Doom Cacowards
doomwiki.org
doomwiki.org
So you start by throwing together some boxes; and before you know it you've spent 11 years building a monster of a map in your spare time[1].
I know a number of veteran professional level designers are kinda worried about the field. So many of them got their starts playing around with the level creation stuff that frequently came with PC games. It got them interested and allowed them to walk before they could run. So they're a bit afraid a new generation might be starting from less than they had. There's some hope that maybe Minecraft and Roblox will be a younger generation's starting point.
Game development is the most accessible it's been in many decades, but level design specifically is perhaps less accessible than it was circa 2000.
Unity had the issue of the high skill floor of creating meshes for scenes until recently. You can now build reasonable looking unity scenes using a process akin to Hammer and QERadiant; albeit still inferior to those, IMHO.
There's also the resurgence of interest in crunchy arcade shooters, using classic engines no less, which is drawing attention to tools like DoomBuilder and TrenchBroom.
Annnd VR tools are making complex mesh building a lot more accessible by making it a lot more intuitive.
But I will say there was something particularly special about level editors coming with the greatest games of the day back in the 90s and early 2000s. Not only was this extremely accessible as it meant you could just learn level design, and not the rest of game development, but it meant you got to learn level design for your favourite games, something particularly enticing to young people. You also got a bit of a built-in audience.
†A "softlock" is when it's possible to get into a situation where the player can't win but they also can't die and start over, so they must either restart the game or wait for some in-game timer to count down to zero. In normal course design you should prevent this, if necessary with an "anti-softlock" where Mario assuredly dies once frustrated in this way, e.g. you miss an important jump, and Mario just falls to his death, rather than being stuck in a deep pit from which he cannot escape. But in troll design you make dying in this circumstance possible but extremely difficult, so that the player's skill in tested not only in winning, but also just in dying. This art is called an anti-softlock or most often "anti" for short and is a crucial part of "troll Mario".
That's not even on a general purpose computer, a Switch is something you might have purchased or been gifted solely to play video games and now you're a level designer, able to show off your aesthetics, pacing, mechanics and so on.
(Java) Minecraft is way beyond that because it's not even just about level design, it goes way beyond even a Doom TC. People change the physics rules, how graphics are rendered, not to mention radically changing the gameplay. I basically only play the ascend-to-godhood type packs, and even among those there's so much variety between something tightly themed like Compact Claustrophobia or Star Factory, and big sprawling do-what-you like packs such as Stoneblock, or Project Ozone. But now you're a video game programmer (albeit in Java) not even just a level designer.
It took over two years before 3rd-party software could break Nintendo's DRM and give players the privilege of seeing how someone else's level works:
https://github.com/JiXiaomai/SMM2LevelViewer
and even that effort only evaded a ban for a month or two:
But you're right that it's frustrating if you're starting out. Many Troll makers provide a "behind the scenes" version where you can inspect how the contraptions work e.g. adding a vine you can climb to see mechanisms "above" the level, or making something transparent or whatever.
I think trolls are the category where off-screen mechanisms are most important. In a puzzle level they're mostly an unnecessary confusion (where did that key come from? Well, off screen a Thwomp hit an ON/OFF switch and...) and in Kaizo who has time to look at everything on the screen, let alone think about things that aren't on the screen.
Of course once you're actually "Into" it there are private discords and so on for discussing stuff where people upload video, provide codes for their "Uno mas" demos (ie very short courses that show off a single new idea) and explain insights into the underlying mechanisms. I never got that deeply into MM2 but it's clear that people writing trolls for Carl or Geek are co-operating.
It really gave me an appreciation for how much of a difference tooling and infrastructure, specifically fast feedback cycles, can make in a final product. Even if you don't see the difference in the development pipeline as a player, you can definitely see the difference in Memento Mori[2] and Sunlust[3].
[0] https://doomwiki.org/wiki/WADED
[1] https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DCK
https://www.gamers.org/docs/FAQ/DOOM.FAQ.Specs.html
You can use any language you want to work with the data, but C is probably the most straightforward. The first time you decode some sprite data, or a level map, you will have the strangest sense of joy as it appears on screen.
I used to play around with that stuff in the 90's with a copy of Turbo C and started to write a Mac level editor (very simple one at least) a few years back but haven't really worked on it since I had kids.
The 90s through early 2000s were the best time for FPS modding and mapping, par none.
> The 90s through early 2000s were the best time for FPS modding and mapping, par none.
Absolutely agreed.
Back then I got invited into helping on a big custom map pack project and did a lot of level scripting for it. Nearly failed a few high school classes because I was skipping homework to work on it, and I ended up quitting cold turkey before the end to focus on school. The project was great experience and I think of it as my first real software development experience programming something for actual users. (It was also what made me realize I absolutely needed to learn a version control system like Git. Never again am I doing any group work on that kind of project if actual version control isn't used!) I was excited to learn later that the project got finished and it was one of the 2010 Cacowards winners (Stronghold).
I think a lot of homework is busywork, made under the idea that nothing a kid does already outside of school has educational value. It's a shame that some of the most educational experiences I had were in conflict with the system. But then again, maybe that is an unusual experience? I think there's a stereotype I don't want to fall into, of autodidacts who fail to realize something unusual happened with them and think that all that's necessary to put others onto their path is to merely remove the obstacle of school. I wonder if it's possible for schools to better encourage this kind of experience, of kids learning through fostering mildly-competitive scenes of projects like this.
They should have given Romero Most promising newcomer.
SIGIL is probably one of the best _Doom_ experiences since "Doom the way id Did". Too many modern maps lean heavily on limit-removing ports, and other modern features, and lose the sine qua non that made Doom unique and special. They eschew the radically unreal lighting and abstract-but-familiar level design to push the engine towards realism, and consider hardness to be a factor of enemy quantity and not the complexity of the situation.
I'd rather be dying because I was sniped while low on health and fending off a lone imp than find myself circling an insufferably large swath of enemies, soaking them with BFG blasts.
I think the last I played was Sunder[0]. Good times.
Boom-level limiting removing ports and WADs are not that distinct to for example, Memento Mori, Requiem or Scythe.
These mods are a great way to experience a mix of old and new tech and old and new styles in gaming.
named after the cacodemon: https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Cacodemon
He had these really really weird but unique youtube videos years ago, for example
EDIT: this was the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQO-aOdJLiw
also: cows & cows & cows