doom.ukiro.comukiro's Doom works – Levels, textures, and opinions for the world's greatest game

ukiro’s Doom works Levels, textures, and opinions for the world’s greatest game OTEX About OTEX OTEX Downloads List of published levels using OTEX OTEX Questions and Answers My history with textures About me OTEX About OTEX OTEX Downloads List of published levels using OTEX OTEX Questions and Answers My history with textures About me The making of Eviternity II map 36: Kenosis January 29, 2024 Eviternity II has now been out for some time, so it might be time to pull back the curtain a little bit regarding my map contribution. Note that this contains lots of spoilers so I strongly recommend playing the level for yourself first. I doubt any single level merits this much text on its own, so I think the real value of this write-up isn’t the specific ideas for this particular level, but rather some insight to the overall process, what I struggled with, and my thinking about design in general. The curse of the sequel My level for the original Eviternity , Anagnorisis, gained a lot of attention for its scope and ambition. I felt that following Anagnorisis with a normal sized level for Eviternity II might lead to disappointment. So this time around I knew before placing a single vertex that the size and scope had to be very grand. That context made it rather daunting to start building, so I needed an overarching vision and concept to adhere to; I wasn’t trusting that chance and intuition alone would guide me to repeat the success of the predecessor. I started building this far too close to the deadline, and it was by a good margin the level that missed our internal deadlines by the widest margin. Dragonfly ended up bailing me out by helping with several sections, detailed more below, and there’s a number of compromises in the level due to this time crunch. On the other hand, with infinite time at my disposal I would never get it done, so at least the level exists now. Doom maps as art When Sverre André Kvernmo released CABAL7.WAD in 1995, it made one of the strongest impressions on me that any single level has ever had. Its gameplay isn’t sensational by modern standards, but hit tab and WHOA. I knew from the day I saw that map—which would have been right around the time of its release—that Doom levels could be art. CABAL7.WAD from 1995. I can’t quite draw like Sverre can, but around 20-22 years ago I created a map for a never released project called Odium. My map, korset.wad (The Cross”, in Swedish), is shaped like an inverted cross. It’s a fairly complete level but doesn’t play very well, so it’ll likely never be released. It was however directly inspired by the sector art of CABAL7 and a spiritual predecessor to Kenosis. Korset.wad, originally built in 2001-2002. Combat design and the Doom zeitgeist Eviternity got a bit of criticism for being too reliant on incidental combat rather than more deliberately sculpted fight setups, so one thing I wanted to change this time was to prove to myself (and everyone else) I could build more clever fights. To hone that craft, I built several small setpieces in 2019-2022 where I tried to exploit monster behavior and Doom engine mechanisms to create something novel. Only after the fight felt somewhat interesting did I work on detailing and texturing. I’m a long way away from being a Ribbiks kind of mapper (or player) but I felt these exercises evolved my instinct as a designer tremendously. As Eviternity II was taking shape, I knew I wanted my level contribution to showcase this new approach. The plan Anagnorisis had 3 color coded buildings—red, yellow, and blue—that each gave the player a key. In addition it also had orange, green, and magenta buildings, plus the final fight building. That makes for 7 in total, and I felt dividing a giant map up into roughly that many sections helped make the size manageable for most players. Any fewer and the individual segments might get too big, and getting into double digit sections will make it hard to remember what’s what. Combined with the idea of automap art I decided on a heptagram—two more points than a pentagram—with each point being a set piece or arena. An inverted cross building in the center would be the 8th, expanding the total by one from Anagnorisis. At work (I have since quit this job), some time in 2021 I saw my colleagues work on special effects for the TV show Sandman, and in particular this shot grabbed my attention: Sandman season 1 VFX reel from ILPVFX Translating this to Doom isn’t trivial, but I decided not to worry too much and make the lines forming the heptagram elevated walkways like this, surrounded by lava and a desolate hellish landscape. I wanted a bit more directorial control over player progression this time so I drew a plan on paper of a non-linear but more manageable flow compared to the ultra open predecessor, with notes on initial ideas for each setup. In the end the level actually follows most of this plan, including how you can initially go for chaingun or SSG, then a pick between two fights that each give the rocket launcher, then another two for plasma. It helped that had already built several little set pieces like the circular crusher, the initial berserk fight with the Arch-viles, and the winding path the player starts out on. From the original plan, 1, 2b, 3a, 3b, and the inverted cross made it to the final version. 4b is almost there but square instead of circular. I wrote my notes in English instead of my native Swedish in anticipation of this post. Years of foresight ? Now did I plan for the exact vibe that Kenosis ultimately has? Not at all. As much as I tried to maintain an unwavering vision of the final product, it still changed and shifted as I built it. So there’s still that element of compromise, serendipity, and ideas that take on their own life. But more on this later. Building begins I drew a gargantuan heptagram on a map and started to add in the existing pieces according to my paper sketch plan. The map area here is about 34000 units across. October 16th, 55 days from release. The walkways were just straight lines at first, and I roughed them up manually. First the contours, then I segmented them to make shifts in elevation, and only in the final weeks did I add the little trim indentation for all of them. With korset.wad, for scale. It was immediately clear that this was an terrifyingly daunting undertaking. The very crude terrain seen above left has many lines exceeding 1000 map units in length, and just making the walkways a bit more natural and squiggly took many hours. I hit the sidedef limit on November 13th (and might have done so sooner, but I don’t have a screenshot older than this), so the last month of development was a constant fight against the boundaries of the map format. One thing that had to be simplified is the final fight room, where I originally had these ridiculously elaborate sector arches: The angel texture was a placeholder for the stained glass windows. What didn’t make it From the beginning the idea was not to have the level be empty, but instead to have imps on cliffs all over the map, so that there’d be a constant torrent of hundreds of fireballs coming towards the player. This would look cool in such a giant space, I thought, and it’d force the player to keep moving. What made me abandon this idea was mostly that they were incredibly annoying to kill even once you had all the weapons. I had to build these little imp islands close to the walkways for vertical autoaim to even have a chance of working, and it just looked wonky. I was really disappointed in this at first, but other people in the team pointed out that the emptiness actually felt better, and eventually I began to agree. I also had plans for a huge swarm of flying enemies—Cacodemons and their variants—descending like a storm over the map once you had finished all the towers, but that went against the idea of the landscape being entirely dead. Lastly, there are two little red brick ruins in the map. They’re a remnant of a plan to...