The Sky May Be

The Sky May Be

Authors	Doug the Eagle and Kansam
Port	Vanilla
IWAD	Doom
Year	1997
Link	Doomworld/idgames

The Sky May Be is a semi-serious joke WAD for Doom.

It was created by Doug the Eagle and Kansam. Kansam is also known for Kansam's Trial. Doug the Eagle has recently been mostly known for his highly humourous "anti-walkthroughs" and strange findings from Ultima game series, and other games as well.

The WAD is named after a texture experiment, where one of the textures was called "sky (maybe)". While the texture wasn't ultimately used in the WAD, the name stuck.

The WAD consists of Douglas Adams-style humor throughout three levels, two of which are training levels: E1M1 is a stock-up level, E1M2 is another tutorial level.

E2M1 is the actual giant level where most of the action happens. It has extremely ugly graphics (most wall textures consist of single colour, or are based on Windows 3.11 screen shots), incongruous music (Bach's Brandenburg concerto no. 3) and strange sound clips (from various movies and TV series, etc).

Also included is the Blessed Engine DeHackEd patch, version 1.6b, which changes a lot of things about the weapon and monster behaviour in a way that probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but will undoubtedly be quite amusing.

The Sky May Be was featured in Doomworld's Top 100 Most Memorable Maps, placing 7th.

Plot[edit]

The Sky May Be played with ZDoom.

From the text file included with the file:

The Great God Imp has shown mercy on your soul and cast you into the hellish pits of his virtual toybox.

Running around the garish lego buildings, you become aware that the virtual toychest is actually running under windows 3.11. However the mouse is broken and the ALT and F4 keys have been removed.

You must find a way to shut down the system and end this nightmare!

Oh, and watch out for the Great God Imp. He may not be so kind next time He sees you.

Notable level quirks[edit]

Opposite of the door to "the Firmament" is a door with a danger sign on it. In vanilla Doom, opening the door will close the game and the message "I Told You So" will be shown at the DOS prompt. Nothing special happens in modern source ports.
Pressing "Cancel" on the Windows 3.1 prompt in the exit room will cause the ceiling to come down and crush the player. This does not work properly in more modern source ports.

The Blessed Engine[edit]

The Blessed Engine is a DeHackEd patch included with The Sky May Be. Among other things, it does the following:

Enemy differences[edit]

Zombieman: Moonwalks away from the player. They "metamorphose into an evil bugger" on death.
Shotgun guy: Shoots twice as many pellets when firing.
Imp: Their projectiles shoot out BFG tracers on impact. Other imps are not immune to these tracers.
Demon: Shoots plasma bolts out of their mouths that each shoot out chaingun fire. Their bites now deal damage ranging from 10-100. They disappear on death and cannot be resurrected on Nightmare! difficulty.
Spectre: Now fully visible. While their bite deals no damage, they shoot out rockets that home in like the revenant's missiles and deal between 60-480 damage on death.
Cacodemon: Given the name "Edward Diego". Their bites have the power of BFG tracers, which can hurt other cacodemons. They disappear on death and cannot be resurrected on Nightmare! difficulty.
Lost soul: Attacks do 200-1600 damage, enough to kill any player instantly (unless they are at 200 health and have a full megaarmor, then there's a one in eight chance of survival).
Baron of Hell: Melee attacks deal no damage, but the fireballs they throw instantly kill you on contact, even with invulnerability (the exact number is 80000000-640000000, or 80 million to 640 million).
Cyberdemon: Rockets have been replaced with energy balls that constantly explode after 1/3rd of a second, utterly devastating whatever is nearby. They are not immune to blast damage anymore, though, so they have a good chance of killing themselves. They have 6000 hit points instead of 4000.
Spiderdemon: Can fly through the air like a cacodemon and shoots 4.5 times as fast.
Barrel: Slowly moves closer to you when in close proximity. On contact, they explode. They have 50 hit points instead of 20.
Burning barrel: Runs away from player. It can resurrect any monster whose corpse they come in contact with. Counts towards the final kill percentage. It has 700 hit points instead of being an unkillable obstacle.
Burnt tree: Can now be destroyed. It has 800 hit points instead of being an unkillable obstacle. In ports like ZDoom, they instead bloom into bigger trees.

New enemies[edit]

Sergeant: The "evil bugger" the zombieman turns into on death, a mix of a shotgunner and a demon. The sergeant retains the demon's speed and bite, but can also use its shotgun (both as powerful as the demon and shotgunner's attacks in the Blessed Engine). It has 500 hit points.
The Great God Imp: Acts just like other imps (including the BFG spray on impact), but with total invulnerability and the ability to clip through walls. It has 60 hit points, but is immune to all forms of damage (including blast damage, unlike a ghost monster).

Weapon differences[edit]

Fist: Now known as Mr. Fist. Continuous-fire, like the chainsaw, hitting every tic.
Chainsaw: Now known as the plasma cutter, makes the player spin around the target when hitting it. Also hits every tic.
Pistol: Continuous-fire, no accuracy loss, lacks a muzzle flash.
Shotgun: Now known as the Shellgun. Fires in the same time it takes a chaingun to fire two shots.
Chaingun: Now known as the Instant Discharge Cannon. Fires every bullet the player has, all at the same time. It crashes on source ports that have an infinite ammo cheat turned on.
Rocket launcher: The pickup message says it "[doesn't] know what you just got". Shoots the same energy balls as the cyberdemon. One should move away from their missiles when firing in order to avoid being liquefied.
Plasma rifle: Now known as the Mine Launcher. Shares its sprite with the rocket launcher replacement. It shoots a non-exploding energy ball which hits the ground, waits a few seconds, and splits into thirds. These explode constantly for roughly 20 seconds, leveling anything unfortunate enough to go near them (including you). They dissipate after about 20 seconds, though this can be sped up by shooting at them.
BFG9000: Now known as the Blessing Cannon. Either instantly kills an enemy or renders it immortal. This works by dealing an amount of damage so high (2000000000-16000000000, or 2 billion to 16 billion) that it can trigger the integer overflow bug and give the enemy so many hit points that it wraps around, giving them an absurd amount of health. In source ports that fix the integer overflow bug (like ZDoom) it instead either kills the enemy or does nothing.

Miscellaneous[edit]

Most of the in-game messages are changed, some of them having nothing to do with the game. The "picked up a medikit that you REALLY need!" message in particular has been changed to refer to its rarity.

The Blessed Engine 1.9[edit]

A standalone version was released on May 26, 1997. This version includes support for The Ultimate Doom.

The Blessed Engine for Doom II[edit]

For years requests for a Doom II version of The Blessed Engine were not being met. Doug the Eagle uploaded a video on YouTube in 2008 highlighting the then unreleased Doom II version of The Blessed Engine. Finally, in 2016, this version was uploaded. According to tapewolf, the pseudonym of Doug the Eagle, this version had the following changes:

It's based on an earlier branch of the mod, so not everything that was in 1.9 is in the doom 2 version. 

The main change is that it makes most of the Doom 2 monsters work to some degree, except for the mancubus which is a barrel and doesn't trigger the action specials on maps such as Dead Simple. 

The only properly overhauled Doom 2 monster is the Hell knight, renamed to 'the eraser'

It was highlighted by Maes on July 21, 2016 in a Doomworld forums thread titled: "Doom 2 version of the Blessed Engine finally released!"^[1]. On June 30, 2017, Maes added in a local copy of the file.

Reception[edit]

For a long time, the WAD has divided opinions; it is often seen as either worst WAD ever made, or work of a genius. On the aims, Doug the Eagle writes, "my chief aim in 'The Sky May Be' was to create something totally new and utterly unlike anything that had ever been seen in Doom before. I believe, that for good or ill, I succeeded in that goal."[1]

The review by Cranky Steve's Haunted Whorehouse, a feature hosted at Something Awful that focuses on inept custom level design on various FPSes, gave the WAD the score of -48, lowest of the three Doom/Doom II WADs reviewed on the site. It is also enshrined in the DoomWorld's Top 10 Infamous WADs list.

External links[edit]

References[edit]

↑ Doomworld forums thread

[1] Doomworld forums thread

[1]