Author: coshernandez

Hey, it’s been a while.

In these last couple weeks, the class has ramped up quite a bit. Starting with the 6th project, which involved scripting Doom, using a decorate file to code in custom sprites, it all started getting crazy. My decorate file straight up didn’t work until Patrick and I went through and carefully checked every single character in the code. It turned out that there were invisible spaces carried over from when I copied the example codes on zdoom wiki and the project 6 assignment. Those spaces confused the program and prevented any actors I had from showing up in the Decorate repository. Annoying right?

In the end, I was able to crank out my level a week late. I based it upon the Saturnz Barz music video by Gorillaz, which involves the characters going on a trip through space after moving into a haunted house (I do have a theme going with these spooky atmospheres this quarter). I tried to convey every different scene from the video in my level, such as the beginning in the house, the trip into the asteroid belt, the fights with the worm monsters, and the strange, multicolored vaporwave-like sequence near the end. I ended the level at a mural depicting the end of the video, with the gang trapped in rooms while delivering the last lines of the song.

Saturnz Barz, in Doom.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the way a lot of my sprites and artwork turned out, mostly because I have pretty much no experience with photoshop. All my textures and sprites thus far have been hand drawn, which typically involved either freehand drawing something or tracing over source images using the layers tool. After our photoshop tutorial though, I was able to gain a rough understanding of some more advanced techniques that would reduce the amount of ‘brute force’ methods I was using.

Transition into zombie mode

For my final project, I’ve decided to build on my second WAD, which was the trip through the haunted house. I want to add a continuous story that builds throughout the level, with all of the plot being conveyed through scenery and sprites, a la Daniel’s level in space. In addition, I want to convey a very tense, survivalistic mood where the player has to move carefully through the map, rather than speed through it. I’ve obtained a couple of monsters from the Realm 667 repository online, in addition to a few weapons that would fit the aesthetic (AK47, revolver, knife). As a final plot twist, I wanted to have the player become a zombie, and play the rest of the level as a member of the undead that they were slaughtering not a moment earlier. I figured it would be a cool way to switch up the gameplay and add a mild plot twist to the level.

One of the more abstract parts of my level.

It’s a shame I won’t be able to incorporate the arduino in my final, I just don’t have enough knowledge about the machine to take advantage of its capabilities in a meaningful manner. Our class on learning the basics did go fairly quickly, but I was able to get the gist of some basic functionality, such as scripting the machine to press a button on a timer. It could make for an interesting project which involves a level that plays itself. It was cool to learn about soldering and scripting in the arduino’s language, and maybe I’ll try working on some ideas in the future with it, since I do own it, so it might be a good idea to mess with it a bit.

Overall, this class has been a crazy time, and I’m actually very excited to exhibit my final level at the event on Thursday, to show off how far I’ve come since week 1, where I could barely even play the original game.

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.

This week on my journey through the subcultures of Doom took me through a familiar territory; speedrunning. Having done this in the past for a course in metagaming, CTS 172, I had experienced the trials and tribulations of playing a game repetitively with speed, rather than fun, as a primary objective. However, with Doom, I find myself using different tactics to play, as well as different skill sets. 

(Super House of Dead Ninjas, the game I speedran in CTS172)

Speedrunning SHODN involved a lot of twitch, split-second reactions, due to each run of the game being randomized to some degree, so enemy placements are never the same. Speedrunning Doom, however, depends heavily on memorization and precision, due to the level structure and enemy placement being constant. The challenge in Doom comes in developing a sort of muscle memory from playing through a level enough to perfect the optimal route through the map.

(One of my failed runs through E1M2, 3 sec over my best time)

Memorization was the easy part, since the level wasn’t too long, and the optimal route is fairly easy to understand. The difficulty for me was being precise with my movement, making sure to hit switches quickly and not hit walls. As a result, I found myself becoming very tilted after several failed runs, because the only thing stopping me from getting a better time was my own lack of mechanical skill. Eventually I was able to hit 25 seconds on my best run, which is 3 seconds away from the world record.

In conclusion, I thought the speedrunning exercise was interesting, but I would definitely never repeat it, due to it not being my preferred method of play.

This week’s project involved me playing through episodes 2 and 3 of Ultimate Doom, and picking an interesting level to analyze and create a presentation on. I chose to focus on the level design, aesthetics, and music of E3M1, Hell Keep.

(Map of E3M1)

This level stood out to me as having a similar purpose to the very first level, E1M1, in that the level is designed to introduce you to new core mechanics in the following levels. From the first room in the level, the player must solve a simple symmetry puzzle in which they make an object (a skull with dark eyes) match an example object (a skull with red, glowing eyes) by triggering it with the ‘use’ key. 

This serves as a simple, yet effective introduction to a theme of episode 3, which features puzzles more heavily than the previous episodes.

This episode also emphasizes a particular design choice that is one of my favorite aspects of Doom; the horror aspect. The jump scares in the narrow hallways and behind closed doors add to the experience of playing the game, which connects the player emotionally by tapping into their fear and adrenaline resulting in these sudden jump scares and dangerous, claustrophobic situations.

(An instance of jump scares, where the player is greeted with a loud roar and several monsters in their face when opening the door.)

All in all, taking a closer look at the level revealed some valuable insight in how to design my own levels and how to introduce new mechanics to players without needing explicit tutorials.

Playing Doom was definitely a ‘new’ experience, in the sense that, despite it being an older game, it is entirely novel to me. A lot of the mechanics caught me off guard, such as the lack of a Y-axis for aiming and the amount of speed that the game allows your character to move at.

(Why can I shoot those fools above me from the ground???)

In addition, setting up the game itself was a pain, with me having bought the Steam version, but then having to go in and tinker with the game files due to mouse controls being bugged. Despite my struggles, I did develop an appreciation for the level design of the game, with that being, in my opinion, one of its crucial strengths.

In particular, level 6 is by far the most interesting level I’ve played as of yet because the level design emphasizes one of the key elements of Doom that I feel helped propagate its popularity. Throughout the level, enemies are plentiful, especially the invisible demons that are not only hard to see on a computer that isn’t running the game very well (like mine), but also take tons of hits to kill. That being said, the best design decision made with the placement and frequency of enemies in this level was to orient them around corners and behind walls, in order to induce jumpscares as well as scale the difficulty and encourage a new way of playing.

(An example of the tight corridors with startling enemy placements.)

The jumpscares resulting from placing demons around tight corners in maze-like areas is one of the strongest points as to why the game became popular, because it elicited the strongest responses out of players both in terms of action and fear. The small adrenaline rush that came from being spooked by a demon round a corner and proceeding to empty 30 rounds into the hallway was one of the best moments in the entire game. Every time I was in the cramped mazes, I felt the need to save at every corner due to more enemies shaving hp off of my total health, and I ended up saving myself into a corner with only 1% left. I then had to keep reloading the same state while I tried to kite the monsters and kill them quickly so I could find health kits, all while terrified that I would run into an invisible demon out of nowhere and then have to reload the save.

All in all, it was a fun experience, despite its learning curve and various bugs, and definitely inspired me to finish the other episodes on my own time, now that I’ve acquired a taste for the demonic.

 

P.S. Try listening to Gorillaz’ Demon Days while playing this, the walk animation lines up with a lot of song tempos which makes for a funny experience.