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Doom tutorial: overview & setup

The goal

Section titled “The goal”

The Python adapter tutorial ends with an Adapter that prints Invocations to a terminal. This tutorial series replaces the terminal with a real game: by the end, viewers redeem Cues that change gravity, spawn bots, speed up monsters, and talk trash in the in-game chat of a live Doom session.

You’ll build it in stages, and each stage introduces exactly one new Pack concept:

  1. A Pack with one event (say) and one queue.
  2. Talking to the game over Zandronum’s remote console.
  3. The first handler — wiring an Invocation to the game, safely.
  4. A second queue, so instant effects never wait behind chat.
  5. A timed queue with ready_after = "done" — the bridge serializes long-running effects for you.
  6. Pack state — a persistent chaos tally, a live active-effect key, and a death counter read from the game.
  7. Pack config — broadcaster-tunable caps and branding.
  8. An overlay — Doom-themed toasts and a death counter that don’t hide the game.
  9. Default redeems to finish it off.

The finished Pack lives at https://git.aiko.works/aiko/chaos-pack-doom; everything in this series is real, runnable code from it. The repo has one commit per stage, in order — check out a commit to browse the source exactly as that stage leaves it.

What you’ll need

Section titled “What you’ll need”
  • Everything from the Python adapter tutorial — Python 3 (stdlib only), the mobrule binary on PATH, a bridge token.
  • Zandronum — a multiplayer Doom engine with a remote console (RCON): https://zandronum.com/download. Install both the client and zandronum-server. The Pack never bundles or distributes the engine — it just talks to a server you run.
  • Freedoom — free game data, so you don’t need to own Doom: https://freedoom.github.io/. (A DOOM2.WAD you own works too.)

Start the game

Section titled “Start the game”

Start a local server with RCON enabled, and connect your client to it:

Terminal window
zandronum-server -host -iwad freedoom2.wad \
  +sv_rconpassword 'pick-a-password' +sv_cheats 1
zandronum -iwad freedoom2.wad -connect 127.0.0.1:10666

Keep both running for the rest of the tutorial. Next: declare the Pack and its first event.