T w e n t y S i d e d

This is is about a DOOM mod I wrote. Except, not really. This post is actually about the the surreal and frightening sensation of getting old. Way back in 1995 I made a map pack for DOOM2 called “Slugfest”. As far as I can remember it was well-received, although I haven’t thought about it in years.

Last week someone posted a YouTube video where they played through that old map pack. Back in the day, I would have been giddy with excitement at the prospect of watching someone else play though my levels. But here from my vantage point at the tail end of 2021, I feel something very different.

So let’s talk about these maps…

MAP01

I was 24 when I made this, which means this was a little over half my life ago. According to the text file I packaged with the mod, I spent “between three and four months”. On this map collection. Since there are ten maps, this means I spent an average of 10 days on each level. And yet, I’m watching this person play through the first map and I don’t even feel a tingle of recognition. None of this looks familiar.

It’s one thing if I forget the layout of a level I played. I’m sure there are a handful of 90s games that would look unfamiliar to me now. But it’s weird that something I personally created can vanish down the memory hole like this. I must have spent dozens of hours of my life crafting this level, placing items, choosing textures, and playtesting the level, and yet if you showed me this level out of context I wouldn’t even recognize it as my own.

I wonder how much of our lives simply vanish like this. How many days or weeks have I spent working on other projects that eventually died and were then completely forgotten, making it as if those hours never happened?

MAP02

I do remember this map. Specifically, I remember the long passages with the holes in the ceiling. I remember I was very interested in using zone lighting to simulate the effect of shadows. Basically, the map author could control the brightness of different vertical chunks of the map. If you were careful, you could effectively “draw” primitive patterns of light and dark.

This was still a year before Quake gave us baked-in shadow maps, and almost a decade before the existence of graphics hardware capable of doing much in the way of real-time shadows. So these hand-drawn shadows were state-of-the-art at the time.

It’s interesting that this player has chosen to 100% the maps: All monsters, all items, all secrets. I really appreciate that, since there’s no way I would remember most of these secrets.

MAP03

Okay, this looks like more of the same. It’s a bunch of random hallways with more hand-drawn shadows. So rather than comment on this level, let’s have another look at that text file…

Submitted	October 25, 1995
Author	Shamus Young
Credits	Thanx to Strider, for all his helpful advice and also to Cliff, for bugging me until I got it done. Thanks to my brother Pat, for hogging my computer for hours to test this thing. (as if it was a burden) HUGE ThanX to the gang at ID! Also thanks to Denis Möller (for NWT), Raphael Quinet (for DEU and DEU2), Matt Fell (for the Doom specs), and Kevin Roels (for the status bar graphics)
Base	All new levels from scratch
Build Time	Between three and four months
Editors Used	DEU2, NWT, MIDI2MUS, BSP
Bugs	The game will sometimes crash on level four for no apparent reason. I suspect it might have something to do with the light switch on the East side of the map, but the problem is so rare I can't be sure. If anyone knows why, or finds any other errors, let me know, I LOVE having people point out my mistakes. ;-)
Text File	=============================================================================
Title : SLUGFEST.WAD
Author : Shamus Young
Email Address :
Misc. Author info. : My first name is pronounced with a long "a" and a
: short "u" (so it sounds like "famous")
:
Description : 10 levels for DOOMII! These are high quality
: levels, not just a bunch of boxy rooms with
: mismatched and unaligned textures. The levels
: include new sounds, new graphics, and all - new
: music! The final level puts you up against the most
: hideous monster you've ever seen: a hundred foot
: high picture of my face! For more info on what
: you'll find before you play, check out the
: "additional notes" section at the end of this text
: file. Enjoy!
:
Additional Credits to : Thanx to Strider, for all his helpful advice and
: also to Cliff, for bugging me until I got it done.
: Thanks to my brother Pat, for hogging my computer
: for hours to test this thing. (as if it was a
: burden) HUGE ThanX to the gang at ID!
: Also thanks to Denis M”ller (for NWT), Raphael
: Quinet (for DEU and DEU2), Matt Fell (for
: the Doom specs), and Kevin Roels (for the status
: bar graphics)

I know that “Strider” was my friend Vince. He chose his name based on the brand of bike he owned as a child in the 1960s. He’d never read Lord of the Rings, and so he was a bit perplexed when the people he met online assumed he was a fan.

But Cliff? Who is Cliff? I have no memory of anyone named Cliff. Was this an on-line friend, or someone I knew IRL?

Also, I just want to reassure you that YES, I am feeling the appropriate level of cringe for my deliberate (yet no less embarrassing) spelling of “ThanX”. Ugh. I’m also not a huge fan of how the author proclaims the work to be “high quality levels”. History seems to support this claim,It seems to be well-reviewed. but it’s still unseemly to have the author saying so. Good work speaks for itself.

I realize the person who wrote this text file was an earlier version of myself, but I don’t really recognize him. He feels wholly alien to me, both in terms of writing style and general attitude.

MAP04

I vividly remember this map. In fact, I think here we can see a pretty good snapshot of my particular style of design.

1. Holes in the ceiling / overhanging ledges to justify shadows. It’s a good trick and I think it holds up. I just wish it wasn’t the only trick.
2. Open courtyards with pools of water, because I thought vast open arenas were “boring” and needed extra details to fill them in. (I guess I thought open arenas were for picnics and not gameplay?)
3. Generally unclear flow. I didn’t like when levels were a linear chain of rooms. Fair enough. But my solution was to have an open design built around a large central hub. That’s fine once in a while, but you can’t do that for every level because sooner or later the player is going to say “Damn it. Just tell me where the next keycard is. I’ve killed all the monsters and I just want to know where to go next.”
4. Open design that has all of the monsters converging on your position. You can see what appear to be drains in the water tunnels, where the ceiling is just a couple of inches above the water. The point of these was to connect the outer hub to the central room, so that the sound of your weapon would wake up all the monsters as soon as you pulled the trigger the first time.
5. I tested maps in isolation. That is, I’d begin a map from the default new game state of starting pistol and no armor. I’d tweak the level until I could beat it under these conditions. This meant that the levels were much too easy once they were part of a series of levels where you carry over resources from previous levels.
6. Kitchen-sink item placement. Every level seems to have every weapon and every powerup. They also seem to use almost every monster. In the original games, levels would be built around a specific idea. “Let’s fight lots of Monster A in close quarters with a shotgun, then we’ll fight Monster B and C in an open arena with plasma, and then we’ll do an ambush where low-tier foes pop out and we have to mop them up with the minigun.” In my levels you’re always fighting a little of everything and you’ve got plenty of ammo for whatever guns you favor. I probably thought of my design as offering “more variety”, but now I look at it and it just seems unfocused.
7. The levels shift between open courtyards and dark corridors. That’s not bad, but I think we could use a little more variety in terms of layout. Some of the CQC areas could be even closer, and we could stand to have fewer straight corridors.

This stuff isn’t bad, but I’ve learned a lot in the additional quarter century since I made this. Also, I think some of these secrets are pretty good.

Let’s skip ahead a bit…

MAP09

Back in the day, this level was the big attention-getter of the collection. It was inspired by the scene near the end of Time Bandits when the characters were stuck in a cage over an infinite black abyss. My idea was to have imps stuck in floating cages on either side of the walkway, flinging fireballs at you. But because of limitations with how the DOOM engine works, I couldn’t make it look like the cages were really floating if I wanted to have monsters in them. So I had to stick the monsters on pillars.

I don’t like that falling off this narrow walkway is certain (but not instant) death, but I have no idea how you could fix that without compromising the visual design.

MAP10

Ouch. The cringe is real. The final boss is a cyberdemon, trapped behind a massive billboard of my face.

According to the text file, this picture is from the night I took Heather to prom, although this one seems to be different from the picture I remember. I wonder who took this picture, and I wonder what happened to the original.

Also, how the heck did I scan a picture in 1996? I doubt I owned a scanner. Consumer-grade digital photography was still years away. It wasn’t like you could just whip out your phone and and bring images into the digital world like you can today.

In any case, that was a fun and slightly uncomfortable trip down memory lane. Thanks so much to the YouTuber Roofi for posting this.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.