Position: Individual Project

Engine: DOOM 2016 Snapmap Editor

Development Time: 8 weeks

Synopsis: DOOM 2016 mod which received popular mod of the month as well as community star awards for ‘Single Player’ ‘Campaign’ 'and ‘Story’ categories.

Overview

Consider it Resolved is a standalone single-player custom campaign level designed to fit within the DOOM 2016 universe. Serving as a summarized format of the base game, the mod tells the brief tale of the player awakening in their doom chamber and being tasked by Dr. Samuel Hayden to chase the now insane Olivia Pierce from mars to Hell and back.

Non-Intrusive Storytelling

In the midst of all of the epic combat that DOOM 2016 has to offer, I found that they we’re still able to tell a compelling story. I also wanted to reflect this yet on a much more condensed scale.

To create a coherent narrative I looked at several of the existing voice lines in game and combined them in new ways alongside select atmospheric music and SFX to tell an alternate version of story.

This required a lot of custom logic where certain narrative and gameplay elements would be hidden or enabled based on precise timers and other logic conditions in sequence to be able to chain together narrative beats in this modified way.

“Welcome to Hell”

One of the bigger narrative beats is when players first enter hell - I wanted this to be as jam-packed with DOOM 2016’s signature badass combat as possible.

One of the stronger power ups in game is berserk and I chose to provide this to players immediately after they’ve gone through the portal to hell to make players feel like murderous machines.

I specifically created the height of this fall to be large enough to trigger the player-kneeling animation so that as players look up from the blood covered floors of hell to which they’ve literally just been flung they raise up their fists and prepare to enter a truly bloody brawl.

Hyper-Intense Combat Arenas

Doubling down on DOOM’s combat was definitely one of the design goals I wanted to really nail. I spent a lot of time doing geometric edits to the template arenas to get them feeling better for navigation.

This finale space, for example, was a bit notorious for letting players fall to their deaths. As such, I created all of the red-rune blocks & many other rocky bridges to fit naturally within the arena making it a safer environment for players to focus on killing enemies. Elsewhere, I created mountains of blood from hundreds of gore piles to create a natural feeling gauntlet.

Ultimately, the combat encounters were highly planned with monsters spawning in specific sequences and locations to enforce DOOM’s high-movement combat arena design.