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.