Author: ConnerShaw

At the end of my journey through DOOM, I have come out the other side with new insight into my creative interests and a few lessons about game design. One of those lessons, and perhaps the most important, is that I should make my expectations as limited as my time. I did not even come close to achieving my goal of making an entire episode of DOOM, mainly because I wanted to make the three levels I did finish full-fledged, detail oriented, individual yet contributing to an entire project. But this is not, to me at least, a story of my failure. I set out to make the best final product I could keeping to the DOOM aesthetic with a modern perspective on them. I made the best levels I could with my time limitations. They aren’t perfect, but improving each time I look them over again. Overall, I am proud of my accomplishments and I will continue my work on this .WAD until it’s finished.

“Sifting Through the Ashes” is a replacement for the first (three levels so far) of DOOM aimed at challenging the player and introducing the best of DOOM‘s modded resources as if part of the original game. It represents the largest undertaking in my creative career so far, one that I see as a pinnacle moment in my game design. Working late nights on this was hard, tiring, stressful, but also fulfilling, fresh, exciting, and thrilling, especially when it resulted in praise from my peers and mentors. This quarter, and especially this class, will be remembered as the time period I started getting serious about game design.

For my final project, I want to go back to my DOOM roots and focus on play rather than an elaborate recreation. Reskinning DOOM with the tools available has been interesting, and some of my previous considerations would be interesting side projects to continue working on in the future. But right now, for some reason, I don’t feel like doing any of that. I just want the players to feel like they’re playing something made with craft and time and attention. They can feel however they want, but the important takeaways are fun, intrigue, and challenge. A list of characteristics I want this project to contain by the end of its conception and execution:

1. At least 5 well-designed levels (hopefully 8, making a full episode, by the final due date)
2. A background storyline conveyed through level details
3. Game feature spotlights, such as key card puzzles, traps, jump-scares, and secrets
4. Some updates to the original DOOM, including new monsters, weapons, sprites, and maybe textures (although not to detract too heavily from the original DOOM aesthetic)
5. Design features that stray from the limitations of the original and showcase the capabilities of using modern tools such as GZDOOM

I want this project to culminate every design lesson taught throughout each week without the tedium of creating everything from scratch. This way I can work through the details that I never fully investigated in prior projects simply because the new features implemented to fulfill requirements took precedence. Now that I know how things work in DOOM, or at least how they’re supposed to work, I can think about my level design from a holistic standpoint. For now, my worst enemy is myself when it comes to finishing this over an appropriate course. I know I have a tendency to do projects within a limited time frame, usually because I procrastinate much more than the average person and also because I like seeing something through from beginning to end without many breaks in the creative process. With an undertaking this huge, though, I need to keep working, even if I’m not in front of the level editor itself.

To end, here are a few additions I will make to the pool of resources I have to make these  levels (some of which will have to do with my story arc)

      

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.

(Apparently I never hit submit on this diary and thought I had, so my bad on that one)

This week’s DOOM experience involved not only map design, but sprite, enemy, and weapon design, along with the maintenance of a stylistic and aesthetic experience. Basically, this week was like taking everything we did from last week and and quadrupling the amount of thought and effort, but with the purpose of creating something equally as complex and rewarding. This week felt like a full design process, and in working on the final project and other comprehensive projects, I viewed this week as an opportunity to think about my approach to future work. If I eventually want to make my own games, even if I might be doing less of the art that this week involved, I still need to consider the factors that go into these methods of creation, namely sizing of objects, stationary versus movement aesthetics, and overall quality assurance.

Luckily for me, working within the medium of Radiohead art, I had a defined art style that made my usual qualms with drawing a bit more negligible. However, this week I tried to exude more confidence in my work despite its limitations and the time it took to do so little. Not to compare myself to others, but when also seeing how much effort people put into their presentations also gave me confidence. Critiquing my work alongside others’ work allows me to see what I need to improve in my own work that everyone did well, the culmination of which I will apply in my final project. Hopefully, what I have learned will come through, in addition to a few ideas I want to explore throughout the next few weeks on my own.

This was the first texture I made for my level (and really, for anything ever). When I first sat down to work on this week’s project, I honestly thought I was just going to make a hand drawn level with some basic textures to make my weekend a lot easier. But making textures turned out to be the longest part of my project, and although a lot of that time involved navigating through GIMP and retexturing everything until it looked “perfect,” I learned two important things from this experience: one — I do not want to be a video game artist — and two — being part of the art design process, even if I’m not the one drawing or texturing, enriches the design process of a level so much.

 

The aesthetic principles of the level depend on the ability of the artist to imagine the style of the level, but also to integrate a particular style that matches the tone of the game and the image of the company producing it. Although video games are not an entirely visual medium, the visual components of a game can determine whether or not the game is worth playing. Where gameplay determines the genre and fun-factor in a game, the graphical content determines the pace of the game, the first impression before a person is able to engage with it. Graphics do not define how good a game is or what a game is in general. They provide another layer to the video game experience that separates it from other game types — the video component. And of course, this is common knowledge. I knew this coming into this class and far before deciding I wanted to make games. I find it interesting, though, how the pieces that combine to create a whole graphical world are often cast aside in favor of a short judgement on the overall project. Few people go through a game looking at each individual texture even though game artists can spend months drawing each individual surface viewed throughout the game. To me, that is amazing, and something that I now appreciate even more than before.

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.

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.

So, even though our project for this week involved many of the practices in writing this blog, I wanted to try to dive into another layer of DOOM I we haven’t touched on, but that still impacted my experience this week. While thinking about this, I came to thinking about first person shooters and why they have recently become the most popular genre in current video gaming. We have team based shooters like Overwatch and Counter-Strike, objective shooters like Battlefield and Call of Duty, puzzle and story-based shooters like Half-Life and Portal, and then we have DOOM, a strange, somewhat out of place shooters amidst the other. Sure, there is an objective, like any other game: get through the level as quickly as possible while doing as much as you can to stay alive and get the most stuff. However, in compared to more modern titles of the same genre, the game itself makes very little sense. Small details create some assemblance of a story, there are enemies to shoot, levels to get through, and yet even with the additional secrets and new enemies with every new chapter, stopping to think about why I am enjoying myself as much as I am does not produce a cohesive answer. And then it hits: it’s fun because it is a shooter. DOOM represents the fun-for-the-sake-of-fun aspect of shooters, a kind of middle ground between stress relief, catharsis, and disconnection from reality nearly everyone can relate to. With that, I am beginning to see why this game sits on its throne of obscure popularity and why so many shooters, with all of their polish and variety, still pull from DOOM. I am interested to delve more into this in the coming weeks.

When I was around 6 years old, my dad told me about playing DOOM on the worst computers ever. He told me how it was the only GPS he could stand to play at the time. He also told me how motion sick he gets just thinking about playing again.

Now that I’m diving into this shared experience, everything he says makes complete sense. The sprawling hallways, the quick turnarounds, the jumpscares, I feel like I am reliving the stories he told me as a kid, but with the knowledge of an adult. Each level left me more puzzled as to what to do, sometimes losing where I was, having to retrace my steps and find my way through the level multiple times. My particular favorite level ended up as Phobos AnomAly simply because of its contrast to the others. The final area dies not conform to the maze-like mess of hallways — rather, it presents you as the player with clear direction, making the gameplay even more ominous than before despite the lack of enemies to fill in the empty space (which should be the most terrifying aspect). The boss room then presents you with several surprises: a new enemy to learn as you fight it, a space that initially fools you with a floor texture looking like lava, and an ending design resembling a pentagram, the first formal, obvious shape in the game. Then, when you think you just won, you enter the real game, a perfect bait and switch, leading you further into the game.

As I continue with my exploration of DOOM, I look forward to learning more about the level design and get more perspective from my dad on his playthroughs on the orginal game.