Doom WAD Bot

I like to follow bots on social media.

Not the ones posting spam, misinformation or trolling replies. The ones that post algorithmic art, content and other fun things that brighten up your timeline.

Twitter used to have a great community of bot builders but they destroyed that when they changed the API access. I used to follow quite a few on there.

The juxtaposition of updates from different bots was sometimes interesting. Enough to prompt me to try writing stories to string them together in some way. Those are mostly broken now as the bots have disappeared or accounts changed.

I also had some bots of my own which have now all been shutdown too.

Happily a lot of bot authors have moved to Mastodon and I’m now following a bunch of them including Star Fleet Jobs, BBC Microbot, Orcspiration, Mythology Bot and, um, Cheesoid.

I’ve also starting writing my own bots again. Like Marvin the Copilot.

This week I launched a new one called Doom WAD Bot.

Roughly once a day — I’m still running it manually as I make improvements — it posts maps from Doom and Doom 2 levels. Like these:

The Doom community is still very active. I heard recently that the original Doom/Doom2 games are still the most popular Id games.

Watching videos of people playing Doom on YouTube I was struck by how interesting and intricate some of the designs are when you can look at the whole level. So I thought I’d make a bot.

Luckily someone else had already done all the hard work. Steven Elliott’s wad2image tool is capable of generating some fantastic images, in a range of styles.

I’ve just wrapped it up into a Mastodon bot. The code for the bot is here if you’re interested.

It’s currently picking random maps from a list of 566 Doom Wads that won a Cacoward between 1994-2022.

Downloading and extracting the images is made simpler by the API and download mirrors made available via the idgames database.

The posts made by the bot are hosted by the botsin.space server which is an instance dedicated to hosting Mastodon bots.

I have some ideas for improvements including adding additional styles and a wider list of WADS. But I’m already enjoying seeing the random selection of levels.

Give the bot a follow if you’re on Mastodon. You can follow me here.