http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=16179

You should release this onto the idgames archive when you finalize it; I wasted twenty minutes looking for it there before I searched the Doomworld forums / Google.

If you want to learn the Unreal Engine and/or get a job at a studio that’s using it, the best way to do that is probably the Unreal Development Kit.

Im already passed the section this question addresses and I really want to get a job as a level designer at a real studio. There are level editors that come with games but what tools do the professionals use? What should I learn for this job? So far my only answer is 3DS Max which is a fine program but it has some oddities on my computer not allowing me to use it as effectively. Is it really my only option?

The gameplay was surprisingly Robotronesque, now that you mention it, but while it was in development, I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning this. It certainly didn’t occur to me, and I wrote the automap and added the cheat codes.

While it was in development, we were dreaming about how cool it would be to have an actual bridge you could go both over and under. The irony is that this would dramatically increase the difficulty in developing the game, as we would soon learn in Quake.

NS

One of my favorite games ever was Natural Selection, a modification for Half-Life. I know what you are thinking “multiplayer, there is no story or anything!” Yes well that may be but the amount of imagination that could be applied was amazing. When the game first out I admit it had a few quirks that needed to be fixed but in general the initial game had it all. In fact it had more than the developers bargained for…
I remember my first time playing… everyone one at the LAN party was well extremely confused. However we gained an idea of how to play and eventually got the idea down. We created a small guild of friends. At the next LAN party things got nuts. Let me tell you how the game works so I can explain how bananas things became. First there are the Marines who have a commander with an RTS view that gives waypoints, and puts down structures to be built by the other Marines. Their goal is to kill the aliens. The aliens have hives; they start with one and gain new attributes and evolution of different aliens with each hive. Essentially the aliens are trying to get multiple hives and require at least two to stand a chance at the Marines who are just trying to get resources from the nodes (that both sides want to control to spend the resources on abilities/weapons/structures) to upgrade and lay down areas of turrets before the aliens get powerful with a second (still stand a chance) or a third hive (probably screwed Marines at this time).
Well the other features this game has or had was complicated rooms, tons of vents that were sometimes sealable or openable via a welder tool Marines could get – these vents systems some times had rooms in them of varying sizes – doors, elevators, you name it with lots of shadows. When we started out our second time together as an alien builder (Gorge) I knew the defense structures (about the size of 4 Marines back to back) could spit acid at Marines and defend our hive as we were elsewhere procuring another hive. Then I discovered you could STACK THEM ON TOP OF EACHOTHER. That quickly led to barriers of them that the Marines would not go near. I had one set at the vent to our hive, and another at the only other real entrance not guarded by my comrades which was at the end of a hallway that had a huge elevator that the Marines came down. They tried grenade launcher but got no wear to my massive allotment of defense structures. Then awhile after I died, confused and all of my structures died off as well and they soon arrived at our single hive and wiped us out. We held them and all there technology with nothing more than first hive abilities and evolutions for who knows how long, it was war. Well what ended it was the discovery of siege cannons which fire through walls and only hit building and aliens in the immediate area. They hit hard too.
After that discovery it became regular practice to hit hives with them. As players got better it became increasingly hard to get the siege cannons in range or hives which now usually had the array of defense structures as to guard them instead of having to prevent sieging in multiple places. The devs later nerfed the siege cannons so that a marine had to spot the structure they would shoot and that was fine. I have no idea how many games I played where the aliens strategically build things, often in vents (which builder aliens had to be boosted into by other players) to prevent the Marines from having the chance to spot hives at all. However the Marines quickly adapted and started building arrays of turrets and siege cannons inside of the events. That caused a lot of stir in the aliens because they had no idea where the damn thing was hitting their hive from. Yes the maps had that much area to explore. The Marines even came to a point where they would move their base, and in last ditch circumstances would move one into a vent system. The bases had the command chair (RTS view entry), spawners, ammo station, etc…
The aliens were ever pesky, hiding in shadows, deep corners, you name it. They even had mild cloak ability. They had to though because the early stages of evolution had power but died quickly. They were fast and small in a vast map… it was a blast. The inventiveness that followed by building things in strange locations was great. Then jetpacks hive rushes were discovered… of course a good alien team would just shoot webs to kill the jetpackers and then it was all over. This however gave an element that required a time sensitivity to be accounted for… “we must do this before they do that and get this or we are screwed on this map.” Dynamic… fun… evolving game strategy…
Then the new patches came out that started following the new trends that ruin things. First off no one ever fully exhausted the potentials in the original game before it got serious changes. They instead let all the people who were awful at the game and got spanked by people that actually played with intent direct where it went. I stopped playing.
What did they do? Now you can not see where you are going because the maps are fat, blump, and lack that deep big awness that earlier games had like the first Aliens vs. Predator might be another example (where as Alien vs. Predator 2 was bubbly and lacked darkness, not scary at all). Your screen is covered in way points and dots and stuff anyways, like you are no longer required to know your way around! There is no explorering! There are no strange doors and switches for them or big vent systems. It is all straight forward run and shoot or bite. It is nothing but see who clicks fastest. Further more there is no where left hide in the small maps. I remember being a Marine and walking down a super ordinary hallway was dangerous because of the 1 ft bracing that was in an octagon shape was enough room for an alien to hide, or under the grate at your feet; YOU HAD TO LOOK EVERYWHERE EVERY STEP, it was scary especially when devious minds of humans wielded those ankle biters. All of that is gone and filled with motion tracking or some other crap that lets you know where things are. Most of the characters can not jump onto tiny ledges of moldings in the rooms or climb up weird places that exist for no apparent reason but to look cool and have dark shadows.

Almost all FPS multiplayer games are like this now…

There is nothing to explore in the maps… sure sure everyone eventually figures it all out but the fact that they were complicated with lots of unnecessary places a character to be increased the overall possibilities and there for stimulated and used peoples imaginations to respond to the ridiculous things people did like hiding on the other side of doors standing on a red emergency light or something impossible in real life.
Next they all have those disgusting mini-maps. I hate them I hate them I hate them. No one has to know maps and you never have to keep track of your teammates if FF is on. Plus if an enemy shows up at all on anyone’s screen everyone without the point of view knows where they are because one person can see them. What is this crap? I remember playing counter strike and being scared out of my wits with nothing more than a small tab screen that told me how many other people where still alive out there trying to kill just me who is left over… I had to sneak around and be really quiet. I had to play mind games with them making them think I was different places, and surprise them from unlikely places to be hiding. I had to use my imagination to combat them in a world of uncertainty and yet it was all a gamble because who knows what they were doing? This could have been as simple as just ducking midway between two common fortified positions and waiting for them to point their crosshairs at either one of them when I know where they are and pop them. Now if they see me once I can not even run away to be quiet again because in most games there are no possibilities for places to run jump and hide too, you just appear on their mini-map for the next thirty seconds. This leads me into my next complaint with limiting your imagination greatly… The realism thing…

I played video games because it was not real life, because the amazing, absurd, and sciencfictiony stuff was going on!

Today’s games are solely based on realism typically even if they are in the future. What does that mean for killing imagination? Well maybe I like carrying around 10 huge guns with crates of ammo. If I go target practice I have to reload all the time but I have to put the bullets in the magazines and it all takes forever but the results are real… the sound barrier breaks and thing are violently altered at the other end. In a game you get the idea of that but it is no where near the same so why suffer the long lead in for a result that is not magnificent? In real life if I run too long I get tired but I also eat, nap, and get the benefit of being better at running later which is personal and part of me not just computer software. Why do I want some character in a game to be hampering my creative ideas for killing the bad dudes by being out of breath every 50ft?
They are killing the part of a “game” with realism. I can go do all the painstaking things for real rewards, in real life. One of my favorite game series, Max Payne, does not have these boundaries. What does it have? Well I can run jump and tumble endlessly all in “bullet time” which is slow motion but I move a little faster than the enemy with my mouse look. That allowed me to be a craftsman, an artist, at killing the enemy. I could walk into a room and lay every punk ass mother fucker down in a couple of seconds if I planned my diving, turning, rolling, and reloading correctly. Is that not what made the Matrix cool, or Equilibrium? Oh and who the hell wants to spend the majority of the time playing video games waiting for their out of shape badass character to catch his breath? Boring, snooze. Next up is the fact that this situation also dulls capability. I feel like most of the FPS games these days are like playing KOTOR. You can only walk where they want, and even if you do not have to the likelihood of you jumping on top of anything by standing on a 3 inch wide fence are pretty slim since you are winded after your 12 inch vertical jump has been used more than twice. What is interesting about purely linear combat due to the approaches being strictly as intended? I will admit I liked some games that had some of this but they had so many other things going on. The original Call of Duty was one of them because of the dynamics where super fun. The way you played every map was often vastly different from the approach of the one before.
Really is linear capability that leaves you with one way to approach enemies that fun, is having to spend all your time aiming through iron sights, catching your breath, or looking at the mini-map really progress in games? I think it is post-modern bullshit.

What I want?

I want games with more possibilities than the devs intended on, for the community to develop the game play in it (ok I like multiplayer games a lot, or did). I want it to feel like a video game so that I run around fast, act fast, but have to explore. I am sick of how slow games are. Why are they slow? They are slow so every one in the world that wants to play can play without feeling entirely lost. That is post-modern bullshit that caters to the lazy that ask not to think. People that play to get better should be better and should not be limited to reaction speed. Brain and wits should count but they mean nothing with a mini-map and voice communication. They have to stop nerfing everything. They need to use realism elements when it BENFITS THE GAME, NOT BECAUSE YOU CAN.
I want stories in the game that develop with my game play. I get tired in modern games spending my time LOOKING FOR THE STORY. OH MY GOD BORING. Max Payne I loved, it had a comic book built into it with fantastic voices reading it to you. It was dark, had been drawn by someone, voiced by someone, and it could give you feelings on things that were all new that the 3d world could not offer… The story also changed with difficulty settings… That was rad.
Scare me. Stop trying to show off graphics so much that you sacrifice the game. If the part of the game is best suited to have low visibility so be it… That made the first Aliens vs. Predator – as a marine primarily – so scary that my friends would not play it in the middle of the day let alone at night! It was scary because things happened lightening fast and visibility was extremely small a lot of the time. It felt like the movie, it scared the shit out of you and by that I mean you wanted to go poop because the release felt good after having your nerves racked from aliens jumping at you traveling 50mph that were not even visible until 15ft from you even with night vision… Use twisted ideas and thoughts, run deep with psychological trauma accompanied by exceptional musical tracks that fit the mood.
Visually appease me not over stimulate me. Yes I like how Mass Effects 2 looks but every 5 ft you are behind a box and everything you look at just looks like blurry art so the affect is loss through repetition. When I think visually appealing, put me in awe by being able to look up at a grand tower the citadel in Half Life 2. Make me feel small, impotent in a world too big for me to deal with even if I can not explore it all but not endless fields of nothing like in Far Cry 2 the most boring game ever. How about a little vertical exploration? I have seen less and less of that lately. Save a little bit of awe for the big monster boss. If every enemy I cross I have time to examine and it blows my mind how am I going to be blown away by the big dude at the end of the level? What if he is realistic and boring? Why not give him some personality and bizarre ass unrealistic qualities that no one can explain?
I would like to play a game where I can explore in ways unknown, interact in strange ways, be confused and alone even in multiplayer. I would like to interact with strange unrealistic creatures; give me a world that looks like early Walt Disney and Alejandro Jodorwsky threw up all over.

RTS and RPGs?

I liked it back when I could name my own things, and make them! I liked ridiculous over the top astounding figures that were hard to comprehend. I liked mystery, I liked shadowy figures (often called only that), and I liked no intended way to play just respond to the enemy combating against you. Where are the riddles? Where is the continuous play for enjoyment and not just skill? I play single player games to appreciate the surroundings, enemies, and new ways to combat challenges (that goes for all games). All I have seen lately is them waxing their noodle (ego-techno-jerk-off) so I can feel like I am waxing my noodle because I can tell how realistic this game “I own” happens to be.
I got a lot of thoughts but they are disappearing the more I think about how all the new games think for me, but make me work real hard by taking up all my freaking time trying to do its pre-ordained game play just to get to the boring sub-Sci-Fi channel story.

You’ve missed those releases:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/d/doomxboxlivearcade/
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/doom-classic/id336347946?mt=8

Nuff said.