I honestly had a lot more fun making my Doom level this week. I think it was because of a combination of a couple things. One, I was a bit more comfortable with Slade and knew a bit more how to deal with its shortcomings. And two, I was able to incorporate a design that was a lot of fun for me — Zelda!
My map is largely inspired by the first ever level of the Legend of Zelda on the NES.
This time around, what ended up probably taking up most of my time is getting my textures prepared and learning the photo editing software called GIMP.
Generally I would have to take a really tiny screenshot of a texture from Zelda on google, and then copy and paste this texture onto a layer in Gimp, being sure to make sure that it all lines up correctly.
Sometimes while resizing images, I even had to re-pixelize to sharpen them back up.
And, what probably took the most time of them all — creating a transparent background for some of these objects, which I think for the most part turned out pretty good!
The textures aren’t perfect, but I still had a lot of fun drawing inspiration from Zelda. It was cool to really be able to incorporate some of my own ideas into this game! It started to feel like something I created and designed, rather than something that was created for me and I was just editing.