NEVER Doom Mod
I made a Doom level set for some reason.
I have been playing Doom for, like, 25 years so I thought I would try my hand at designing some levels. COVID had just hit and I was looking for something creative to do. I also made the soundtrack, which was a really large part of the project. I liked having a simple and fun, low stakes prompt to get me to focus on making some tracks instead of just twiddling knobs.
While this isn’t what the game is remembered for today, Doom’s ability to transport you to another world blew me away as a ten year old. I would spend minutes at a time just walking back and forth watching the wall textures grow and shrink as I got closer and further away. At the time, nothing else came close to feeling so atmospheric.
Keeping this in mind, I wanted my WAD to be a tone piece. The tone I went for was heavily inspired by Blame!, which is a very y2k-cyber-goth manga. It has some overlapping themes with Doom: Extreme action and violence. Surreal sci fi horror. A gun is arguably the main character.
The rest of the tone I wanted to impart comes from the soundtrack. The original soundtrack was more or less trying to rip off 80s and 90s metal with old sound cards that were not up to the task so, in my opinion, it landed squarely in the territory of industrial music. A lot of WADs these days stick with MIDI for the soundtrack, but go for a different, often vaguely orchestral, genre (if they change the music at all). That’s all well and good, but since almost every major source port supports OGG or MP3 backing tracks, I decided to go with a different approach and keep the original game’s genre but update the fidelity. Also I happen to like making obnoxious aggressive industrial techno. Here’s my personal favorite example of what I came up with for the wad:
Altogether, I want the tone to come across as oppressive and surreal. I want you to feel like you are a little bit too high in a nightclub in a foreign country. But, like, in a fun way. Honestly I think I nailed it based on the player feedback.
The aesthetic - the general presentation, the music, the level/environment design - comes together so well that it ended up giving me flashbacks to my one and only time at Berghain a few years back...
This is one of the most uniquely oppressive wads I've ever seen. It makes me feel absolutely terrible, I love it.
This wad is a damn masterpiece.
The soundtrack sounds like a 90s industrial dance club in the best possible way.
The mood you pulled off with what seems like 99% vanilla textures is spectacular, and the sense of scale in some rooms is rad.
Never.wad is uniquely oppressive even by Doom standards, it sticks in my head and I think about it pretty often
Found it to be a really fun and refreshingly challenging experience, set to a thumping soundtrack that I couldn't help but load up on soundcloud afterwards, exactly the type of music I could listen to for hours and hours. ... that dark industrial level design and architecture matched with the tunes made for a really sublime feeling of tension throughout. I feel like I could play this over and over without really ever getting overfamiliar with it, it'll definitely find itself in the rotation of wads I come back to often!
Tech Stuff
Music:
The music was done in Bitwig studio, which is a wonderful DAW. It’s not often that software is this intuitive while also being this capable. Plus it runs really well and is basically crash proof. Heavily featured is my Korg Mono/Poly, usually run through a RAT pedal. Another recurring player is my NAVA open source 909 replica, which was built for me by a friend.
This project did its job of giving me some practice at both the art and craft of making tracks. Specifically I improved a lot at song structure and mixing.
Levels:
I played around with the newer UDMF format but was a little overwhelmed with the options. I thought it would be good to start with the basics, so I aimed for compatibility with the most vanilla source port that supported mp3 background music. I landed on Crispy Doom.
Perhaps this isn’t surprising, but after 25 years of community map making the tools have become insanely good. Ultimate Doom Builder is truly a joy to use.
To help it stand out from the crowd, I wanted to try modding a couple of weapons and monsters. I used DEHACKED to accomplish this. DEHACKED is basically an old systematized way of hacking the OG doom exe to change around various values and animations – things you can’t do with a normal pwad.
The caste of weapons in Doom is legendary, and doesn’t need a lot of updating. That said, I think the pistol and the chaingun aren’t that great. The pistol is useless after you have some better weapons, and I always just hated the sound the chaingun makes.
I used dehacked to make the pistol shoot a little slower, but now it fires two bullets at once, doubling the damage. It also fires a small projectile meant to add some visual oomph to drive home the idea that the gun is more powerful now.
The new chaingun fires faster, but it has a cooldown animation, like the plasma gun.
Both weapons have new sprites based on the VP70. They also got a new sound effect, which I am pretty proud of.
This sound was made from a kick drum and two different thunder samples layered on top of each other.
I also made some changes to the roster of monsters. I basically switched the attacks of the lost souls and the cacodemons. I think the new cacos came out really good. A large part of the strategy in Doom is target priority: Kill the hit scanners first, then the revenants, and so on. I think my new caco disrupts the target priority routine that has become so deeply ingrained in the average person that still plays Doom. If you don’t focus on these things they will close the distance and take a big bite out of you in a hurry. Plus I think they are just rather scary.
Alright that’s enough words. Go play it!