The connections between rooms also yield numerous possible routes through the map, as well as several possible ways to approach any given room. The runner up is the preceding map at 238.) Compounding this effect is the relatively scant ammo and health in the early parts of the map getting very far from a pistol start is an uphill battle. (In fact, Refueling Base has the most monsters of any map in the game by far: 279. It’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by an endless horde no matter where you run, they just seem to keep coming. Many areas near the beginning are simply adjacent with no doors between them, so it’s easy for monsters to start swarming in from all directions. Not only are you rarely faced with a dead end, but you’ll almost always have a choice of where to go next, and that choice will lead into more choices. Almost every major area (of which there are at least half a dozen) has at least three exits. The one thing that most defines the map has to be its interconnected layout. But wow, little kid fears sure do linger.) (It’s just a video game, of course, and since then I’ve successfully beaten it from a pistol start myself. This may seem strange to bring up as a first example in a post about level design, but I don’t think it would have impressed on me quite so much if the level weren’t designed the way it is. I don’t even have very strong memories of his particular attempts, but watching my parent be swiftly and repeatedly defeated - at a time when I still somewhat revered parents - left enough of an impression that hearing the level music still makes my skin crawl. I watched him play Refueling Base one night. My dad wasn’t an expert gamer or anything, but as a ten-year-old, I assumed he was. See, I got into Doom II through my dad, who played it on and off sometimes. Refueling Base was started by Tom Hall in the original Doom days, then finished by Sandy for Doom II.)īut Refueling Base is the level I have the most visceral reaction to: it terrifies me. (Curiously, those other three maps are all Sandy Petersen’s sole work. Or at least MAP08, The Pit, which stands out for the unique way it feels like a plunge into enemy territory. Or MAP13, Downtown, the map that had me convinced (erroneously) that Doom levels supported multi-story structures. I would’ve expected myself to pick MAP08, Tricks and Traps, for its collection of uniquely bizarre puzzles and mechanisms. I’m surprising myself by picking Refueling Base. Screenshots mine - map via doom wiki - see also textured perspective map (warning: large!) via ian albert - pistol start playthrough Here, then, are some levels from various games that stand out to me for whatever reason the feelings they evoke when I think about them and my best effort at unearthing some design principles from those feelings. I haven’t had time to take a deeper look at pixel art this way, so I’ll try it right now with level design. Find the underlying themes that appeal to me and figure out some principles that I could apply. I don’t want someone else’s ideas I want to identify what I like, figure out why I like it, and turn that into some kinda of general design idea. I don’t want to copy a small chunk of the final product I want to understand the underlying ideas that led the artist to create what they did in the first place. I’ve been sifting through stuff in the hopes of finding something that would create some flash of enlightenment, but so far that aimless tourism has only found me a thing or two to copy. Recently I realized that I might have been going about looking for inspiration all wrong. I’ve been browsing through a lot of pixel art from games I remember fondly in the hopes of finding some inspiration, but so far all I’ve done is very nearly copy a dirt tile someone submitted to my potluck project. I’ve been struggling to create a more expansive tileset for a platformer, due to two general problems: figuring out what I want to show, and figuring out how to show it with a limited size and palette. Shmups are probably the genre I’m the worst at, but perhaps some general principles will apply universally.Īnd speaking of general principles, that’s something I’ve been thinking about too. I’ve been thinking about level design a lot lately, seeing as how I’ve started… designing levels. In relation to a vertical shmup since I’m working on one of those. Another Patreon request from Nova Dasterin:
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