id Software released Doom in 1993. Soon after, a community of players began to modify and extend the game, and shared their efforts freely. These "mods" remixed existing content and added new levels, graphics, and audio; they told new stories and explored new design ideas.

In 1997 id released the game's source code, and since then the community has expanded the game and its technology far beyond anything its creators dreamed of. Today, several source ports are still in development, and the community is still pushing Doom in a dozen different exciting directions.

Doom was also an early example of referring to game technology suites, as distinct from the games they enable, as engines - tech that can be reused for many projects. While the original version of Doom's engine (rechristened "id Tech 1" in 2007) was designed for DOS PCs and is quite primitive by today's standards, source ports like GZDoom sport advanced features that are in some ways convergent with far more modern engines. GZDoom in particular is under very active development and has a lot to offer solo or small team independent game creators. The catch has long been that out of the box, working with GZDoom usually means making a mod for, and thus requires owning a retail copy of, Doom or one of its siblings.

Sectorseed, then, is a resource file that allows GZDoom to run without any Doom or other non-free content. This gives developers a base to build a new, standalone game to build from. Independent developer Brendon Chung did something similar for id Tech 4 with his Doom3 Starter Kit. Freedoom is a free, full 1:1 content replacement for Doom, which is great for someone looking to make a Doom mod or something strongly Doom-like. The target audience for Sectorseed is creators who have novice-or-greater general game development knowledge but don't know anything about Doom, and/or don't necessarily want to make anything remotely like Doom.

Don't let any of what follows give you the impression that Sectorseed is some big new technological effort - it's a tiny resource file, some examples, and this documentation. I proved out the idea over a weekend, after realizing that 99.9% of the work had already been done by id Software, the GZDoom developers, tools developers, and everyone else who's pushed Doom's technology along over the years. It is a tiny, humble seed from which you may grow greater things. This documentation will help you start down the path to learning how.

levels can be represented entirely from top down sprite objects and characters can be very quick to doodle up and get in-game no "floors upon floors", but GZDoom has some clever tricks that allow this all geo dynamic - any sector floor can be

• GZDoom
• Sectorseed itself
• SLADE (pk3 AND level editing)
• Text editor of your choice (Notepad++)
• Pixel graphics editor of your choice (GIMP, Krita)
• Audio tools of your choice (Audacity, ?music?)

Main processor (CPU) with [SSE2] support - almost all computers released since the mid-00s have this 384MB RAM - or more, the more you intend to exceed Doom 2's general content footprint Graphics hardware (GPU) that supports OpenGL 3.3 or Vulkan Windows: Vista or later macOS: 10.7 or later Linux: probably any kernel released in the last 10 years or so