MyHouse.wad

[Kroc]

I've seen portal trickery, but often it's that -- portal trickery. This wad is not _about_ portal trickery, it's about places, or rather one place but from different (often metaphysical) angles.

 

Edit: Thinking in terms of the repeating architecture, it makes me think that is more about memories of a place, than of people; the plot could be entirely fake decoration on top of a how a home is an anchor point in a world that changes around you.

Edited April 14, 2023 by Kroc : Commentary

[Gradius]

On 4/12/2023 at 11:38 PM, Mr. Alexander said:

I don't think a court of law would uphold a version of the GPL 2.0 that went like this:

Honestly it'd probably be null and void anyway because at least half of the assets are ripped from other commercial releases. Invoking GPL means nothing when you're invoking it over sprite-edits of Duke 3D sprites from someone else's texture pack of someone else's texture pack released twenty actual years ago. None of it's legal anyway, so it probably comes down to whether you're respecting the general wishes of the mod author than some actual legalese applied to a piece of work that is essentially half pirated (albeit in an exceptionally harmless way). I do admire the commitment to House of Leavesitude and just having every part of the experience lie and try to gaslight you at every opportunity. In the words of that one polaroid from Momento: DON'T BELIEVE HIS LIES.

[DavidN]

 

I've started a deep-dive on this incredible piece of Doom work, analyzing how it performs its tricks with clever use of UDMF/GZDoom's features :) (Heavy spoilers, obviously - so don't watch if you haven't played it, or if you want the mystique of the game to be preserved)

[Obsidian Plague]

World's best map of all time, if this doesn't get a cacoward i'm going to be disappointed.

[Thaddeus]

Kinda sad I experienced this through a video I was playing in the background first, but luckily, it was one that didn't find everything. Tearing into the rest of it myself and using this thread to get me in the right direction...what an experience. It's eerie just how often House of Leaves keeps popping up in my life, but I'm not complaining, this time anyway. An absolutely incredible achievement in interactive horror, even beyond the scope of just DOOM mods. Bravo.

[Faux Magician]

Spoiler

I am not entirely sure how deep I should be going into datamining this at this point, but the credits inside the PK3 have some pretty weird capitalization in them. Is anyone else looking into this sort of stuff, and if so where are people talking about this at?

 

[ℂ𝕝𝕦𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣_𝔾𝕦𝕪]

On 3/3/2023 at 7:01 AM, Veddge said:

MyHouse

 

Excited to finally release this tribute map. Last August I lost a good childhood friend of mine and took it pretty hard. When I was visiting my hometown for his funeral, I connected with his parents who shared with me some of his old belongings. Among them was a copy of an old map of his backed up on a 3.5” floppy from high school. Thomas and I were into amateur Doom mapping in the early 00s but I had never seen this map of his prior to uncovering it on one of the old floppy discs. As a way of paying tribute to him and all the great memories we had together, I took the plunge and installed Doom Builder in order to polish up his map and add a few modern amenities just for convenience sake.

 

I haven’t touched an editor in over 15 years so it was quite a surprise to find out how easy mapping has become. I may have gotten a little carried away with these new UDMF features and, as such, the map is designed for GZDoom. From the text file:

 

• Doom 2 - GZDoom, hardware renderer
• 1 map: Not much of a challenge and roughly 10 minutes of play time. All difficulty settings implemented.
• Jumping & crouching disabled, freelook is fine
• Lots of Doomcute!

 

Making maps of your house was all the rage back-in-the-day, but I feel like this is a pretty adorable and detailed tribute to my friend and a great way to share something of him with a community we loved. Miss you, Tom.

 

Download myhouse.wad

 

Screenshots:

  Hide contents

 

awesome

 

[Muleke_Trairao]

OK, this WAD is NOT what I expected. For those that haven't played yet, please do. I don't wanna spoil anything.

I wasn't able to do everything there is to do on the map, but I did reach the exit.

[tarrasqueSorcerer]

20 minutes ago, Muleke_Trairao said:

OK, this WAD is NOT what I expected. For those that haven't played yet, please do. I don't wanna spoil anything.

I wasn't able to do everything there is to do on the map, but I did reach the exit.

If you reached the exit, you have not finished it properly.

[Scuba Steve]

I've heard similar things from others, but I think that's an incorrect way to understand the player experience with myhouse. @Eevee laid out what I think is probably the best way to think about player progression; there is no 'wrong' way to beat the map. If you find yourself experiencing the most common first time blind ending... That's not "improper" just one experience. You could stop there... as probably many of us did, but if you're still curious and want to explore the themes of the map further, then there's an even deeper rabbit hole for the player to explore and contemplate.

[Catpho]

Adding to that, I think one reason why the map managed to attract so many people is because the "cool" stuff is not all that difficult to find. The map, on the surface, indulges in a lot of things that's popularly attracted many complaints as "bad" level design: mandatory unmarked secrets, not one but two honest-to-god mazes, unspecified puzzle "fail conditions", red herrings galore, and so on. It's no surpise most needed a walkthrough to get through the level, and even many of the walkthrough writers reached the solution via collective fact-finding. The thing is, much of that is for further poking. You can already get a decent idea that this is a creative and emotionally impactful map just from the most easily accessible ending. I'd still consider this a great wad even without 60% of the content, even if that missing percentage allows it to reach even further heights. Very abrasive map in certain respects, but a lot of the cool stuff isn't locked behind the demanding design choices.

[Not Jabba]

Yeah, we've been describing the map in terms of a "good ending" and a "bad ending" for convenience and simplicity, but people going into this map for the first time should definitely not view the content through that lens, because that description completely misses the point of playing the map. The "bad ending" of MyHouse is already one of the best maps that has come out this year and a really important part of the full experience, while the "good ending" has the greatest impact if you've already seen the alternatives. If there's such a thing as an "ideal" way to experience this map, it's to reach the easier ending first and find the "good" ending later. The map is designed in such a way that most people will fall into that sequence naturally, which is incredibly good design for a map with so much branching content.

 

 

Edited April 15, 2023 by Not Jabba

[SiFi270]

This may have already been discussed. I tried opening every spoiler on each page and then ctrl-f'ing the relevant term but that got tiring around page 7.

 

Spoiler

Inside the pk3, the credits txt capitalizes random letters. Here's the whole thing:

amuScaria - hELl forged enemiES
perkristian - smooth weapons
revenanT100 - minor sprite fix
thelostrevenenat - textures
espi - textures

mechadoN - box o Skies
ukirO - otex
ralphis - Action doom 2 music
scuba steve - action doom textures
JereseY - sprItes
Kevansevans - zscripting
nash - nasHgore
xaser - dead.air
martYrmax - playtesting
xatrix - redneck raMpage
3D realMs - duke nUkem 3D
monolith - blood

 

And assuming I didn't miss any, here's what the capital letters spell:

SELESTNSOAJYIKHYMMU

 

If you count the D in both instances of "3D" the ending changes from MMU to MDMUD, but I don't know if they're really supposed to count. Either way, it doesn't mean anything spelled backwards, so my theories are:

-It's an anagram I'm too dumb and/or lazy to solve

--It's another, more complicated kind of letter puzzle

-It's a House of Leaves thing that flies right over the heads of philistines like myself

-It's just there to make people who notice it get even more paranoid and wonder if there's even more stuff they're missing

 

Does anyone else have any thoughts? Come to think of it, I don't think any Action Doom 2 music actually appears, not even inside the .pk3. It's also a little strange how esselfortium's contribution isn't acknowleged.

 

[Not Jabba]

2 minutes ago, SiFi270 said:

This may have already been discussed. I tried opening every spoiler on each page and then ctrl-f'ing the relevant term but that got tiring around page 7.

 

  Hide contents

 

And assuming I didn't miss any, here's what the capital letters spell:

SELESTNSOAJYIKHYMMU

 

 

Spoiler

Just looking at it, I can tell that the word "MyHouse" could appear in it if it were an anagram, so that might be worth pursuing.

 

I haven't had any luck with an anagram generator, but for convenience, here's the letter jumble with "MyHouse" pulled out:

MYHOUSE LESTNSAJYIKM

 

[kevansevans]

I like to interpret all the endings as canon, opposed to levels of desirability. Sometimes in life, you go around your house, do your chores, eat your food, count the many blessings you have, and then you leave for the day without a single thought.

 

Spoiler

Then, one day in your life, you may be trying to enjoy a vacation after a stressful month or two, some particularly bad few months that makes it hard to really appreciate the time off, and you feel like you could just pull the curtains back and find its facade.

 

Other times you may have strong moments of Deja Vu, where nothing seems right, backwards even, but eventually you make it back and things align once more. Not perfectly, you know in the back of your mind things are off now, it can't be undone, but not a whole uprooting of your life.

 

One day, you experience a disaster. You've lost everything. An electrical problem of some sort, investigators concluded there was no foul play. The sheer panic moving you through, and the surrealism of dealing with an unfamiliar new home. Some too big, some too small. You visit the wreckage for one last time, bringing back vivid memories of when you first bought the land.

 

Eventually, you have a day of true peace. You've found solace in the once you love, carving initials into inconspicuous places. In these moments, you know with full clarity that whatever life can throw, you can move on and grow.

 

[Steve D]

I'm still looking for time to fully explore all the possibilities of MyHouse, but for me, more than anything else, this map is an emotional experience. I appreciate all the work put in to make this, in some ways, a sort of Blair Witch Project for Doom. The whole thing with the "found item" -- the deceased friend's map -- the journal showing the mental and emotional challenges of designing the map, the weird, super-detailed dreams, the idea that the map is designing itself, is to me a delightful way to bring horror movie trappings into Doom, and even though I never encountered any of this storytelling until much later, it still has an impact because I'm not finished with the map yet. Also, killing the bad doggo and hearing the death-yelp of what turned out to be the good doggo, too, touched me. The brilliant transformations from one version of the house into another, the cool airport, the brutalist area in general, the destroyed house -- it's just fun, fun, fun from beginning to end. And if nothing else, one has to admire the craft that went into all this, and the amount of time and study it must have taken. In every imaginable way, this is a towering achievement.

 

And let's face it, even if it's considered a "bad" ending, the Navidson Realty conclusion is fucking hilarious, so it's not a bad ending at all. This kind of playfulness is rare, and I appreciate it. :)

[lavaimp]

17 hours ago, DavidN said:

 

I've started a deep-dive on this incredible piece of Doom work, analyzing how it performs its tricks with clever use of UDMF/GZDoom's features :) (Heavy spoilers, obviously - so don't watch if you haven't played it, or if you want the mystique of the game to be preserved)

 

Honestly watching this so far is really interesting. I recently watched a playthrough of the wad (and idk if i can play it myself due to the exisitential dread i felt just watching it), so it's nice to know how all of it works in a sense.

 

As for my opinion of the pk3 itself, i enjoy it and the concepts in it...

personally though,

Spoiler

I wish that it took less from backrooms / liminal style horror. Despite all of that being somewhat creepy to me in the end, I guess I was a little bit disappointed when it delved into that over continuing the disturbing themes within the house map itself. The constant changing to become more and more distorted in a way that is unnerving and subtle was always something that as a favorite of mine.

 

[MugMonster]

On 4/13/2023 at 4:45 PM, Technoturnovers said:

Created an account here just to comment on this map. All I can say is, holy SHIT, it has been a while since a game (or really any media, for that matter) mindfucked me QUITE this hard. The last game like that for me was Superliminal, but Superliminal isn't really a horror game, and it definitely doesn't fucking gaslight the player as hard as this map does. If this map isn't a fucking shoe-in to headline this year's Cacowards, then I have no fucking clue what even could be. It also nearly lit my laptop on fire because of all of the fuckin portals, but I don't even care, totally worth it.

Some MINOR criticism:

  Reveal hidden contents

The game's creepy and confusing ambiance and gameplay kind of dampens down a lot once you go through the bonfire in the in the Mirror Gas Station. Getting chased around by a nightmare Arch-vile would definitely be scary as shit for someone newer to Doom (or Joel xd), but for pretty much anyone who's played Plutonia like me it's more of an annoyance than anything else. And after that, all of the enemy encounters are standard slaughtermap fare set in open areas with vanilla demons, both in the normal House and when returning to the normal Gas Station; run around to provoke infighting, BFG to thin the herd, rocket launcher to pick off the stragglers, etc etc. And where the lack of a Super Shotgun enhanced the monster encounters before, now it just really drags shit out, and it's even worse if you DON'T find either the secret BFG or Plasma Rifle.

 

HOWEVER.... none of that REALLY matters, because literally everything UP to that point is fucking amazing, full stop. And the slow ending is only really disappointing because of the massive bar that the map set for itself in the first place- like, the slaughtermappy stuff isn't bad or anything, it's just not anything really special.

Also, the polyobject doors keep slamming me in the face and whatnot, which is some real Mappy shit if I'm being honest and made me giggle at some points where I really shouldn't have, lol.

 

Spoiler

I can certainly understand not really enjoying the slaughter section, I eventually gave up on trying to get past it without cheats myself, but I don't think it's necessarily completely out of place... the map homages several things that are specific to the legacy of Doom mapping, including the concept of myhouse wads itself and the old 90s tradition of throwing in Barney or the Simpsons into a map with the Shrek fight, so having an homage to slaughter maps to go out on makes sense on at least some level

 

[mr. Solace]

quicky created an account to express my thoughts on this masterpiece

 

Spoiler

I really can only compare this WAD to Silent Hill 2. recent loss of a loved one, short term memory loss from shock, memory alteration/unreliable narrator, the WAD having a will of it's own with the ability to contort into whatever it wants to be without external input like the town of Silent Hill.

(edit: and both entities use an "object" of sorts to convey their will to you, i don't know better words to describe this. stone me for this language barrier lol)

 

Both feature an "unreliable" narrator who recently lost a loved one for which they both manifested something that represented the said loved ones as a coping mechanism. for James, it's Maria, reflecting James' needs and repressed memories and desires. in this regard, it's the friend's house with all the memories and repressed memories manifesting along with it. I suppose the artifacts themselves tell a story that connect the two people together from childhood to adulthood.

 

it's such an interesting take too because I always called Silent Hill 2 an in-universe ARG like, how the game goes on the rails to be "Just another one of those survival horror games" because the first one was just that, a survival horror game with not such a deep pool of lore. The game takes a few couple of hours before slowly delving into a darker story set in the said universe before it pulls the lid off the pot and you find out the events being told are about the protagonist's tragical backstory and an unfortunate death. The game initially drags you into thinking you're the hero coming to save the girl, meanwhile you're being dragged deeper and deeper into this sludge of guilt and unease and at one point the game even outright gives up on itself with the flooded hotel, sort of breaking the fourth wall on how reality is breaking down (i know it represents James' then current mindset) as doors take you all over the place instead of where they should.

 

it's a textbook description of what an ARG should be, and it's executed so well in MyHouse as well with the "it's just a regular house WAD i made using generic DOOM assets out of boredom" and the slow and mystic changes go over your head like the smooth animations and the silently shifting topology around you, which i last saw done this well in the first Layers of Fear game. Doom's familiar graphics make you feel like you're occupying a space that you grew up with, this is why it's such a weird transformation when the midi shifts into breaking itself, or the slow transformation into the memory:entryrrrr song because you can still hear D_Runnin in it here and there. one question i have though is: i don't see people discuss a certain room in the bath house where you go into a half circle tunnel, there is a hallway leading into a room with a pillar in the middle and it loops in circles and it loses the tiles with enough revolutions. is there anything more to this?

so in conclusion, thanks for coming to my ted talk

[TJG1289]

25 minutes ago, mr. Solace said:

i don't see people discuss a certain room in the bath house where you go into a half circle tunnel, there is a hallway leading into a room with a pillar in the middle and it loops in circles and it loses the tiles with enough revolutions. is there anything more to this?

 

That's the entrance from the flooded basement. I saw Vinny's stream and he managed to somehow screw up the transition to the bathhouse and didn't enter the correct way, instead hesitating at the bottom of the stairs which somehow teleported him to the main bath house room. You're supposed to go down the hall to where the yellow door is and go through those rooms, and when you head back towards the main basement room, the halls change to that half-circle tunnel and the bath tiles start showing up. 

[myredhulk]

On 4/14/2023 at 5:33 PM, Nate42 said:

For what its worth, I didn't bother upgrading I played through on 4.8.2. 

I did eventually figure out what the problem was.

In the in-game GZDoom settings, I changed the rendering to doom's software, from hardware acceleration.
This causes many other bugs I found in the map,, including apparently the crashing bug.
I don't know why or how, but there it is.

[mr. Solace]

5 hours ago, TJG1289 said:

 

That's the entrance from the flooded basement. I saw Vinny's stream and he managed to somehow screw up the transition to the bathhouse and didn't enter the correct way, instead hesitating at the bottom of the stairs which somehow teleported him to the main bath house room. You're supposed to go down the hall to where the yellow door is and go through those rooms, and when you head back towards the main basement room, the halls change to that half-circle tunnel and the bath tiles start showing up. 

yeah i watched Vinny too, it was weird like that teleport looked very out of place

[S3M_XM]

I just finished this, and I can say it was an interesting experience.

And also you'll be missed, Thomas.

Edited April 17, 2023 by S3M_XM

[MortisCausaDonatio]

This was the map in my head when i first opened up Doom Builder when I was young. Real life locations with fun gameplay experience

my first map then turned out to be a startan heavy hotel room with a bfg in one of the first room

[Groplaw]

So I was getting a friend to try this, and when I went to go to the google drive to link the file to them, I saw the myhouse.pk3 file was modified yesterady, the 16th.

 

 

Has anyone else seen this?  does anyone know if anything was changed?  It seemed as I remembered it when watching my friend play through it so I assume maybe it was just some small bug fixes?

[Hurricaine Jr.]

First new map I've played in over a year and it just so happens to be inspired by my favorite book. It'll be a long time before something tops this.

[PsychEyeball]

23 hours ago, myredhulk said:

I did eventually figure out what the problem was.

In the in-game GZDoom settings, I changed the rendering to doom's software, from hardware acceleration.
This causes many other bugs I found in the map,, including apparently the crashing bug.
I don't know why or how, but there it is.

The readme file and first post do clearly say you need the hardware renderer to play the map.

 

Always check out the release notes before playing a map to make sure you're using the right settings or source port! Doing this in the future should save you a lot of trouble.

[Bulletproof Pal]

1 hour ago, Groplaw said:

So I was getting a friend to try this, and when I went to go to the google drive to link the file to them, I saw the myhouse.pk3 file was modified yesterady, the 16th.

 

 

Has anyone else seen this?  does anyone know if anything was changed?  It seemed as I remembered it when watching my friend play through it so I assume maybe it was just some small bug fixes?

There are a couple changes here and there that I'm not experienced enough to know the significance of (wedding ring spawn now says "BRIGHT" and the d20 has "+NOGRAVITY" among others), but the only things I personally see of note is sllahrednu no longer has ResetInventory.

 

the actual myhouse.wad file is too big for me to do a diffcheck but there are definitely some changes there, though I'm not sure if I'm comparing it to the original pk3 or the most recent updated one that removed the phonebooth and fixed the tub.

 

That said, both instances of "3D" in the mysteriously-capitalized credits are now "3d" so SiFi270 may be on to something...

[princetontiger]

This map is insane. Wow!

 

EDIT: After looking at the doomwiki article and reading all of these posts, I'm suspicious that this map just "happened"... it looks like an effort by well known mappers to launch something really nice for Doom's 30th anniversary.

 

I mean, who the heck wrote the Doomwiki article so well for a recent wad?? :)

Edited April 17, 2023 by princetontiger

[Not Jabba]

15 minutes ago, princetontiger said:

I mean, who the heck wrote the Doomwiki article so well for a recent wad?? :)

Jimmy. He put it together over a few days when we were all collectively super excited about finding the other endings, and borrowed partly from walkthroughs that I wrote while we were still trying to find everything.