Last friday night I decided to try and make a doom map.I looked up what programs I'd need, and was shocked at how easy and simple it was to get started.
It took me just a couple days of playing around and watching some tutorials and examples, and I could pretty quickly make a first level!
Theres how it starts:
I really recommend everyone here tries this. Its really engrossing, especially if you've been a fan of the games.
Just pure level design fun, within a really cool toolset. The software you can use for it is really smooth and well made, too.
Heres a few links to help anyone get started:GZDoom Builder, a map editor for making doom maps. There are a bunch of other programs for this, but this one seems to be the most recent and actively developped. Its still being worked on, you can see the latest update was today! It is so easy to use, something that can only come about from years and years of iteration and polish. Theres a whole history of these doom map builders, slowly getting easier and simpler to use. Id software would have done nasty things to have a tool like this back when they were making the original levels. Its still being worked on, you can see the latest update was yesterday! I was AMAZED a program meant to make goddam Doom maps was still actively being developped, couldnt believe it! What a wonderful world we live in.
Slade 3, a program used to add custom ressources and art/textures/flats to your game. (It also has a map editor like GZDoom Builder, but its not as smooth as GZDoom Builder... So just use slade to import new stuff.)
on making a doom level with Doom Builder 2. Doom Builder 2 is an older version/branch of GZDoom Builder, so the interface in the video will look a little different to your own, but it should still be quite useful, and almost everything they mention like hotkeys and advice should still apply.
I spent the whole weekend working on a map, I cant believe how quickly I could make something, its so easy!
Heres a picture of the map layout
http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/Doom/Image5.jpg(as a link so you dont get spoiled if you wanna play it first)
You can download my first level here
To try the level out, you need to get a doom sourceport program like
ZDOOM,
and you need to get the
Doom 2 IWAD.
( If you ever bought Doom2 on Steam or elsewhere, you should have a file called Doom2.wad in the folder, that's the file you need. just copy and paste it in the same folder as ZDoom. )
Yeah sorry, if youre not familliar with playing Doom wads, there is a bit of work involved setting things up. No way around it im afraid, a crucial file needed to play, the doom source code, is copyrighted by idsoftware so cant just be freely distributed along with the custom level/campaign!
To launch the level, drag my level's WAD file onto the ZDoom executable, and pick Doom2 as the source engine to play the level with.
Tell me what you think if you play it! I am really not used to designing stuff in this perspective, so this has been a great learning experience. One of my Game Maker projects is a Wolfenstein 3d/Blake Stone style first person shooter, and making some doom maps will serve as great practice for this.
I made half of the level on my twitch stream, you can watch the recorded stream
. Its huge though, like 9 hours long, but you can skim through. I got a lot of help from people on the stream giving me hints on what I was doing wrong! I will surely make more levels later, and I will probably stream that too.
Developer
