Although this week’s project had a lot less to do with DOOM than previous weeks, I found our Arduino work fitting for one of the main themes of this class: taking something and making it do more than intended. My experience with hardware is mainly fact-based in that I know about hardware and practices, but I myself am not practiced. For this reason especially, I found the process of working with an Arduino for the first time, as well as taking apart a computer mouse, soldering components, and rewiring rewarding and intriguing. If I had more time, I would explore the implied avenues of the Arduino more, but since this is not the case, I will move on to exactly how this work will apply to my project.
Since I will not be utilizing the skills demonstrated during these lessons in hardware manipulations, I turn instead to their implications on a process. To create a custom controller, you start with a game and a way you want to play it, even if that way disconnects the player from the original media in some way. This is exactly what we do in this class, and although the temptation to change the nature of DOOM is strong, I found this week inspiring for the opposite reasons. I want my DOOM mod to be about DOOM, to represent the lengths a mod can go to convey every aspect of the DOOM aesthetic. I want to take DOOM apart to see how it works, and put in a few extra things when putting it back together that id software didn’t include. I’ll get more into my hopes in my next blog post, but for now these are my ruminations.