maximum character length exceeded - I shall instead provide links to .txt files you can read

http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/monster_gaunt.txt
http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/monster_gug.txt


Please note: I haven't thought up these monsters because I'm a raving Lovecraft fanatic; literary zeal aside, I conceived them as appropriate additions to the Quake bestiary because they would fill a role in the gameplay I have felt during many mapping sessions to be noticeably empty. 

here are the illustrations from the Call Of Cthulhu RPG as reference - I would deviate some way from these depictions in actually modeling them for Q1 though.

http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/gug.jpg
http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/night-gaunt.jpg
[hoot]*chirp* http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/pitch-black.jpg 

good ideas, both of them. i like the pitch black version with the vertical hammerhead bone better than the illustrated picture, much more cooler. :D

i think the pickup/drop thing would be hard to code well... 

Sounds cool. But no matter how far the player is dropped, he only ever takes a maximum of 5 hitpoints. Consequently, it's good that you noted the player should take damage while being carried by the gaunt; however, I think 5 hitpoints every 2 seconds is too lenient. As you said, though, that would be refined during testing. 

Gugs sound interesting, and I think a better substitute for an end boss would be rather nice. But the attack system has me a little concerned. If the damage delt is too much, then it simply becomes a matter of starting the battle with more health than the gug (or dealing damage at a faster rate than the gug); but if you balance that by making the gug slower than the player, then it will be too easy to avoid it. It seems to me that the amount of damage delt by the melee attack should be about the same or perhaps a little more than the shambler's, and the speed should be pretty much the same as the player's. At least you're not really planning on a "smash" attack, as I think that would definitely be too much.

Drawing the player out with the bilebombs sounds pretty cool, especially if the gug's speed and melee damage are balanced properly. Hopefully it would actually work that way, instead of turning into a poorly implemented feature that serves almost no purpose at all.

BTW, if this sounds like unintelligible, delusional ranting, that's probably because I'm in a rather unintelligible and delusional state of mind right now. 

I had an idea for a monster. It was basically like a guy wearing a human skin trenchcoat and mask, and he had a chainsaw or some similar weapon, and he could like walk on walls and stuff. I got the idea after watching the Matrix Revolutions, and combined it with Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I decided to call them Skinnies. I also thought the Gugs would make a great monster for Quake, it seemed perfect when I was reading the Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath. 

well if you've added a custom monster it emans you must already have tampered with the game code so you could just as well change the way falldamage works although you might not want that because it could come as a terrible suprise to a player who would expect it to woek like they're used to when playing quake.