04 Mar 2026 » Super 2D Noah’s Ark Retrospective

The 2.4.0 release featured Super 2D Noah’s Ark, the 4th Wolf3D clone to be made available as a C-Dogs SDL mod. Work began in earnest two years prior, despite the game being a fairly conventional Wolf3D clone, with few unique mechanics (notably the quiz system). So why did it take so long, considering a similar effort (Spear of Destiny mission packs, which was mostly reskins) took only 2 months?

The first commits

If you’re familiar with Wolf3D-engine games you might be wondering why, after Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny and the mission packs, would I choose Super 3D Noah’s Ark (S3DNA) as the next Wolf3D mod to make, given much better games like Blake Stone and Rise of the Triad. Blake Stone was indeed my first choice, having tinkered here and there with reverse engineering and loading its data.

However, after a big effort making Cyberdogs for the 2.0 release I was eager to tackle a smaller project, and after studying Blake Stone some more I realised it was going to take a lot more work than anticipated - it was filled with extra features like a dialog system, item dispensers, one-way doors, teleporters and more. On the other hand, I suspected that S3DNA would be pretty low effort, given that its only unique mechanic was the quiz system - even the melon launchers were reskins of Mac Wolfenstein 3D’s flamethrower and rocket launcher. My suspicious were proven correct as I was able to get the level loading after only adding a few tile definitions. At this point I was pretty optimistic: this was only going to take a few months of sprite work, making a few new weapons and characters, and implementing the interesting quiz system. This will be a cakewalk! _{Narrator: it was not a cakewalk}

Quick sidebar: S3DNA, at least the 20th anniversary version that’s available from Steam, is not quite a conventional Wolf3D package. Some of its data is stored in WAD files, and the music is OGG instead of IMF - oddities likely related to ECWolf’s ZDoom inspirations. Fortunately these are both quite simple to decode.

Honeymoon phase

The first few months were a breeze. As expected, getting the game up and running and implementing the first few levels was quite easy: the level format was pretty similar to Wolf3D, with only a few oddities here and there, and respriting all the wall tiles only took a month, and respriting items another.

Other work took longer - implementing the weapons, removing the features that make S3DNA special like sleeping animals, slingshots instead of gun barrels that can overheat, lack of blood and so on. Some more reverse engineering was required to figure out what the weapon and enemy stats should be, since unlike Wolf3D, these haven’t been meticulously documented by fans over the years. This is where the first inklings of how S3DNA is no simple Wolf3D clone appeared: the enemies are not mere reskins of Wolf3D, with different stats and behaviour. Most of the later enemies are bullet sponges so you’ll be relying on the chaingunsuper feeder to spray copious amounts of ammo at them, and/or diligently scouring the secrets to find hard-hitting melon ammo. But more importantly for C-Dogs SDL, these animals aren’t humanoid so I can’t just dress up the human characters with special hats and facial hair like with Wolf3D…

The grind

The animals. Argh the animals! I made a 3D-to-2D pipeline so I can one-shot a bunch of character sprites after some up-front modelling work, which I am not good at and absolutely do not enjoy. Well now there are all these animals so the human model can’t be reused, I need to model and animate each. and. every. one. of these animals. I did take shortcuts - oh yeah there were plenty, like stretching and deforming existing models to the limit, reusing heads to represent unrelated animals, taking creative liberties like classifying elephant trunk+tusks as a type of “facial hair” - but each animal was a slog, taking a month or two each to make. It was so demoralising that I took side quests like making an easter egg or a whole different major feature release.

This phase of the project took about a year, which was pretty much half the total project time.

The timeline

And that pretty much describes the project. It was about 10% work on extracting and interpreting the game data, 10% sprite work, 20% special features like quizzes and weapons, 10% side quests to protect my sanity, and 50% making the damn animals. Usually when adding large content releases like this has side benefits, as the additional content enriches the base C-Dogs SDL game with new textures, sound effects, hats and so on, but not in this case - when will a sci-fi shooter ever need elephants and giraffes??? Well, maybe I’ll just have to add a special zoo level in one of the campaigns…

It’s been more than a month since the release so I’ve had time to mentally recover. Onward with further C-Dogs SDL development!

31 Jan 2026 » C-Dogs 2.4.0 Released!

This is a very special release. 2.4.0, it looks like a minor release, but it features a big new mod: Super 2D Noah’s Ark!

After Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny and the mission packs, this is another Wolf3D mod of the obscure yet highly noteworthy Super 3D Noah’s Ark. Critics derided it as a lazy reskin of Wolf3D but as I’ve written before, it’s fairly high quality when it comes to Wolf3D clones, and as I hope you’ll find, it’s rather fun, especially when played in 2D!

Like the other Wolf3D mods, to play this you need to get a copy of the game, which is available on Steam. So don’t wait, pick up your machine gun slingshot and kill feed some animals!

Once again this release contains a bunch of fixes and enhancements including those from new contributors. See the release notes for details.

Download free from itch.io: https://congusbongus.itch.io/cdogs-sdl/purchase

Release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/2.4.0

23 Aug 2025 » C-Dogs 2.3.2 Released!

Hey there, another out-of-band release that fixes crashes when loading classic campaigns. These are basically the ones from the mission pack. Reminder that you can get these from the downloads page, and contains a hodgepodge of user-created campaigns from back in the day. The quality is often lacking but it can be fun to mix things up a bit!

Download free from itch.io: https://congusbongus.itch.io/cdogs-sdl/purchase

Release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/2.3.2

09 Aug 2025 » C-Dogs 2.3.1 Released!

This is an out-of-band release that fixes a bug where the game gets stuck at the end of a level. Thanks for those who found and reported the bug!

The next release will have a major new feature and it is coming slowly but surely. Stay tuned for it!

Download free from itch.io: https://congusbongus.itch.io/cdogs-sdl/purchase

Release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/2.3.1

08 Mar 2025 » C-Dogs 2.3.0 Released!

New year new C-Dogs SDL minor release! This release adds a new high score system, with lots of added features. Check it out!

Compared to the old version, this adds:

• Time taken
• Kills
• Accuracy
• Favorite Gun/weapon
• Face

Which should make it much more useful. Want to challenge yourself to a speed run, or maybe a pacifist run? How about 100% accuracy? Now you can track it all with this system.

It’s a feature that I’ve wanted to add for many many years. It turned out to be a much bigger task than anticipated, and warranted a complete rewrite of the high score system. Unfortunately it is also backwards incompatible - more details are in the previous post. I hope it was worth it and you’ll enjoy it!

Download free from itch.io: https://congusbongus.itch.io/cdogs-sdl/purchase

Release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/2.3.0