Master of Space

One of the things you don't see discussed much when it comes to what made Doom so great, and something I've never really hit upon myself in all my flailing attempts at distilling what made original Doom (especially episode 1) so awesome is the idea of how important the shapes and sizes of the spaces you move through in Doom are. John Romero, in my opinion, was the absolute master of this, and I think it is a big reason why Doom's episode 1 was so damn good and it's why I still prefer smaller scale wads to big operatic battlefields. 

If you play through E1M5, for instance, you'll see just how small the spaces actually are, yet they never feel tight or scrinched.  This is the brilliance of episode 1. Yet, you'll be hard pressed to find Romero ever talk about this important aspect of his episode 1 development process. Yet, I did catch a few second gem of him describing just this element in that video I keep spamming in the "what I just found out about doom" thread, though it seems to get glossed over/interrupted before Romero finishes expressing his thoughts on the topic:

The line level design process is an iterative play design process where I start building a level and I play it immediately and I feel the space that I'm moving through and do I like the way it looks and is it the right length of movement space; do I like the amount ... [gets interrupted]. So what I do is I keep on creating the level and I run it and I keep playing it and I just tweak it constantly over and over. So each of these levels, by the time I'm done making it, I've played the level a thousand times. And I go through the whole level. While I was making the level I don't think I start in the middle to test half the level. It was a flow. How does this feel for a player who just died and started this level, is it doable [from a pistol start].

I guess we could play a game of try to finish Romero's sentence. What do you think Romero was going to say before he engaged in friendly fire?: "The line level design process is an iterative play design process where I start building a level and I play it immediately and I feel the space that I'm moving through and do I like the way it looks and is it the right length of movement space, do I like the amount ..."

Anyway, the next time I make a single player map or try to start a community project I am going to focus on this little nugget of genius from Mr. Romero during my design process.

Size and scale are important, and testing a map as many times as Romero did will surely let you know exactly what your scale is going to be. Is my map too large? Is it too small in places? A good practice is to also bounce between these two ideas throughout your level and not stay locked on one mindset for too long.