TCS198: Modding DOOM

This week was really interesting for me as I am someone who has never really explored a game with cheats. I think at first I may have gotten a bit carried away. Going right into episode two I made my self invulnerable, gave myself all weapons and keys, and enabled walking through walls.

However, I found that by using these cheats, especially walking through walls, I was not really able to fully understand and experience the level design. I found myself just sort of zipping through each level without paying attention at all to my surroundings.

I solved this problem best by disabling walking through walls. Disabling this cheat in particular still allowed me to explore what it feels like to play a game with cheats while still allowing me to effectively tour the architecture of Doom without fear of being killed.

Exploring Doom in this manner really allowed me to explore the level design in a very different way than how I explored level 1. The play through of level 1 allowed me to learn about what it was like to look at and play the game from a players perspective. Whereas touring the game in episodes 2 and 3 allowed me to see more of the developers’ and designers’ perspectives and made me think much more about the overall story of Doom and how that is portrayed.

Through the first episode of Doom, I was surprised by the complexity and sophisticated puzzle nature of the levels, as all I’d known about Doom beforehand were the gory Hell imagery and testosterone-poisoning antics of Doomguy. However, I thought that this was the end of the level design beyond the FPS-founding mechanics that I thought was what made Doom so successful. The secret level in Episode 2, Shores of Hell, however, completely proved me wrong, providing a powerful form of environmental storytelling and world-building that I normally only expected from games such as Dark Souls and the like.

Entering the level is strange enough; it requires walking through a curtain of fire/blood after hitting a secret switch in a previous level to unlock, and the level begins by plopping you down in darkness before countless Baron of Hell roars descend upon you. The level is perfectly geometrical, bringing back reminders of the eerie final boss level of Episode 1, and the next room is just as strange, consisting of yet another geometrical map filled with only one kind of strong enemy. However, once all the noise and fury has calmed down, you notice a strange sprite flashing in a corner of the map, and realize that it’s an eviscerated hanging corpse of what you at the time knew to be the strongest enemy in all of Hell. The moment is a sort of climax to the strange sense of foreboding, and begins an actual feeling of overarching tension in the back of your mind for likely the rest of Episode 2, until you finally encounter your suspicions: that there are bigger fish in Hell.

The exit itself is strange too, as it consists of 3 consecutive gate doors, all containing the key to the next. It requires neither  mechanical skill nor heavy thinking to progress through, and gives off the feeling of magnanimous ceremony right before one encounters something of immense significance. The gate process finally culminates in simply a teleporter, adding even more to the sense of strangeness, which is only compounded when this teleporter, unlike the switches that needed to be flipped at the end of every other level in Doom, simply ends the level for you.

The level is a small, short gem of both storytelling and compelling gameplay, and will likely remain in my memory for a long time down the road.

Sandy Petersen beat you. He designed Containment area
Containment Area in The Shores of Hell is by far the best level design in your game.

I personally think this is by the best level because of the complexity behind it. There is no room to breathe you are constantly turning a cornered having to fight those lovely imps. The begging of the level looks very human, one of the most human features of the game. Starting this game, I Instantly became attached to the maze of crates.

I felt they had so much potential and made the game feel completely different. It wasn’t until I read the doom wiki that I was able to truly understand why the levels look as they did. This warehouse which used to be run by UAC were now being taken over by aliens had been altered to their liking. The crates therefore were the only truly preserved items in this level. Which is surprising because if a real battle had occurred in that warehouse the first thing to go up in smoke would be those crates. After exploring the maze, I got tired of the maze but instead fell in love with the Quadra pistons which were ¼ elevators alternating, simply for aesthetics.

As I investigated these pistons, I came to realize how human and alien they felt. The Industrial fell of the piston was the human part but the engravings on the top side of the piston looked very alien.
So yes John Romero, I was highly entertained by this level that you didn’t design.

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.

Upon starting up Doom from Steam (which worked with ease, surprisingly) and wanted to try an authentic, difficult, “Basic” Doom experience. So, I tried the first mission ( not exactly the shareware version) on the “hurt me plenty” difficulty. It took my about two and a half hours to get through it, with about an hour and a half just on these two levels – levels five and six. With level five in particular, I had the level mapped down to every enemy i should be hitting at precisely the right time. I had died pretty quickly the first time playing the level, and hadn’t saved my game the entirety of my time playing. This made my shotgun ammo (which the level supplied plenty of) a valuable resource for me. After a few tries of just holding down control with the shotgun equipped, I learned to take a deep breath and try to eliminate the enemies one by one by specifically targeting them. What made the level particularly interesting was the chamber in which two hidden doors opened on both sides of the room, with a ton of enemies in them:

 

Yeah.. this one really got to me. Of all the levels in the first mission, I think this one helped me develop my skill in the game, since I would have to run around in panic mode trying to get the health packs on either side. A couple times I would get past this only to die within the next minute on the next part of the level, which was great. I think whatever skill I gained during that level really helped me with the next several (or I got less anxious and more confident?) because I managed to gather a lot more weapons and health and not die again until the last level of the game. A couple of closing comments about my first time playing Doom: The game doesn’t hold your hand, or even try to. Which was good and bad. I didn’t realize there was a map button until the second to last level, and it took me quite awhile to realize I could shoot the canisters of waste to blow up enemies (and another bit of time before I realized enemies could do the same to me). This lack of handholding really amplified the exploration aspect for me, when I realized the game wasn’t trying to lead me I guess I became more curious about what I could and couldn’t do. Secondly, I thought it was interesting about how the game almost expects you to die several times while playing a level. Maybe it was just me playing the fifth level a billion times, but the moment of finding out where the wall was that all the enemies were hiding behind as well as how to trigger it was very rewarding, and it was something I definitely did not notice on my first playthrough. Super excited for the class!
P.S. – I grabbed that image on a Youtube playthrough of the original shareware version, and totally didn’t even think of there being a hidden wall behind a hidden wall that could lead to the outside of the level .. I guess there’s a lot more to find in this game.

10/4/2017

As this was my first time playing the DOOM Series, I chose the easiest difficulty possible!!

I usually play the Normal or Easy difficulty when encountering a new game.  But I was a bit surprised upon entering the levels that enemies lay strewn across the floor already dead.  It was humorous to see that enemies were included still but just dead, it’s like someone else had gone through this level before me??  I started to wonder about the story of this game since there was no opening prologue or dialogue.  Are we the only protagonist in this game?

This is what the easiest difficulty looks like…

It’s been awhile since I’ve played a first-person shooter in general, but especially on my laptop.  I wanted to spend some time getting reacquainted to this style of gameplay and get to learn all the controls.  For starters, for some reason my mouse wasn’t working.  And a problem I encountered was pressing F4 to get to the volume controls screen.  I used this as my way to pause the game, but my first time doing so brought on a ton of lag?  I closed all the tabs on my computer and re-entered the game which helped, but later when I returned to the volume control screen, the screen turned black.  I’m not sure what was going on, so next time I’ll test it out a bit.

Another thing was an issue with strafing.  I could only successfully toggle between strafe/non-strafe when in fullscreen mode.  And sometimes just pressing ALT didn’t work, sometimes it did.  Sometimes I feel like I had to hold it down a bit, and other times I think I had to use ALT in combination with a left or right arrow key.  This made combat challenging with the brown enemies that shoot the fireballs.

But overall, my first experience with this game was positive.  I feel like the easier difficulty helped me consider this game in the context of a class rather than just thinking about how fun/addicting it is.  I’m excited to continue!

 

Though I enjoy horror/creepy movies and games, I never touched Doom as it just had a sort of nightmarish bent I stayed far away from. These fears were quickly realized as soon as I entered the game, and the constant sounds of demons and possessed humans moaning and growling through walls everywhere constantly kept me on edge. What surprised me was the difficulty on default setting, “Hurt Me Plenty,” and how instantly immersed I was in the Doom experience despite my constant feeling of being creeped out and pressured, especially in the last few levels where the puzzle and discovery part took a massive upturn.

Mechanically, while I originally expected a very primitive fighting system, I was surprised to find myself eventually taking cover, shooting past walls, switching from shotgun to pistol to conserve shotgun ammo in taking down distant targets, etc., all practices I use in modern day first person shooters. Another large part of my mechanical progress in the game was realizing that moving forward and backward on my mouse were also controls for movement of my character in game; while this definitely helped clear a great deal of confusion about my movement, it was still extremely difficult to not move my mouse in a way that’d affect my movement at all. Even when I discovered that there was a way to strafe (alt/option + arrow key), I’d already habituated myself to turning and backing up to dodge attacks. This was the only way I managed to survive numerous late game encounters, as well as the final boss fight in a peek-behind-cover, shoot, and dodge in an almost Dark Souls-esque pattern.

Dodging

Dear John Romero this is my very first time playing Doom and the level I chose to analyze was “Nuclear Plant.”

The reason i chose this level is because is simply because i suck at the game and it took me over 4 hours to beat the first part of the game. So the second level was enough for me.

In this level you are presented with the opportunity to either to explore a large room (of course filled with those evil gun-holding martians).  In this room you meet your best friend, the shotgun. This OP weapon gives you the power to kill your enemies in one blow with having to be perfectly center. Best weapon in the game, yup, even better than the rocket launcher that kept getting me killed.

The enormity of the room, is a little shocking for me personally. I never expected games to be this advanced for its time. Having to find keys to open specific doors, ride elevators, invisible monsters was more than I expected for a game that came out before i was born.

This level design in this episode is well thought out. In the first room you have to decide weather to go straight, left or right. On both sides you have doors but you can not access the left door without grabbing the access card that is found on the right side. One of the most important features however is located ahead of you, on the a hidden elevator inside the small tunnel.

Once you get the access card, you are able to then access the red door on the left. I love how once you enter these next rooms, the lighting change drastically , these rooms are darker and have a lot of acid that could potentially kill you.

The second to last room is by far the scariest in the level, especially with my screen resolution. The room was pitch black and a horde of monsters are there waiting to destroy you. Especially since i tried this level in the hardest setting (once).

Over all the game, specially this level, is very difficult especially with the outdated controls. But its a great game for its time.

I really enjoy playing video games, but to be 100% honest, this probably would not have ever been a game that I would have chosen to play on my own besides the fact that it is such a classic. I don’t mind the FPS aspect, it’s the monsters (if I can even call them that? What are they?) chasing after me and hearing the “oink oink” noises telling me there’s something nearby trying to hurt me, yet having no idea where it is. I’m the type of person who refuses to watch horror movies, so getting through the spookiness of the game was a bit challenging for me. Embarrassingly, I tried to view it as a sort of “conquering my fear.”

E1:M6 was by far the worst.

After navigating through a crazy, maze-like map, I hit what I thought was going to be an innocent button and immediately like 20 monsters appeared behind me, I sprayed my machine gun everywhere in a panic, and I died, without a recent save to fall back on. Even after later coming to this room and defeating these monsters after a few more tries, I could not for the life of me find the exit. Later I found out it was in that very same room.

In my search for the exit, I was able to uncover 50% of the secrets. I really appreciated the health boost from the blue guy.

Overall, I found myself getting braver and braver to turn corners and explore as I continued to play the game. I found my self saying “even if something does pop out from behind there, I can kill it.”

 

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.