doom

Early development

Conception

Following the successful release of Wolfenstein 3D in May 1992, most of the id Software team worked on the sequel, Spear of Destiny. Since this game used the same engine as Wolfenstein, lead programmer John Carmack could use the time to begin work on the company's next-generation graphics engine. With significant effort, choosing to isolate himself from the rest of the team for a long period of time in order to avoid distractions, he implemented various new features, including varying light levels and texture-mapped floors and ceilings. He even added support for sloping floors, although this feature was later removed. The engine was not developed with Doom in mind, and in fact Doom was not the first game to make use of it: Raven Software licensed an early version for Shadowcaster, which would be published some months before Doom.

After the release of Spear in September 1992, development began in earnest. The initial idea was to make a licensed game based on Aliens, one of the team's favorite science fiction-action films, and some negotiations were conducted with 20th Century Fox. This plan was eventually abandoned in order to get more creative freedom. John Carmack instead conceived of the basic theme for the game: demons versus technology. Doom was then imagined as a cross between Aliens and the team's favorite B-grade horror movie, Evil Dead II. The idea to include demons was also inspired by their most recent Dungeons & Dragons campaign, which had ended with demons overrunning an entire planet.

Tom Hall and the Doom Bible

The horror-tech theme was not accepted unanimously. Creative director Tom Hall had instead wanted to continue the Commander Keen series with a third trilogy, but the others felt that the cartoon style of the Keen games would not do justice to the new 3D engine. Conceding defeat, Hall set out to create the new game's design document, which he titled the Doom Bible, while the others were programming and creating graphics.

Unlike Wolfenstein 3D, which had essentially been a plotless shooter game, Hall wanted Doom to have an elaborate story. The game was to take place on an alien planet called Tei Tenga, on which the UAAF (United Aerospace Armed Forces) had two military research bases. There was supposed to be five playable characters with different personalities and abilities: Lorelei Chen, John "Petro" Pietrovich, Dimitri Paramo, Thi Barrett, and Buddy Dacote. The game would have started with creatures from Hell suddenly rushing the base while the five were playing cards. There would have been a total of six episodes, with storylines involving traveling to Hell and back through the hell gates from which the hellspawn came, and the destruction of Tei Tenga, for which the characters would have been sent to jail.

John Carmack disapproved of the detailed plot, instead imagining Doom as a simple, action-oriented game. He allegedly remarked, "Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important." This creative conflict eventually lead to Hall's resignation from the company in the summer of 1993.

The Doom Bible as such was scrapped, but several of the ideas were kept for the final game. Before he left, Hall had created one big Giga-Map of the original Phobos Base, in which the player initially could roam around freely between different sections of the base with only one exit attached to it that would lead to the next level complex (sort of like Quake 2). From that he created 7 seperate levels for the first episode after the cohesive Giga-Map concept was scratched. As in the Bible, the final Doom game starts in a military research base and features a trip to Hell and back, although Tei Tenga was replaced with Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars. Several locations, items and monsters mentioned in the Bible and already created by Hall, while he was still at id, appear in the final game as well, though some slightly modified.

Some concepts from the Doom Bible, though discarded for Doom, made their way into later titles:

Building the game

Programming

Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the NeXTSTEP operating system. The final game engine was programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. The engine was first compiled with Intel's C compiler for DOS, but later Watcom's compiler was used.

The whole engine was programmed by John Carmack from scratch. Dave D. Taylor was hired right before Doom's initial release date to take care of the various ports of Doom and Wolfenstein. The sound library, DMX, was an external piece of software created by Paul Radek, and not included in the 1997 release of the Doom source code.

The editing tools used to build the game included scripts to generate source code for monsters from definition tables, a tool to piece together WAD files from data lumps, the BSP node builder and the level editor, DoomEd. Among these utilities, only the BSP node builder has been released to the public.

Levels

Main article: Levels

The Doom Bible contained detailed descriptions of scenarios that were to appear in the game. Tom Hall, as instructed by John Carmack at first, studied real military bases to create realistic locations, such as recreation facilities, training centers and supply depots. He designed several levels with this mindset, but as they were constructed and placed in the game, they were deemed as uninspiring, although being decorated with real-life wallpapers, floor tiles, and office equipment. Hall then created one big Giga-Map of the original Phobos Base, in which the player initially could roam around freely between different sections of the base with only one exit attached to it that would lead to the next level complex (sort of like Quake 2). From that he created seven seperate levels for the first episode Knee-Deep in the Dead after the cohesive Giga-Map concept was scratched by John Carmack in favor of a more disjointed style.

When Tom Hall resigned, an extra level designer was needed in order to complete the game on schedule, and so Sandy Petersen was hired about 10 weeks before release. In those 10 weeks, Petersen completed all of the second and third episodes, and one level for the first episode — 19 levels in total.

Graphics

Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud became the chief artists of id Software after Tom Hall left, and are therefor responsible for every visual concept seen in the game that was not created by Hall before. Additionally, Don Ivan Punchatz was hired to create the package art and logo, while his son Gregor Punchatz created some of the monster's sculptures for digitalization.

Some sprites of the game were drawn by hand, but the characters were digitized from sculptures. Some, like the player character, Cyberdemon, and the Baron of Hell were done in clay by Adrian Carmack, and others like the Arch-Vile, Mancubus, Spider Mastermind, and the Revenant, were created in latex and metal by Gregor Punchatz. The sculptures were photographed from eight different angles so that they could be rotated realistically in-game, and then finally colored and animated digitally.

The shotgun and the pistol seen in the game are photographs of toy weapons bought at Toys "Я" Us. The chainsaw is a McCulloch Eager Beaver, provided by Tom Hall. The hands seen holding the weapons, and the brass-knuckled fist, are those of Kevin Cloud. Textures were either created from scanned pictures or drawn from scratch. Among the more unusual sources, one texture was based off of Adrian's snakeskin boots, and a bloody texture for the hellish levels was created from a photograph of a wound on Cloud's knee.

Sound

Main article: Sound

For music and sound effects, id Software hired Bobby Prince, who had previously scored Wolfenstein 3D and the Commander Keen games. Initially, John Romero gave him several heavy metal records and told him to create something similar for Doom. As the design of the game progressed, it was realized that this style would not be appropriate for all levels, so Prince also created some ambient tracks. The final music tracks were giving to Romero pre-packaged and he then assigned the different tracks to each level.

In addition to heavy metal albums, several of the songs were inspired by the activities of the id Software team. Prince and John Carmack would often stay in the office for hours when no one else was around; "Deep Into The Code" (E3M3 of Doom) refers to Carmack's habit of programming for long periods without leaving the computer, oblivious to his surroundings. Prince created the track "Waiting For Romero To Play" (MAP18 of Doom II) after observing the anticipation of people to watch Romero in multiplayer matches. The final sound effects for the monsters were mixed from various animal recordings from a sound library frequented by Prince.

Additional sound effects were acquired from the sound effects library Sound Ideas. A famous example of that, which is also heard in many movies, is the spawn "swoosh" sound that the Icon of Sin makes when shooting (DSBOSPIT).

Pre-release versions

Main article: Alpha

Four pre-release versions of Doom originally intended for testers and the press have afterwards been released to the public due to historical interest. None of these versions have sound or music.

Sources

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This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Development of Doom. As with Doom Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.