I love the first doom game. I've played it every way you can imagine, in every engine you can imagine. I've played remakes, total conversions, the original hundreds of times - spent years of my teenage life deathmatching and playing co-op.
While I feel John Romero's levels are the pinnacle of what the original Doom can muster level-wise, I still have a huge amount of respect for Tom Hall's level designs.
If you've read the classic "Masters of Doom" book (which you really should) - you understand that Tom's desire for Doom was a bit grander in scope than what we actually got. A bit slower paced, a bit more realistic with a lot more flexibility and options. More characters, etc. You can get a feel for that from the 'Doom Bible' which effectively is the technical design document for Doom that was ultimately scrapped in favor of what they ended up with. Here's a link for those of you who haven't read it: Tom Hall's Doom Bible
Tom Hall was primarily responsible for the levels of episode 2.
The opening screen of E2M2 - note the structural differences between this and Romero's.
Here again right off the bat you see a big difference in color/lighting. The tones are flatter, more muted. They're greys, browns, blacks and yellows. It's all very rational and very sane.
Tom's work is very representative of what you could consider a 'logical' style. It's far less abstract than Romero's work but is still exceptionally good - especially in a modern context. His work was similar to Romero's in use of texture, color, lighting... but he clearly had a completely different process. Whereas Romero's levels gave you a sense of indoor/outdoor and this massive overarching awe at the implied size of it - Tom literally built these huge ass indoor levels. I mean HUGE.
Courtesy of doomwiki
This is literally the second map. The SECOND! It's titanic. On top of that, on the north part of the map you see what Tom really invented as a genre - the box maze. You can literally get lost in piles of endless boxes.
Turn left and wait a sec, where the fuck am I?
The combination of rather bland colors and lighting actually work really well in this context; they provide a sense of loss of direction; everything blends in without being so similar that you completely feel hateful at the lack of texture (like Sandy Peterson's levels). Tom also loved the monster trap - something he did in exquisite detail. If you ran full speed down a corridor without looking you'd easily trigger a huge horde of monsters and usually your demise.
This is actually one of the smaller swarms.
Remaining observations are as follows: Tom loves secrets; in fact his levels far and away had more secrets than any others. It wasn't uncommon to find levels that had 10 or 12 secrets on them. You really had to work to find them too; while some were fairly obvious, others took a while of hunting around just to get the feel for where they were. Often, it was for a meager bit of ammo, just enough to keep you going. This is in contrast with Romero's 'big win' method of secrets where a secret almost always gave you a huge boost.
Completing one of Tom's levels gave a real solid sense of accomplishment - like you really worked to earn it! This was one of the better features of his design. I didn't really like the fully indoors feel of his work which unfortunately left things feeling closed off. But the mazes and monster hordes really did create an awesome experience which I believe has influenced many more modern games in a very impactful way. A lot of what Tom did was based around a notion that this game was going to be different and then he got a rude awakening when the design had moved on without him. As a result his levels have a different feel and rightfully so.
There's a doom mod that attempts to recreate the experience he intended called 'The Tei Tenga incident'. It's worth a look if you've never seen it:
Definitely has the feel of one of Tom's levels.
So what can we say we've learned from Tom? Similar palettes, box mazes and monster traps are all going to find their way into my game. An avid fan of the secret, I think I'll have to make sure a few more make their way into my levels.
Ciao for now!
No comments:
Post a Comment