John Romero on his book “Doom Guy” and developing games at a small scale

Are you in the camp that says the creator was an insufferable man that did a lot of damage to the credibility and likeability of indie developers for years to come?

I remember reading about that a while ago and it wasn't until the last 5 or so years that indies got back into magazine covers and such.

Prodeus also has a shotgun that can snipe enemies at far distances with a long range incendiary mode

https://www.prodeusgame.com/

But it's somehow bizarrely hard to find in Indie, they all want to be these sprawling finicky massive things where you have to read a novel length wiki to find out that "four sticks can make a log", or are brutally difficult, or both (Darkest Dungeon comes to mind).

There's some counter examples but theyre weirdly hard to find.

I know you were trying to say "it didn't offer graphic card pushing 3d like AAA games but it did X uniquely" but by no means can you call that mediocre, specially if you've ever seen old games.

Gameplay over one specific style of graphics, is probably the concept you're looking for.

Since the whole point of games is to have fun I don’t mind bugs.

It's in the eye of the beholder, but I strongly disagree with this. The art is absolutely timeless; cacodemons, cyberdemons, the super shotgun and the BFG9000 are some of the most recognizable video game designs of all time. Most importantly, the art direction feels very consistent and cohesive. You can contrast it to something like Heretic, which came out at the same time and runs on the same engine, yet looks noticeably worse.

I wouldn't play it at 320x200 on a modern PC, but take your pick of source port to run at 1080p+, and Doom still looks great.

I've been referring to this as "baked-bean-ification". Something originally quite distinctively spicy and varied gets progressively fine tuned for the mass market, resulting in a universally inoffensive and yet immeasurably bland experience.

I like simplier story games sometimes. The uncharted series I thought was fun, you get 2 weapons and maybe some grenades. Lots of cut scenes.

Compared to some of the inventory and level up trees I have seen it was refreshing. Watching my partner play fallout 4 I was amazed at the inventory management required.

On iOS when I need a quick game, I’ll play plasma sky which is a modern galaxan style shooter.

Huh? I find it has aged just fine, aesthetics wise.

Or do you mean the lower res of the original?

I so strongly agree with this.

There's a certain sense of "exploration of the game" that's missing in AAA games. AAA games are just entirely too smooth as experiences, there's no jank, very little learning, etc.

I don't necessarily mean exploration as in, exploring every bit of content/land, but learning the game itself. When Pillars of Eternity came out, so many people didn't like it because they were surprised by the idea of having to actually learn the underlying system.

I was hopeful for VR for a while because I figured if the developers themselves haven't "solved the problem", there would be a return to that type of exploration where a game would often have amazing parts and then parts that didn't work as well.

I did think he should have gone into more of a deep dive into why Daikatana was a bad game. Yeah, turnover. Yeah, delays from chasing the new shiny engine. But for a company he started where "Design Is Law", why did his game suck when Deus Ex being developed at the same time at the same company turn out so great? And how was id able to pump out Quake II and Quake III in the time he was buggering on Daikatana?

Somewhere in the book (start or end, can't remember) there is a quote from Carmack that references Romero's amazing recall ability, so I'll give hime the benefit of the doubt here.

Umm... Suck It Down?

Also, about some stuff not mentioned in the book... I do think it gets light in details the further it goes, but you also need to read the disclaimer: there are people who asked not to be covered in the book and he respected that. There's one particular storyline that is never mentioned at all... to me it's very clear the person involved likely asked not to be mentioned because they've moved on.

When one's writing from the first person, about friends and acquaintances, they have to be more polite than someone who's acting like a neutral observer, like in "Masters of Doom".

I found the second part of the book which begins after Doom is launched and Doom II goes into development to be more of a slog to get through. He also goes at length into his post-Id Games games and how he made some mistakes and some successes. For example. Deus Ex came out of his game company because he gave Warren Spector the independence to build it and many influential personalities in the game industry nowadays got their start at his game company.

My recommendation? Read the first part of the book if you want to get a real FPV of the Wild West in which pioneers like Id Games built the first complex, performant 2D and 3D games and game engines in a world where performance was mostly determined by assembly language wizardry and mastery, not a GPU.

I don't doubt that John Romero has that superpower ability.

It went from good to excellent because it was narrated by Wil Wheaton.

I'm not saying I have the same memory, but the part that I find so frustrating is having conversations with people and then remembering it clearly while others either don't remember or seem to recall the conversation being completely different.

But I can recall the specific words and sentences used, not just impressions.

They experiment with a lot of different game mechanics that might be fun, test them early on other people in the office, and then when they find a core mechanic that seems like a game can be built around it, they start fleshing that out, add other mechanics that work as sweeteners, and build up iteratively.

Only when they have a good picture of the game do they start piecing together some sort of story or setting that makes the mechanic make sense. Even the IP might be swapped entirely to something that better jives with the mechanic, or just to stick on a brand that will help it sell. That’s why their games stay fresh and fun and they can maintain their innovative edge.

Another perspective is, you shouldn't be doing this if you can't tell if something is fun without "testing" it.

> Also, most of your ideas are probably terrible

Without fail, all the people I know who are the best at this keep having one good idea after another. They absolutely do not run out of really good ideas that sound and play obviously fun. They lack free audiences and money.

This is basically the difference between making video games and doing product management.

The bit about being non-confrontational (and this being a hindrance during the Ion Storm days) also hits home. I would have spiraled out of control myself in that position I'm sure.

Whereas back in 1998, there is absolute night and day between 1994 tech (DOOM) and 1998 tech (Quake 2), to the point where the latter makes the former look ancient and almost unplayable in comparison.

Keeping in mind also that tech moved so fast that "serious" PC gamers would look to upgrade their PC on a much quicker cycle, every couple of years was a game-changing upgrade such as Pentium chips or DDR RAM, or some other new tech that just blew away the previous PC generation.

Games companies didn't have the luxury to slip years and still deliver on what they started, and any "engine change" would have been far more impactful against that background, and also keep in mind that "changing engine" back then meant from scratch engines not swapping, say, between Unity and Unreal or some other off the shelf stuff.

https://gamerant.com/john-romero-doom-90th-game-made/