Live podcast interview with John Romero. Links are up!

[Revae]

7 hours ago, Bridgeburner56 said:

(along with a Quake pack in the future). Super cool.

Found it interesting that he's using AD as a bar to shoot for. I just started my first real quake map a few weeks ago, and as easy as trenchbroom makes it, that seems like a tall order. Some of those maps are art. You could hang them in a museum.

Looking forward to it. Sigil was fun.

[Diabolución]

Will there be thirty-two levels by him? A one-man made megawad featuring 32 levels by him? Hell yes!

Edited July 4, 2021 by Diabolución

[Diabolución]

 

John Romero, the fucking killing machine amongst the fucking killing machines.

[Bridgeburner56]

11 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Sigil 2? Hell yes! However few or many maps it is, I’m super keen!

Romero confirmed a full 32 maps as hard as he can make them

[TheGreenZap]

I just listened to the entire interview and found it extremely  interesting. The reveal that there will be a SIGIL II is soooo awesome!

 

Romero was so genuinely nice and was engaged in the questions and still seems very happy to discuss Doom, which made me very happy. 
 

Great job on this @Bridgeburner56!

 

 

[Rytrik]

Excellent podcast @Bridgeburner56. Thank you for your time and effort putting this together. Cheers!

[Gifty]

9 hours ago, Xeogred said:

He said the full 32!

 

*face melts off and gurgles down the drain*

 

Wow, that is unbelievably exciting.

[Kristian Nebula]

HELL YEAH :)

[Bridgeburner56]

Podcast is up!
https://inthekeep.com/burning-bridges-with-bridgeburner-06-john-romero-on-the-art-of-level-design/

And the edited video on the tube of you

 

 

[Gifty]

That was great! Super fun interview, and still can't believe we're getting a full 32 maps of Doom II Romero. Just fantastic stuff!

[Lüt]

Well done, not many people get such an iconic guest by their 6th podcast.

 

A few points of interest related to the level design topic:

 

- I'm much the same as you two in that I almost never block out a level, but rather design it incrementally. The thing I always find is, scenes evolve as they're being constructed. Maybe there's a person out there who can mentally picture every vertex and line exactly where it should be before they start designing, but it sure isn't me, and it doesn't sound like it's you guys either.

 

Often in large scenes, but even in small scenes, design ideas come to me in a progressive chain rather than a massive cluster, and designing one element of a scene always gives me ideas for further elements - ideas I never would have had if I hadn't started designing the scene in the first place.

 

And a lot of them are related to function and progression. Like, once a core design is laid out, I'll look at a corner and think, "You know what would fit really good there? A door." Or I'll look a part of the floor and think, "You know what would be cool, is if this lowered into a staircase that reveals an underground passage." And as soon as that happens, there goes my blocked out level.

 

That said, I don't always build in sequence. A lot of times I design a number of stand-alone scenes, then deal with connecting them later, so that's one area where I differ from Romero. I do, however, have a habit of re-testing the entire map every time I change one little thing. Some say it's a bad habit, but if it works for Romero, then it's fine by me.

 

- Romero talked briefly about how they had trouble designing levels at the early stages of Doom's development because no reference for such advanced game technology existed back then. I first heard him mention this in the Doom postmortem presentation, but now that you paired it with Quake's development, it suddenly made me wonder if they had a similar reference problem for that game.

 

I know he said it took about a year before they started designing the levels that would make it into the final product, but what I'm thinking is this: it makes sense that there was no easily adaptable reference for Doom's design, but couldn't some of that also be due to the limits of Doom's engine, rather than its advancements? For example, a lot of the 2D game design of the time dealt with multiple layers stacked on the "Z axis" regardless of side-view or top-down or three-quarters perspective, so there would have been no chance of adapting that to Doom's 1-floor 1-ceiling no-slope limit.

 

However, Quake did away with that limit entirely, thereby creating something of a reference dichotomy. On one hand, you'd think that reference material for Quake would be similarly scarce to Doom... if you look solely at other FPS games. It's another similarly huge leap forward in game technology, so it should be another similarly blank reference slate, right? But on the other hand, those same advancements in game technology provided significantly greater design possibilties, thus opening significantly greater reference possibilities, whether from other genres of game design or from genuine real life architecture. So whereas Doom came with a long list of things that couldn't be adapted to its limited technology, Quake now allowed the team to look at all genres of 2D games and say, "Yeah we can do 3D versions of all of that," or to look at actual buildings and say, "Yep we can recreate those entirely."

 

So if I'd been able to catch the live stream, that's probably what I would have asked - if the Quake engine advancements made it harder or easier to find design references compared to Doom.

 

(I rewrote this part so many times, and I'm still not sure it makes sense, but that's as good as I can get it for now.)

 

- I was a little surprised to hear he's not a big fan of optional content, but I suppose his levels bear out proof of that. Personally, I've come to highly appreciate things like secrets that are a whole new section of the map and not just a little closet, or large side-areas dedicated to specific powerups that are helpful but not necessary. I guess I see it as a mapper going above and beyond the minimum requirements, whereas apparently Romero interprets it as breaking the scope of the level. Still, I like his comments about reusing existing space, and revealing new things that were actually there all along, both of which are other design concepts that I highly appreciate seeing done well.

 

- Lastly, super hyped about the Sigil 2 announcement. Admittedly, I'm nearly as late to playing Sigil as you were, but even without that, Romero's Doom 2 maps were always among my favorite maps of the game, and a new full 32-level set from him is some of the best Doom news I've heard all year.

 

Anyway, there was a lot of other interesting and informative stuff on the podcast that made it an all-around good listen, so thanks to both of you for making this happen, it was a really enjoyable presentation.

[Mystic 256]

Will there be deathmatch areas outside the main map in Sigil 2 too?