 kB

Install instructions

You'll need a sourceport such as LZDoom or GZDoom to play this file. I also recommend looking at launchers like ZDL or Ace Doom Launcher to combine this with other mods.

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

okay. I recorded a video with your manowar mod

(+1)

Hey dr_cosmobyte I have a problem with user 1 which is the key that I assign to it, which is t, and well, you'll say what's wrong with it? Well, this key is also assigned to mods like hellrider vengeful in the attack melee command and with dino crisis weapons.etc. So can you change a few lines of code so that it doesn't happen please?

I kinda don't understand the question.

You can still use the same User1 key in other mods without overwriting their functions, since User1 is a thing inside GZDoom itself. 

(+1)

I use lzdoom

It's the same system, friend.

Sorry dr😓

(1 edit) (+1)

Strap in, this one is probably going to be long.


After the release of 1.1 I decided to play 3 DBPs fitting the theme of each class, Into The Storm for Berserker, The Magnificent Five for Desperado and Vicarious Reality for the Technomancer, these are my thoughts on the gameplay of the mod.


Berserker plays very nice and smooth, I'am always skeptical of melee heavy mods in GZDoom because tbh some of them are clunky or uninteresting, but this one feels really good for most of its weapons, if I have only gripe with it is that I would prefer if the shield was used in combination with the axe since in my opinion both are the only underwhelming weapons of its arsenal.


The Desperado rifle feels way better after the update, sniping is really good now, thanks for hearing my feedback. I think the classe is balanced perfectly now. It was blast playing with The Magnificent Five, I blazed through two times in a roll in one sitting, very satisfying guns, fitting sound effects and the coin toss mechanic is pretty cool, but maybe it bugged sometimes on me, because I got "The next shoot doesn't use ammo" but the gun in question didn't use any ammunition until I switched to another one, so I was basically with infinite ammo for a solid minute there, or this is intentional and I misinterpreted the powerup?


The Techmancer its the most gimmick class and while I like more than I dislike, I think it has some flaws. The Uzis burn through ammo very quickly, playing with Vicarious Reality was a pain in some points because I had no ammo so I had to melee arachnatrons or macuby, wich is not the most fun. The little pyramid drones I think have too much a difference in strength, one is very very powerful and the other is almost a pee shooter, in my opinion the weaker one could be buffed, given a fast firing rate akin to a chaingun in vanilla Doom. Outside of that the class don't lag behind the other two, very smooth gameplay, cool sounds and sprites and the melee also feels very good even if I think is flexible than the Berserker.


And my final thought of the mod is that the chance to win in the slot machine is very low, or I was just incredibly unlucky since I think I just won 4 times in all of these wads combined. 


Even with some of my critiques this mod is fantastic, another CosmoByte work for the hall of fame of my Doom mods folder.


P.S: Almost forgot, coolest touch with the game over screen, I was not expecting that but you wizard surprised me again as usual.

(2 edits) (+1)

Thanks a lot for your feedback again! I will consider those points should i ever touch Stray Jackals for a v1.2. 

And i'm pleased that my tweaks made the difference, so both of us won =)

Do you have a Discord acc? I want to drop Stray Jackals v1.2 for people to test. ;)

(+1)

When I first saw this mod I remember of stuff like 3DeT RPG where you have a generic RPG system for a wide range of characters and I thought it was a very creative and cool idea for a mod. But after playing a bit, I have a few gripes with it.

The dual wielding of the Desperado is very unintuitive, I don't understand why the guns need to in the other side of the keyboard instead of just replacing the single weapon, is this made for some type of limitation? 

The inaccuracy of the Desperado weapons are also a big frustration for me, specially the shotgun replacement, it looks like more of a rifle that I would imagine have good precision but even after I toggled the crosshair my shoots go in weird angles to the target, making sniping really frustrating. 

The Technomancer is cool but way too much gimmicky, I think his melee could be improved a little bit so you don't get too much defenseless in the beginning of runs.

(+1)

Hi, i was in doubt if you were brazilian due to the nickname, but the 3D&T reference clearly turned that out.


The dual wield of the desperado is separated in order to avoid having more than one gun in slot 2 or 4. And the Winchester Rifle, surprisingly, is his most accurate weapon, so i'll take that as a sign to make his weapons even more accurate.

About the Technomancer melee, you mean improve his damage? If that's so, then i'll give it a go.


Thanks for the feedback!

(+1)

Hello, ah yes I'm a Brazilian brother.

I've run a little test with the Desperado without autoaim and I don't think inaccurate is the right word, but using crosshairs I noticed that the shoot on the rifle seem to always go a little bit higher than the crosshair indicates, with a crosshair is a nuisance but without at long range I can see being very frustrating. Here's an image to illustrate more the distance that tested this, more close encounters I didn't see much problem.

As for the Technomancer I think a damage boost could be a good way, maybe a little combo system where he gets a little bit more damage the more he hits opponents a la DemonSteele, but maybe I'm asking too much, or a dash that grants you invincibility frames could be good too. 

And thank you for putting all your mods here, I was actually collecting all of your mods, now I'm more certain that I have all of them with me. Keep the good work man, cool stuff all around.

(+1)

Again, thanks for the feedback! I'll do whatever on my reach, i really enjoyed making this mod.


Also, the only mods i haven't uploaded to itch.io are two sound patches- one that replaces Secret Sounds, and another that gives ambiences an eerie feel. But i'll definitely upload them in the according mods ASAP, i just need some more time to polish my content.

Peace!