Month: October 2017

This week we were given a really daunting but exciting task — creating our very first Doom levels! I went into designing my level having no plan whatsoever. I wanted to take to heart the words of Liz Ryerson, who said something along the lines of “The best Doom levels created seemed to be the ones that he [John Romero] wasn’t really thinking about.”

Oddly enough, my level started to definitely take an inspiration from John Romero’s recreation of E1M8.

 

Above is John Romero’s level.

Above is a clip from my level.

You can see the similarities in the jagged lines. However, something I didn’t realize until looking at these side by side is that Romero’s jagged areas were lowered into the ground, whereas mine were raised. Either way, each and every crevice in the jagged areas had to be clicked and textured, which was a total pain to do.

This is the map of my level. I decided to include a small maze inspired by the level I talked about and chose to speed run — E2m2.

The most fun part of this process was definitely looking at other people’s levels and hearing what people thought of mine. I’m looking forward to it again this week!

For my level, I wanted to create a large arena full of monsters that the player must traverse through.

First, I created a large room and changed the textures to make the level feel like an outdoor arena.  This was accomplished by cobblestone floor textures, vine walls, and the skybox texture for the ceiling.

The arena is filled with every monster available, including multiple bosses in the corners.

I wanted the force the user to dodge the enemies rather than attacking.  To do this, I scatter only a few weapons throughout the map.

I wanted to participate in Doom’s secret culture.  I originally intended on the user picking up keys throughout the arena, only being able to escape if they have collected all three.  Instead of this, I made the exit a secret, which forces the user to explore the arena further than they would with only keys and incorporates the idea of a secret solution found throughout doom.

This is the secret exit:

It is a mysterious monolith in the corner of the map guarded by a spider demon.

This secret ending, sparse ammunition, and large number of monsters is intended to keep the player move and create a fun and rage-filled experience.

 

My first doom map mod was far better than i excepted it to be.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to create a map on actual architecture. At first, I was going to create my house but then I know if created it and didn’t explicitly say that it was my house from the start then no one would get the references. So, the reason I chose to do the art annex was so that I could create something that everyone could potentially figure out on their own. I really tried to focus on creating the architecture of the building and by placing implied furniture.

The strongest of these furniture (judge by the critique) was the flesh couch in the sonic arts lab. When designing this level, I know I had to insert it into the game because for quartets I would be glued to that seat and if any cdm student every took the sonic arts class they would know that image instantly. Using the pink fleshy brain texture was by the far the funniest and most practical texture to use for the couch.

Overall I enjoyed this project, the only hard parts were creating doors and the fact that my slade was bugged and I was not able to sue the 3D world view properly because of a instant scrolling bug.

Honestly, when I started drafting my level for DOOM, I was aiming for something like this. As I started actually putting this into practice, however, I realized how non-linear this zoo compared to levels in a video game and adapted to a more purposeful placement of my monster “exhibits.” The lesson for me here is that concept is key until it interferes with your purpose. My concept was to make a zoo in DOOM, but my purpose was to make a level that fit into the style of the game and also to contain a background narrative structure.

Making this level resulted in more than just a fun experience for a class assignment. It reaffirmed my own goals as a designer. I want to tell stories through aesthetics, to challenge the player through design elements that reward the determined. And maybe I fell short. I definitely did not spend the right amount of time walking through the space, ensuring a balance between empty and filled. But the best part is that this is the first time, and I already have ideas for improvement and future developments. As a result of this, I am now looking into level editors for other games and trying to work with their assets.

This is a much less conceptual blog than I usually write, and I came into this week wanting to talk about concrete design and how I went about making my level. Instead, I can’t help but express how excited I am to be doing what I want to do. Sometimes, I feel like I need to be forced to sit down and create something to get my mind flowing, and this week gave me that opportunity. I can’t wait to do even more.

This week on Doom Diaries, our task, after we chose to accept it, was to create a brand new level of the Ultimate Doom using Slade, a level editor. I chose to make a gameplay focused level, in which the main focus was fighting groups of enemies using powerups that the player would pick up based on their choices of progression through the level.

I came up with the original concept for the layout of the level by thinking back to the design of a gym in Pokemon Emerald, in which the player can take branching paths to move forward to the boss, with each path providing a different experience.

(The Petalburg gym, from Pokemon Emerald)

(The layout of my level, The Evil Has Landed.)

I decided to present the player with an initial dichotomy between choice of rooms: a red path and a blue path.   (The two initial choices of rooms to move forward in.)

The red path would provide the player with more weapons and ammo, making the experience when fighting off enemies more run and gun. The blue path was more powerup and health oriented, which would encourage a slower playthrough which allowed for mistakes that were mitigated by the powerups. The decision to place the red path on the left and the blue on the right was intentional, to mirror the idea of ‘The Left Hand Path vs The Right Hand Path’,  in which the Left emphasizes dark, violent magic, and the Right emphasizes light, healing magic.

(A description of the two forms of magic, from theChurchofSatan.org)

Creating the map was an incredibly enjoyable experience, much preferred over the previous speedrunning assignment. Bringing my ideas to life in the form of a level was very satisfying, and is something I would do in my free time for fun. However, for a solid 2 hours, I cursed everything about Doom, Slade, TCS198, and the internet when I ran into my biggest roadblock: DOORS.

(Seriously, this shit is so finicky.)

Learning to create doors was very unintuitive and difficult, and I ended up ruining my ability to make nice looking and easy-to-create doors because I designed the layout of my level without making additional spaces for the doors. The given tutorials were difficult to figure out since my doors were connected to the whole room rather than having a small partition like most people do when making them. In addition, since I didn’t plan the openings for the doorways ahead of time, the textures wouldn’t fit well over the space for the doors, since they would repeat like a grid. This resulted in some ugly looking doors throughout my level.

Overall though, after getting past the door mechanics of the level editor, I think I have the ability to make a really nice level for next week’s project and for future personal projects.

P.S.: The title of my level, The Evil Has Landed, is a reference to a song by the same name by Queens of the Stone Age. Check it out here.

Since we’ve started playing Doom I’ve been thinking about what I’d want to mod or how I’d want to style my own Doom designs. Doom is very boyish with the heavy metal, roaring monsters, and whole hell vibe. These are all things that make Doom such a cool unique game, but in my own mods I want to start making it a little bit more girly. That’s why I chose to do a rose for this weeks assignment. I was also more inspired by the types of maps that look like a drawing from a birds eye view, like E3M2. 

My Slade difficulties:
When I started using Slade I drew out my rose using the line tool and I later realized that the line segments inside of my rose weren’t actual walls so they ended up being really thin but I textured them anyway and tagged them impassable, which turned out okay except that enemies were able to shoot their weapons through the walls even with the block monsters, sounds and impassable tags on. For some reason I also assumed that you can easily make a door by putting a special on a single line segment but that’s not the case… they’re a lot of work and if I was going to include them into the rose I would’ve had to restructure the inside, so that’s why I just went with open walls.

For this week, we are required to make our own doom level. When I started the project, I wished to make a level that mimics a building in the real world. I tried some famous sites but failed as I am not familiar enough to them. Then I realized that I could make the most familiar place, my house, into a doom level as the video we watched in class. Since I lived on the first floor while all my roommates all lived on the second floor, I decided to make the game start in my room and end at my roomates room. The story is that  I wake up, realzing there were monsters in the house, killed them and came to second floor to inform my roomates and realized that they are the monsters. In the end, shocked and sad, I climbed inside the clost in the inner room on the second floor.

(my level)

(the floor plan of my house)

Since my purpose is to tell a horrible story under a familiar, daily context, I tried to minic the house as precisely as possible to bring the players into the scene. Also, I placed the fictional elements like monsters and guns which are not very likely to appear in my house in resonable place. For example, monsters are mostly in the living room and dinning room, places where my roomates and I spend a lot of time in. Blue water is placed near the medicine clost in the real world and guns in the kitchen(I wish to do a knife but doom does not give me that option) and a saw in the toolbox. The most difficult part of the level design is making the door. What I wish to do is a door with handle and can be opened by push or pull like real doors. I realized it is not possible and even the build in door required hours of work. In the end I only made one door works.

 

For my speed run project I decided to go with e2m6.  I was drawn to this level because it takes advantage of a glitch in which the player escapes the boundaries of the map and walks directly to the exit.

The glitch works because this one of the only spots in the game where two walls meet at a 45 degree angle, as seen in the image below.  This somehow makes the boundary weaker, and the player can SR50 outside the map if you ram doom guy at the perfect angle in the 45 degree corner.

Once you are outside of the map, you can view the monsters (see gif at top of post).  Interestingly, they cannot see doom guy, and only react to the sound of his gunshot.  Doom guy cannot kill any of the monsters from outside the map.

After you have explored the outside of the map for a bit, and are ready to complete the mission, you must hit the exit button from behind the wall it is situated.  This is by far the most challenging part of the speed run. At first I spent at least 5 minutes every run trying to click it and eventually found quicker methods, though it still can take me up to 2 minutes to successfully push the button.

 

Overall, this level is fascinating to speed run because it exhibits the doom communities ability to share knowledge about exploits and build on that knowledge to find a successful speed run.

Doom_UV_e1m1_009

DOOM speedrunning. Definitely something I never thought I would be doing. I always saw speedrunning as something inaccessible to me because of my propensity to take my time with everything, and particularly in video games, to explore cautiously and make sure I am managing my resources properly (side note: I used to have difficulty with RTS games in that I tried to save my resources rather than spend them). Despite my aversion to the practice itself, I found this week’s project rather exciting and, while frustrating, relatively relaxing. The satisfaction of restarting a level over and over, yelling expletives at times and slamming my hands down onto the keys harder each time actually inspired a sort of catharsis in the face of other looming projects and a piling workload. Speedrunning offers a situating into the work space that I do not experience in any other metagame. Repetition, triumph, competition, all of these factors contribute to the appeal of speedrunning. It turns the game into a completely  different space in which the player relies less on the tools granted by the game and more on their own reaction ability. It embodies the “man versus machine” dynamic better than any other playstyle, as the player battles both the images on screen and the hardware that is meant to help them get through the game as quickly as possible. I would recommend at least trying speedrunning to anyone at least interested in games just to understand how it changes your perception of design and game mechanics.

I think this week’s assignment has been my favorite of the three so far, it really tapped into my competitive side. With the “simple” goal of running a single level in an allotted time, there was always a ton of room for improvement with every run of the level I made, really pushing me to keep going.

Here’s the run of the level that I used for reference. I may have been a bit unlucky with getting attached to this level given how difficult it is (and how it is hard to skip most of it), but still, playing the level over and over really piqued my interest as well as made me realize why people speedrun.

The problem with me and speedrunning though is that it might be a little too addicting. Like getting good at fighting games or first person shooters, learning the engine of the game from the users perspective really helps a player improve. I’ve already spent a good amount of time in high school on the former and unless I really really like a game I probably can’t imagine getting much into speedrunning myself (and I would first need to 100% a game before I’d want to speedrun, I think). As I mentioned in class, I really appreciate the community effort to explore the nooks and crannies of game engines through ‘breaking’ games, especially when the engines are easily exploitable, allowing players to go out of bounds/etc. Overall though, I think I would rather watch speedrunning communities develop from a distance rather than engage with them myself (although this experience was wonderful, frustrating, and addicting).