Visions of Eternity - an Episode for Ultimate Doom
A long time ago, in my heyday of Doom level design, I started to work on a project called “Visions of Eternity”, which was going to be an episode for Ultimate Doom, starting out in the style of Doom's episode 1, but then slowly developing to more of an episode 2 and 3 type of theme (which is obviously what just about any user episode does, but oh well). Over the years, I lost interest in Doom editing, then came back, then stopped again. Still, id Software's classic game, which celebrated its 20th birthday just a couple of days ago, always came back to me, or I came back to the game.
This autumn, I once again sat down to work on new Doom levels, and among then was Visions of Eternity. And while I updated all levels to my current mapping standards, the more I looked at it, the more unhappy I was with some maps. It started with the first map of the episode, which I realized wasn't gripping enough. I wanted something that would really overwhelm people right away. :-) So with a new idea for a starting area in my mind, I sat down to build a new map.
Just two days later I finished a great level and was insanely happy. But this was only the start. In the following weeks, I would build two more maps, replacing other, older maps from the episode. Even though these were built extremely fast, I they are my best maps so far. A lot of thought went into gameplay, connectivity and item and monster placement. I would also rework all remaining maps over and over, changing textures here and there and removing and replacing whole rooms. Finally, Visions of Eternity, which had already spawned a running gag between Pablo and me saying that it would take eternally to get finished, neared completion.
Shortly before the release, I had an idea for a supplement booklet PDF that would contain the “story” as well as behind the scenes information and trivia about the development.
The episode has now been released and can be grabbed from the Doom levels page. Have fun!
Comments
No comments have been posted yet. Be the first to write one!
Back to the blog.