Dust Devil

Dust Devil is a single-level mod split across two maps for Doom II, requiring the GZDoom source port. It was created by Captain Toenail and first released on February 22, 2022, and shortly thereafter uploaded to the idgames archive on March 13, 2022. The map uses a blend of a techbase and desert/temple ruin setting, with level progression interwoven between two distinct areas: the research outpost and the dust fields, creating a unified single-map experience.

The goal is to find three keys to unlock access to an ancient artifact the player is tasked with recovering. To do this, the player moves back and forth between the research outpost, which houses the artifact, and the dust fields, where the artifact had been discovered among the ruins of an ancient civilization. The map features an extended bestiary of monsters as well as additional gameplay elements such as jumppads. The mod makes use of the OTEX texture pack and sprites from the Realm 667 repository for the custom monsters and items. A new power-up is included in the form of the "Ragesphere", an orange soulsphere that doubles the rate of fire of all weapons as well as increasing the movement speed by 10 percent, with the effect lasting for 20 seconds. Each of the three keys is either preceded or followed by a boss encounter.

Dust Devil was awarded one of the 2022 Cacowards.

Story
"Alright marine, listen up. For this mission we are sending you through the portal, to Andras VI. This is an arid world plagued by dust storms. The UAC have a research outpost and mining operations here. While extracting minerals in the dust fields they uncovered some ruins. Remains of an ancient civilisation. A unique artifact was recovered from the site and brought to the research lab for study. Some sort of ritual blade. Shortly afterwards the base suffered a demonic incursion and contact was lost. We assume everyone is now dead. Or worse... This is where you come in. The brains at HQ are very interested in this blade. They believe it may be the key to halting the invasion back home. It should still be in the research lab locked behind a triple key security field. Collect the keycards, retrieve the artefact, and get your ass back to the portal for extraction. Those are your objectives. Good luck marine. Godspeed."

- Briefing

Levels

 * DUST00: Intro

Soundtrack

 * DUST00: "In My Mind" by James Paddock (Jimmy)
 * DUST01: "Terabyte" and "Wicked Gods" by James Paddock (Jimmy)
 * DUST02: "Ambience" and "Wicked Gods" by James Paddock (Jimmy)

Custom monsters

 * Quadcopter chaingunner: A flying chaingunner on top of a quadcopter base that makes a characteristic droning sound as it moves about in the air, while keeping away from the ground at most times. It has 70 hit points, just like a regular chaingunner, and will explode when killed without causing blast damage. They can not be resurrected by arch-viles and have a slightly longer delay before firing compared to the regular chaingunner, affording the player a little more time to either kill them or run for cover.
 * Dark imp: A black, somewhat spikier variant of the imp with 100 hit points and the ability to teleport. It fires a large plasma-like projectile that does 1/3 more damage than a regular imp while attacking at a faster rate of fire. It also moves a little faster than the imp though it does inherit its melee attack. If its target is less than 512 map units away, it has a 62.5 percent chance of teleporting to a random location in its vicinity. What happens is that the dark imp will take 30 steps on a single tic, moving aimlessly along the ground. During this one tic, the imp is invulnerable and does not check for heights, meaning only solid walls will block it from moving past them - this will see it potentially reappear up on high ledges or far below its former position. Since all this happens between two rendered frames, the imp appears to instantly teleport to its new location instead of wandering there step by step. It will always follow up a teleport with an attack before returning to its walk state. Curiously, the dark imp and the regular imp are not actually placed in the maps like other monsters but rather one or the other is spawned at the specified location, with the the dark imp having only a 20 percent to appear; otherwise a regular imp will be spawned in that location instead.
 * Grenadier: A green-clad zombie with 100 hit points and a rather small head that shoots grenades at its target that bounce off walls and floors, exploding on impact or after completing four bounces. The grenade itself does between 10-80 damage, plus up to 64 blast damage within a 128 map unit radius. The grenadier itself is immune to blast damage and will continue to attack its target aggressively even at long distances.
 * Spectre: A green (undead?) variant of the regular spectre that is significantly harder to see due to the fact that it uses a different translucency filter akin to that of the spectres in Doom 64, though they otherwise look and behave like regular Doom spectres. Unlike regular spectres though, they lose their transparency when killed.
 * Withered: An undead, mummified cacodemon with 350 hit points that fires a volley of three fireballs and upon dying has a 25 percent chance to resurrect itself after 5-30 seconds. It moves at a slightly slower speed and has a 50 percent lower pain chance than a regular cacodemon.
 * Cyberbaron: A cyborg Hell noble with 1250 hit points that shoots a burst of three grenades at its target of the same type as used by the grenadier. At a distance greater than 1024 map units, it will switch to hurling standard baron of Hell fireballs, as well as performing a baron melee attack at close proximity. There is a 25 percent chance each time it is about to start its grenade burst that it will hurl a baron fireball instead. It also has 50 percent lower pain chance than a regular baron of Hell and is immune to blast damage.
 * Augmented cyberbaron: A fully robotic variant of a cyberbaron that moves at a slightly faster speed and serves as a boss fight before the final key pickup. It fires a burst of three grenades at the player but at a 20 percent faster rate of fire than its cyborg sibling. It is also equipped with a green transparent force field shield that protects it from any kind of damage from all sides, save its rear. After finishing its attack, it will continue to move in its current direction for about two seconds unless it hits an obstacle, and is less likely to turn to face the player, leaving its unprotected rear exposed. Unlike the regular cyberbaron, it does not switch to baron fireballs at a distance nor does it have a melee attack. It will also not engage in infighting, and cannot be targeted by other monsters.
 * Behemoth: A towering undead super demon with 5000 hit points that looks like a cyberdemon before any cybernetic enhancements were applied to its body and serves as the second and final boss encounter of the dust field section. It shakes the ground as it moves about at a great speed and has two different attacks: the first one sees it hurling mancubus fireballs at the player in quick succession, one from the left hand and one from the right hand, which upon impact, will do the same amount of damage as the grenades of the grenadier or cyberbaron. The second, which has a 25 percent chance of occurring, is a ground attack that consists of a volley of three mancubus fireballs shooting along floor in a fan-like spread while continuously spawning explosions behind it, creating the effect of a sort of fire carpet that sweeps across the ground at a rapid pace. Because they have the FLOORHUGGER flag set, the projectiles will ignore height checks, moving up and down along the floor until they impact with the player, a monster or otherwise crash into a solid wall. When impacting with a target, they will do the same damage as a grenade tossed by a grenadier, while the spawned explosions behind them will do only half the blast damage of the fireballs (32 as opposed to 64 damage for the fireballs/grenades). The behemoth cannot be targeted by other monsters, is itself immune to blast damage, it does not possess a pain state, and will continue to attack its target aggressively even at long distances. Upon death, it will explode violently but without doing any damage to its surroundings. The sprite of the behemoth is in fact scaled up from the normal size of a cyberdemon, resulting in a somewhat blurrier look compared to that of the other monsters in the game.

Custom items
There are several custom 3D objects that are placed throughout the maps as decorations, most prominently the portal at the beginning through which the player arrives on Andras VI. Other 3D objects used include ceiling ventilators, large dome structures seen in the background, crystals, crates and certain types of plants.
 * Ragesphere: An orange soul sphere that doubles the player's rate of fire for all weapons as well as increasing their movement speed by 10 percent. The effect lasts for 20 seconds and applies an orange filter over the screen for that duration, blinking for the last 5 seconds before shutting off.
 * Demon dagger: This mysterious artifact was found by UAC researchers among the ruins of an ancient civilization on planet Andras VI and was subsequently brought back to their research outpost, which was shortly afterwards overrun by demonic hordes bent on reclaiming the blade. The recovering of the dagger from its protected vault inside the research outpost is the objective of the mission.
 * Urns: There are 16 urns spread across the dust fields, which are both pushable and shootable, and when destroyed, have a chance of spawning certain items. These are: a health bonus and an armor bonus at 9.38 percent chance each, a clip and 4 shotgun shells at 6.25 percent chance each, and a energy cell, a rocket and a stimpack at a 3.13 percent chance each. Multiple items can spawn at the same time since the urn calls the function 13 times in a row, 4 times for both the health and armor bonus, increasing the chance of at least one of these to be dropped significantly over the other items. There are actually 22 distinct types of urns defined in the DECORATE patch; however only the "tan urn" is placed in one of the maps, with the others types remaining unused.