This post is intended as a companion piece for the release of Arcadia Demade.
A high-minded goal like “expand the boundaries of the medium” doesn’t always mean forging ahead in crazy new unknown directions. Sometimes it means examining lost evolutionary lines in game design – picking up ideas that were abandoned long ago and seeing if there’s any new life in them. The game I keep coming back to in this regard is Doom. Not the 2004 reboot, but “Classic Doom”: Doom 1 and 2, Final Doom, the Master Levels – and its vast universe of user-made content. What can it teach us today?
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Typically when you ship a big game you get some time off to relax, take a step back and enjoy life.
Of course, I had to do something very silly with some of this time. So I did a remake of a BioShock level for… wait for it… Doom 2.
Inspired partly by TIGSource’s amazing Bootleg Demakes Competition, I used a modern Doom level editor called SLADE to recreate Arcadia and the Farmer’s Market, the sections of BioShock on which I was the primary designer. It’s a monster of a level, crammed full of weird little BioShock-to-Doom transmutations and symbolism. If you’re a fan of either game, I hope you enjoy it.
Download the map from here. Inside the ZIP are a standard format Doom WAD readme, instructions on how to get it running on modern systems, and some designer commentary on both the construction of the original map and the Doom demake.
To complement this release, I’ve also posted a design analysis of classic Doom, just as I threatened to a while back. Read it here:
Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom
So, we shipped Bioshock 2. That’s good. Next month, the world will finally tell us whether we did a good job.
Now: resting up, rolling on to a cool new project. Making a DOOM map on the weekends.
Stay tuned. In the meantime, read some words Bruce Sterling spoke almost 20 years ago:
The Wonderful Power of Storytelling
Do you remember this place?
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1]
This isn’t a standard “old fogey remembers classic game fondly” post though. Ultima IV’s tremendous influence and importance aside, I think for players looking back on it from today, it now exemplifies a value that is quite rare in most modern games: encouragement of the player to engage by using their imagination.
What does this mean though? What does a game that fosters “imaginative engagement” look, sound and play like in 2009?
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As of 2009, the game industry seems to want two fairly contradictory [1] things:
- Make games, using proven mechanics from the last 20 years, that sell millions of copies.
- Give people a broad range of experiences that affect them as powerfully as those found in other forms of art.
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A co-worker recently sent along an email from a friend asking an age old question, “How do I get a job doing level design?” I’ve been picking away at a response to this for a few weeks now, and weirdly enough Steve just put up a similar post addressing the same question on his blog. His has more specific “get your first industry job” advice, mine is maybe more “how to learn to think like a designer”… for whatever that’s worth. Here’s what I wrote.
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I was on another one of those “MP3 recordings of radio-format shows” recently:
http://www.idlethumbs.net/
Lots of boisterous nerdiness and interrupting of each other to talk about progressively more obscure old game music. If I meet any of you in real life, I promise not to interrupt you in the middle of a sentence. If I do, I am the ultimate jerk of the planet.
Maybe another new post coming soon.
Hey neat, a mention on GameSetWatch and IGN. Welcome, new visitors!
Anyways, small is beautiful because lately it’s all I have time for. I’ve set up a project at Google Code to house some of the little prototypes I’ve been messing with during the past month… simple, 2D things where I get to dig around for interesting mechanics. It’s very gratifying to be able to get something new and potentially cool on-screen after only a few hours of work, and I recommend it. I’ll put up builds for download here for anything that pans out.
My current projects use PyGame, which integrates the Python language with SDL for graphics, sound and input – quite capable for this sort of work. There’s also LÖVE which does a similar thing with LUA, and of course the cool kids seem to be using GameMaker these days. Flash is as vibrant and viable as ever, and XNA seems to be getting good if you don’t mind being locked into certain platforms.
Hope everyone’s had a good 2008, and congrats to all the IGF finalists!
The good news is, I managed to submit Purity for the IGF deadline at the beginning of this month. Download the (Windows) build here.
Sadly, the day job is now ramping up such that I can’t really justify spending any more time on Purity until the big project ships, sometime next year. As it was, Purity limped in over the deadline at about an alpha level of completeness and polish. I’m proud that I was able to do that in the time I could spare, but it’s really more of a gesture at what I’d like the game to grow into than anything.
All the same, I’d love to hear what people think of the game in its current state.
I’m guessing that by this point anyone who possesses rudimentary google skills and wants to know my full name, and the game studio I work for, can easily obtain such information. So it’s probably fine for me to mention these two things:
A brief teaser for the game I’m working on has found its way out into the world. Tantalizing. What could it mean? Wait and see!
Recently I was a guest on the weekly GameSpot podcast. I can’t remember saying anything particularly insightful, but if you like hearing me say “you know” a lot, this is right up your alley.
Oh, and thanks to Mr. Nowak for the recent mention!
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