The name brings back so many memories, mostly good, some a little frustrated. It was the game I tried to hide from my parents. It was the game I tried harder to hide from my sysadmin in high school so I could play it networked after school. I had some great games. Usually my only challenge was finding a worthy opponent. After all, northern VT isn't exactly the center of the gaming world. I did a fair amount of crushing others, and once in a while I got crushed. E1M2 rocket fights over the soulsphere have had no equal in any other game I've played since. Especially when they became four-way. One of the best times I spent with friends was staying up until 4am playing overload.

But more than the game itself, Doom was a form of artistic expression for me. Most of you reading this already know that I took editing the game seriously, and anything I released was going to be good, quality material. Sure, I built my fair share of crap, but it never saw public release. I started editing before I even knew there was a community, putting a few levels together as I taught myself WadEd. Then my brother started bringing home other editing tools, (he had internet access at his high school. I didn't.) and we messed with sound and graphics, figuring things out as we went along.

There was Hangar, the first level. It was a decent attempt, built because my brother and I didn't think the first level looked like a hangar at all. We even revisited the level later with some custom textures. Another level was CommCent, built after a communtiy center I visited in West Virginia. There was no good reason for building it, I just wanted to. After getting a little more experience, Chris and I put together Mathouse, a level lain out with the same floor plan as hif friend Matt's house. Chris did most of the initial work, and I made the level playable with item placement, texturing, adding extras for deathmatch, etc. It was also my first real entry into special effects, after Chris having brought home some of the first methods to build them. We put deep water in the pool and the river, and built a few transparent doors. I then went a step further and developed a shootable window system of my own, which I haven't seen done the same way in any other WAD.

Branching from levels into sound, my first sound wad was a collection of stupid noises around my computer and made with our mic, but it was relatively funny. Graphics were the next big thing I began to work with. Some basic projects such as ImpHead (turned imp fireballs into imp heads) broke ground for FRuiTDooM, where most of the items in the game were converted into some kind of juicy treat. This graphic patch nearly made it onto the cover of 3D Games Alchemy by SAMS Publishing. Unfortunately, problems with the transatlantic cable made it impossible for the editor to include screenshots on the cover. We did, however, get a mention inside the book, and FRuiTDooM (as well as a few other projects) accompanied it on a CD-rom. Much later, I would extract graphics from the Doom clone "Chex Quest" and apply them to a skin file.

A few gems were lost in an unfortunate drive failure. Lucky for us, most of the stuff was backed up elsewhere, but we lost the only copy of ChrisDoom. Chris (my brother) brought home a digital camera one day, and I shot all the frames and resized and edited them. We then added sounds and I drew some bloody death and exploding frames. Who knew killing your brother would be so much fun. We also lost a good number of DeHackEd patches, including a superwep9 I created which was up to twice as fast as the "absolute fastest" superwep8 that came packaged with DHE. I also lost a personal favorite patch, where the armor bonuses would turn red and lift off the ground, only to fly around and shoot at you! Killing them would yeild a green armor bonus, which you could pick up and be on your way. Another loss was my Chex Quest death patch, where I changed all the monsters' normally G-rated death scenes into splatting green goo all over the level. Suddenly, the game became much more enjoyable :)

I had managed to get pretty good with DeHackEd, and built a Deathmatch Practice utility. After changing all the monsters into different marines with different guns, I placed them throughout E1 levels. Except for fun random stuff, about the only other useful thing I did with DeHackEd was for Twice Risen.

In my later days of editing, all my effort was focused toward Twice Risen, or another large project, and my smaller projects dropped off. It was about this time that the source was released, and ports were becoming prominent. One level outside of any project was built after visit to an armory, so I felt compelled to recreate it as a deathmatch level. ArmoryDM was nothing especially exciting, but I threw in an odd switch behavior to restart the level and reset all the scores. This level was reviewed at DoomShack, and got an 8/10. Not bad.

I entered a couple Doom related contests as well, both sponsored by Doomworld. The first was for a signed 5th anniversary Doom2 box. The contest called for a <100 word essay, which I knew I could never win. So, I got creative. By this time, ZDoom was out, and scripting was available. I decided that the best approach I could make was to surprise the judges by entering not simply an essay, but an entire scripted level experience that popped most of the text up at you. It worked. I won. :) A second contest was especially enjoyable for me, the 10 sectors contest. My level used moving floors to completely change how the level architecture sat midway through the level, offering more than 10-15 different floor heights, when there were only 10 sectors to begin with. My level didn't make award status, but it did make the top 32 and was distributed in the first WAD. Somehow, someone got a hold of an older version of the level and used it in the final instead, which unfortunately made it unplayable in the final release.

The larger projects I worked on brought out some of my best work, but they often brought out a lot of frustration for me as well. The first was All Hell.

All Hell was never a big hit, and it's not hard to see why, but it certainly had some good points. Chris brought the request for a level back from chool, and I decided to tackle it. I had a cave level in progress, and it seemed to fit with the conversion's theme, so I converted it and sent it to the lead producer. It became MAP04, and I think it was one of the better levels in the PC. It was a good opportunity for me to work on a large project, though.

ZanZan was a project I didn't have a lot of stake in, but answering questions about editing and providing support for the creator was enough to get a mention in the credits. I'm proud to have my name alongside this one, because there are a lot of amazing effects brought out in this truly total conversion.

I was approached to do work for the Resurrection project, and I did a great 3D model of an H&K MP5. This model was never used, as the project was cut far short of its original goals and new weapons were eliminated. I found this very frustrating, because of the time and effort I put into the model. I believe it is among the best graphics I have built for any Doom project.

Skull Tag. the biggest project that still isn't quite done yet. I joined up early and started work on a few levels, which rapidly became some of the most intense scripting projects I ever undertook. My level was to be the 'expert' level. I spent an incredible amount of time building two opposing bases and scripting in power generators that could be shut off. Security systems that would alert you of enemy presence. Camera systems to watch your base. Equipment bunkers to use in staging assaults. Ammo bunkers to purchase the weapons and ammunition you need for the assault. Defense systems to prevent the enemy from capturing your skull. There were air vents to crawl through and invade the enemy base, a sewer route, and of course a full frontal route. I created a second level, which also was heavily scripted, as an experiemnt. This level used randomization heavily in allowing access to some areas and not others. It made powerups available and took them away. The level would never give the same deathmatch experience twice, because it was never the same level twice! A third level was nothing especially exciting, but it was well designed and basically asked the player to rocket jump and damage himself to get to most of the good weapons and items. None of these levels, which are among my best, have ever been seen by the public. That is very frustrating. Fortunately, the 3D model of a railgun, which I did for SkullTag, has been released in the beta.

The last project I joined was Ni'mrod, headed by Ebola. I promised him a level, and I gave it to him. I wasn't able to design an entire level from scratch for him, but I picked up a few scraps and merged them together, while constructing the beginning of the level from scratch. I actually do expect to see this project to be finished, and to see my level released.

That brings me to Twice Risen, which is really what this is all about anyway, and likely why you even care who I am. TR is what brought my name into the community, it's the reason I got noticed at all. It started long before I knew there was a Doom community at all. Twice Risen is a source of great pride, but also of great frustration. The pre-releases show me that with a dedicated team, I could have made one of the greatest Doom add-ons available. But the team... it just never stayed together. There were no members who really took the project as their own and worked for its completion but myself. Getting status reports out of people was like pulling teeth. Yet I managed to get enough together to do a pre-release, which was a resounding success in my opinion. Pre-release v0.1 got a 7.5 out of 10 at Team Insanity. The updated MBF enhanced release got a 9.5 of 10 there. It also recieved 4 of 5 stars at Sir Robin's Doom Castle. These ratings were from levels that I mostly enjoyed, but didn't feel were absolutely wonderful. They didn't have exceptional new graphics. There were no new monsters. (well, there was one modified new adversary, but he didn't amount to much) The storyline hadn't even been developed. Just think of what would have been if I had all those in place! That was where I was headed. I got promises in a lot of areas. Promises for source work, promises for levels, promises for sounds, music, textures... and then I got a lot of disappearances. I didn't let it pull me down, I kept pluggin away at it, but when you enter college, and your whole world changes, you have to look at what you spend your time doing and decide if that's really what you want to do with it. Although it was a very difficult decision to make, I had to let go of the project. I simply couldn't do it anymore. Not without help, not without time, not without a team that wouldn't leave me again.

So here I am, a designer with a broken project and a fallen dream. It doesn't make me unhappy that I let it go, my life is great and I'm doing a lot of other things which bring me much enjoyment. I'm studying to become a professional Graphic Designer, I have a girlfriend of 5 months, I have a good job and good friends. I do feel that I let the community down, and I apologize for that. I was hoping to give most of the resources over to a project that I know would use them well, but I've had difficulties connecting even with those people who I would give them to. So I've decided to make my leftover materials available to the public. You can use them in any way you see fit, as long as you leave credit to my name. You won't find my work for unreleased projects that are still active in there. I will uphold my commitment to the authors of their respective projects. My hope is that these projects do eventually get released, and some of my best work can be seen. I offer no support for these resources, so please do not contact me about them. They are provided as-is.

Thus ends my involvement with Doom and the community? I can't answer that. For sure I won't be joining anything big anytime soon. I still float around and see what's going on, so it's not like I'm leaving and that's the end of me. But I do want to make a formal thank you to those who have made me feel like I was truly part of a community: Nick "NiGHTMARE" Baker, Jim Bentler, Edmundo Bordeu, Brad "Carnevil" Carney, Rick "Wildman" Clark, Boris "Tarin" Iwanski, Christian "Ebola" Käll, Lee Killough, Joel Murdoch, Andrew "Linguica" Stine, and all that have given their support.

Doom.

It will never die.

-Michael "Risen" Niggel