Idea Notebook - "Another Icon of Sin remake"

So this is my new segment that I'm gonna be doing on this blog. Since my brain is an idea machine to the point that I've already come up with more possible projects than any human being could accomplish in their lifetime... I figured I might as well just slap some of these ideas down on the internet. Maybe someone will look at this and be like, "yeah, that's a good idea, maybe I could work on that!"

If nothing else, maybe someone will at least find it interesting.

Anyway, there was a trend going around on the Doomworld forum for a bit that someone should re-work the Icon of Sin boss, because it's kind of gotten a reputation for being under-cooked and not very well designed.

The only one that I ever saw really get some positive attention was the Icon of Sin fight for Brutal Doom. But even then, it kinda took the obvious solution of just making it a giant enemy that you shoot at. (Which, to be fair, was kind of how it was described in the actual game's lore)

Oh, and look at that, that's exactly how it was handled in Doom: Eternal, too.

EDIT: Came back to add that I actually like the Icon of Sin in Doom: Eternal. It did a very good job of testing the skills that the player was expected to learn. I'm just saying in some ways it feels like the obvious solution.

Come on, there's gotta be a better way we can do this. So, what exactly made the Icon of Sin bad to begin with? Well, mostly it had to do with the fact that a lot of its lethality potential was based on which enemies it managed to randomly spawn in. On top of that, the arena you fight him in is just very, very uninteresting. 

I think a much more interesting take on this boss would be to focus on testing the player's skills in resource management and environmental traversal. So here's the idea. The Icon of Sin's brain does not start exposed. You have to go through a gauntlet to activate three switches in order to do so. Each switch is located in a branching path off of the central arena (which gets re-populated with enemies after each switch press). This gauntlet would ideally be pretty forgiving about how much ammo it gives you, less so for health. There'd be plenty in the central arena, but once you're off hunting for one of the switches, it immediately becomes a test of endurance. Margin for error is minimal. 

So anyway, once the icon of sin is vulnerable, that's when it activates the random enemy spawns. Thankfully, however, you won't have to jump on a weird platform to raise you up to brain level so you can kill it with splash damage. Rather, the Icon's hitbox will be a lot closer to the front (but we'd want to bump up his health) So the last phase would be a mad dash to do as much damage as possible before too many enemies spawn in.

Anyway, consider this Doom shower thoughts. I think it would be cool.

The Joy of Re-interpretation

I don't know what it is, but I have a mild obsession with the idea of alternate takes on a preexisting creation. It's part of the reason comics were so interesting to me, because I loved seeing the immense amount of adaptations that stemmed from several iconic characters. It's also why I have an entire folder on my desktop simply dedicated to MIDI demakes of songs, hearing how someone interpreted an advanced music piece on an inferior soundfont is just supremely interesting.

Now to actually get to the point of what this is doing on my level design blog. I have made a few map remakes in my time, but there are only 2 that I have publicly released. One was a conversion of Blood Covenant from Quake Champions into TF2, the other was a remaster of the level "Toxin Refinery" from Doom in the GZDoom source port. 

The Blood Covenant remake was started by basically completely re-blocking out the map to completely developer textures. I knew from the start that I didn't want to simply emulate the art style of the original, so I gave it a brand new artpass from the ground up, as if it were any other TF2 map. I guess I was also feeling a bit out-doorsy at the time, so I came up with an excuse to have more of the map take place outside. Where most TF2 maps have tech-base theme towards the edges, as you move inwards, the theming becomes progressively more rugged and rural. I decided to flip-flop it for this. I made the inside a tech base hybrid of RED and BLU, and the outskirts of the map had a more unassuming mining/industrial theme. I think it was a good choice, it made for a very striking central area.

This map was later picked up by the mod team for "Open Fortress: Deathmatch" and is frequently in their server rotations. They did, however, give it an altered artpass with the entire base being RED across the board. It was a little disappointing, because I liked the contrasting central facility, but because their deathmatch isn't team-based, it just didn't fit the mod's direction. So I understand why they made the change.

The remaster of E1M3 Toxin Refinery was a bit of a different beast. I was mostly going for the same art style as the original, but I wanted to take advantage of limit-removing source ports to simply add droves of additional detail. This meant I had to individually look at each room and think to myself: "What were the developers probably going for here?" I think all in all, I did a good job of making this version of the map feel like an actual space that makes some semblance of sense in universe.

Anyway, I'm probably not going to be adding this remaster to my official portfolio, so in the mean time you can download the map here if you're interested: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/115886-e1m3-remaster-udmf-practice/

Learning to Design on a Game-by-Game Basis

It should be clear by my portfolio up to this point that most of my level design experience comes from tinkering around with the Source Engine. Particularly Team Fortress 2 and the Half-Life series, (although I did not list my Half-Life 2 projects) and I would largely say that the communities surrounding these games are what taught me level design in the first place. TF2maps was an excellent community for me to learn from, and later on RunThinkShootLive and the Black Mesa steam workshop were excellent places for me to input single player experiments.

With my experience in Half-Life mapping, this taught me a very specific design philosophy. See, typically First Person Shooter level designs are divided into what I'd call the "two E's" Environment Centrism, and Encounter Centrism.

In Environment-Centric designs, the location is what is considered first. The level designer creates a specific environment and then decides on gameplay ideas that can come about within that environment.

Encounter-Centric designs are essentially the other way around. The level designer decides what challenge they want to put the player in, and then decide what environment facilitates that encounter.

Now of course, it's not quite that cut and dry. These philosophies can often bleed into each other, and frequently what happens, especially in more modern games, is a sort of half-and-half approach. Some parts of the level are done through Encounter-Centric means, others Environment-Centric. But every game, depending on their goals and how they are designed, will follow one of these ideas at their core.

The Half-Life series is one of the big innovators in pushing forward the potential strength of Environment-Centric level design. From fighting a helicopter on top of a hydro-electric dam, to escaping a police state through old, dilapidated canals. It's clear that the strength of these games is the sheer variety of highly immersive environments. This was the design theory that I followed when I first started mapping for single player games. While some of my earlier attempts were somewhat hit-and-miss by my current standards, (Emergency 17 in particular I feel suffered from a minor case of room-corridor-room syndrome) I would largely say I was fairly quickly able to grasp creating an immersive 3D space, especially after becoming familiar with mapping in Team Fortress 2.

Recently however, my sights have shifted slightly. My newer projects are being created in the Doom Engine, as I find that it's much easier to work with, has greater access to custom content, and also I can create a reasonably sized level over the course of a week or so, rather than several months. While I did muddle around with mapping in Doom a small amount beforehand, my first real project was UAC Pacific Northwest. While I did embrace the strength of Doom's looser level structure to a certain extent, I found some of my maps to be very weak in the challenge factor, and overall, individual encounters weren't especially fun. Combat felt basic. (This is worse in the first two levels)

This is because I was failing to understand that DOOM has a very Encounter-Centric design. There's a reason the series has gained a reputation for having industrial facilities that a real person would have no business ever actually trying to work in. This is because each area in Doom and Doom 2 was designed for their combat encounters first, with environmental details being a distant second. In order to remedy this, I created Phaser Foundry. This is a map that I very deliberately designed with an Encounter-Centric mindset, to test and see how well I could give a fair challenge to the player. I was essentially trying to get myself to un-learn a lot of the design philosophies Half-Life had taught me, because Doom simply doesn't work that way.
Now, since it's only been released but a few hours ago, I have yet to see the response on it, but I'm fairly confident that I did a decent job.

Going forward, I'm still going to work on UAC Pacific Northwest with a predominantly Environment-Centric mindset, although I will certainly be giving greater thought to individual combat encounters and how to challenge the player. I feel that with the 5 maps I've made so far, the pack has already cemented its own identity, so turning a hard left would be bizarre at this point. And besides, having a mappack that's more focused on immersion and environmental exploration isn't intrinsically a bad thing. After all, Doom has quite a few maps, we can have one pack that bends the rules a little.