MyHouse.wad

[NonniR]

Brilliant work for your friend. Really well done with lots of Doomcute. Well done!

 

Spoiler

Holy fuck, this map is legit one of the scariest things I have played aside from Silent Hill 2&3. The things you fight, the shifting realities, the soundtrack fucking with you, the sheer depth of the map is just terrifying.

 

Not only one of the best maps I have played but genuinely one of the best gaming experiences I can think of. It just goes so far beyond your expectations that it's just mindblowing. Then you have the diary with it and all the other extra details and wow, just amazing work all around.

 

And I have barely scratched the surface of how deep it goes according to just the first page of comments here, so I will be searching for myself for quite some time!

 

Edited March 16, 2023 by NonniR

[MrNuclearMonster]

Loved MyHouse.pk3/wad, went through on stream without reading any spoilers and enjoyed it so much. Didn't realize until ...

Spoiler

... chatting about it with friends that the discord notification sounds were from the level. One of them during my stream was "real' when a friend sent me a message to mess with me, which just made the fake one seem more real. This map is an absolute delight of design and I'm not sure if "terror" is the right emotion, but it's something like that at times. Just now I've read through the rest of the spoilers in here and I'm so glad there is more to see in the map that I didn't spoil on stream. When I write about this map to try and get others to try it, I wasn't (and I'm still not) sure how to frame it to make it enticing enough for people to get started without spoiling the twist more than you have to... That's maybe the worst part about MyHouse, there's hardly any way to get people to play without cluing them in that there is more than meets the eye.

 

Edited March 16, 2023 by MrNuclearMonster

[Jimmy]

57 minutes ago, MrNuclearMonster said:

Loved MyHouse.pk3/wad, went through on stream without reading any spoilers and enjoyed it so much. Didn't realize until ...

  Hide contents

... chatting about it with friends that the discord notification sounds were from the level. One of them during my stream was "real' when a friend sent me a message to mess with me, which just made the fake one seem more real. This map is an absolute delight of design and I'm not sure if "terror" is the right emotion, but it's something like that at times. Just now I've read through the rest of the spoilers in here and I'm so glad there is more to see in the map that I didn't spoil on stream. When I write about this map to try and get others to try it, I wasn't (and I'm still not) sure how to frame it to make it enticing enough for people to get started without spoiling the twist more than you have to... That's maybe the worst part about MyHouse, there's hardly any way to get people to play without cluing them in that there is more than meets the eye.

 

 

When I've shared this map with people, I've basically said "a lot of people are talking about this". That by itself helps to keep interest rolling.

[indigotyrian]

what the fuck man

 

Spoiler

I'm still reeling from playing this. I think I've spent more time at this point just sitting here thinking about this than I did actually playing it. There's that much to take in.

 

The different "layers" to the house, from the simple first iteration with the sliding doors to the next bit with swinging doors to the goddamn house fire and everything past is incredible. Echoes and echoes upon itself. I've apparently only scratched the surface of this map but I've already seen so much.

 

Read the journal and look at the photos that come with the Google Drive, but only after playing the map. They're every part of the experience as the map is. Further context, further framing. Answers? Not quite.

 

Eevee said this elsewhere but it's something that is at once an utterly radical departure from standard Doom but also can only exist within Doom itself. There is a grammar here that the map speaks in that can only be truly understood by those conversational in Doom wads. If one were to ask me to justify the position that level design is truly an art form unto itself, this map would be a primary argument.

 

The first ending where you're left with a blank lot left me with an emptiness I'm still struggling to overcome. My own fledgling project feels insignificant in comparison. My entire sense of self feels incomprehensibly small. This is going to stick with me. This is going to stick with everyone.

 

Who the fuck is Veddge, really?

 

Edited March 17, 2023 by segfault

[Kyka]

2 hours ago, segfault said:

Who the fuck is Veddge, really?

 

 

The only possible explanation:

 

 

Edited March 17, 2023 by Kyka

[Serathis]

You cheeky MFer going to get at least one Caco for this.

[Biz!]

Maps like these make the Doom Community real special to me, people paying tribute to passed friends, you don't see that often, especially with a near 30 year old videogame.

Keep on Rocking, Tom would appreciate this.

[LSC Lasico]

[Eevee]

14 hours ago, segfault said:

 

  Hide contents

Eevee said this elsewhere but it's something that is at once an utterly radical departure from standard Doom but also can only exist within Doom itself. There is a grammar here that the map speaks in that can only be truly understood by those conversational in Doom wads. If one were to ask me to justify the position that level design is truly an art form unto itself, this map would be a primary argument.

 

 

to expand on this:

 

Spoiler

i love how much this is a Doom thing, and only a Doom thing.  you could try to recreate it in some other engine, but a huge chunk of what it is would be lost.

 

i mean right from the beginning, "my house" is among the oldest genres we've got.  the earliest house wad i see on idgames is from june 1994 — four months before doom 2 was even released!  and even if you're not aware of it, i think anyone with any exposure to doom can intuit why it's an appealing thing to do: doom is a relatively accessible way to slap together a 3d space, and it (well, moreso doom 2) comes with textures and mechanisms that work well for building residential spaces.  the result will always be a slightly strange artifact that straddles both the familiar textures and chunkiness of doom, and the ironically unfamiliar echoes of someone else's personal space.  punctuated of course by doomguy's incredibly goofy size and physics.

 

i actually love that this changes the camera height (41 to 54 iirc?), something i once did less conservatively, because not only does it make the house feel more sensible, but it makes underhalls feel really weird.  on my first run through underhalls i actually thought it might be the beta version of the level from romero's dump, because everything about it felt off — but no, there is no MAP02 in the pk3 at all.  it's stock underhalls, rendered unsettling simply by making doomguy 20% taller.

 

and the way this uses underhalls without touching it is staggering.  i only played through underhalls because it felt off, which made me wonder if the level would do something strange later on — otherwise i don't know how i ever would've found out that it loops back to the house.  i didn't find the chainsaw in the garage, either, so carrying a full stack of shells back from underhalls helped a hell of a lot.

 

but i think the single most genius thing about that is hiding the super shotgun in stock underhalls.  not in the level at all, but in a different level, a stock level, and the most famous place to get the super shotgun in the whole game.  you already know it's there.  just go get it.

 

(and then mirror underhalls!  talk about dedication to the bit)

 

but you can only appreciate a riff on underhalls if you understand what underhalls means, if you know that a wad replaces individual maps rather than defining a new set of them, if you're used to treating the opening shot of underhalls as interchangeable with the cast roll.  much like you can only appreciate a riff on Running From Evil if you understand its role, if you're used to having it play in the background of a single level wad, especially from the same era that brought us a glut of house wads because there were fewer musicians and fewer tracks available and who even knows what a MUS is.

 

the trickiest part of the design is probably coaxing the player into not exiting immediately.  lotsa folks have commented on the soul sphere, but i actually didn't notice it the first time around — i kept looking simply because of the monster count, because i expect levels to be designed to be 100%able.  (ironically, i don't think this one is, not even close.)  that's not even an original doom feature, it's a feature fans came up with to make it easier to 100% levels, but it's one everyone seems to take for granted now.  and while i can't be sure how deliberate it was, i know that the designer could absolutely have obscured the true monster count if they'd wanted to — the majority of the monsters are already spawned by script.

 

(i have a soft spot in my heart for "the exit is always available" — i think it's a really interesting premise and invites some great questions about what the real goal of a game is, what the player must do vs what the player wants to do.  that especially comes up in doom, where uv-max is almost taken for granted as the normal way to play, where players get frustrated by secrets that are difficult to get saveless or monsters that are well out of the way, and so maps are generally designed around that expectation.  simply grabbing the blue keycard and exiting within two minutes is a perfectly valid way to complete this level, but it doesn't complete the experience, the same way exiting a normal level without uv-maxing doesn't complete that experience.  and the level is aware of this and even nods to it, since reaching the "real" ending means you can't actually exit at all.  which is itself a common trick to end a vanilla-compatible mapset without dumping you in the next vanilla level!)

 

even the reveals of the various houses make for a strange gradient across one's understanding of mapping

"ah, all this vanilla doomcute" → "oh the doors swing now, i guess that's why this is zdoom" → "wait is this room over room" → "how the fuck does this work"

"great use of stock textures" → "is this one edited?" → "oh we are just somewhere else now"

"ah, D_RUNNIN, my old friend" → "did it just skip a note?" → "what the fuck"

 

oh yeah, fun fact: aside from the house and both versions of underhalls, every level's music is changed to D_RUNNIN

 

but yeah.  what a fabulous tribute to doom culture.  the dev team thought of everything, as they say, right down to the cheat codes.

 

this is my favorite kind of gzdoom project, too.  i feel like a lot of gzdoom stuff either adds in so many features that the game starts to become something else, or explicitly seeks to create a different game entirely.  myhouse uses practically every feature gzdoom has, but with remarkable restraint (for what it is), and the end result still feels like doom.  i know it's not because i'm aware of doom's original limitations, but a non-euclidean locker room maze doesn't play all that differently from the e1m6 maze.  some of the monsters are new, but they're creepy in a familiar way.  the shadow vile reveal hearkens back to the original arch-vile reveal.  a door that appears from nowhere has the same vibe as a walkover line before i knew what a walkover line was.  it all feels like doom in the way doom originally felt like doom: mysterious, magical, and haunting.

 

i know this is pretty much all obvious to anyone who's enough of a doom nerd to be reading doomworld, but it's all struck me so hard that i just needed to write it down

[thestarrover]

An absolute masterpiece of originality, gameplay, atmosphere.

[Eevee]

i think this is a map that is best experienced by letting it unfold.  but i've watched several people either not realize there was more to do, or post "cool map, had to check doomwiki though" which is unfortunate since even the table of contents on that article kind of spoils everything.

 

to that end i've written a gradually-unfolding list of tips that are hopefully enough to gently prod most players along the right path...  or at least into realizing there is more path to tread.

[Scuba Steve]

It's cryptic and unintuitive (what?!), but I'd also recommend that normies play on 'nightmare' difficulty; it drastically reduces the challenge of the map.

[TJG1289]

1 hour ago, Eevee said:

to that end i've written a gradually-unfolding list of tips that are hopefully enough to gently prod most players along the right path...  or at least into realizing there is more path to tread.

 

This was a good idea! Should be really useful for any new players who want some help, but not everything spoiled. One correction:

Spoiler

For the grave, you don't need the game controller from the gas station. In fact, that was the only artifact I didn't have. I followed what Finnks said in their post and got the grave: Get enough artifacts to show the clue, go back to the house from the airplane (burned the house down to do this), and lower the fence spot. I also in a different playthrough where I got the empty house ending tried to open the fence to no avail, but I did noclip into it. I must have been at the right exact spot for the transition, cause when I tried to noclip back out, I fell into the Backrooms. 

 

[Eevee]

47 minutes ago, TJG1289 said:

This was a good idea! Should be really useful for any new players who want some help, but not everything spoiled. One correction: [...]

 

ah, you're right—

 

Spoiler

i hadn't actually been here and was going by the wiki article.  it's actually implemented as a lock (with an empty message for not having the right keys), where the keys are just the eight normal-house items.  so as soon as you have those, you can do it

 

edit: i also stumbled upon something interesting:

 

Spoiler

in a map editor i see a mirror version of the empty lot.  but there's no way to get directly from the mirror world to the airport, nor are there mirrored empty/overgrown houses.  i also don't see any map spots, teleport destinations, or portal target lines in the mirror lot.  so it doesn't seem possible to get here.

 

it looks about how you'd expect, save for the front door hanging in midair:

 

 

you can get here with the console — warp -5760 -1280

 

the exit leads to mirror underhalls, but it's not set up correctly so you end up in the backrooms of that map.  same thing happens if you warp directly to it

 

Edited March 18, 2023 by Eevee

[mouldy]

this is a work of art.

[riktoi]

Excellent showcase of creativity and visual storytelling. You can tell it's very personal, and it touches on several complex emotions. Just a general pleasure to look around the areas as well.

[Paragon_of_Laziness]

Long time lurker here, just wanted to say that I really appreciate this map. Going through it was an entire journey.

[ENEMY!!!]

I also noticed that at least a few of Amuscaria's recently released Hell-Forged 2 resources appeared in this WAD to good effect.  I was impressed with them when I tried them out upon release, it's good to see them already featuring in new releases so soon after they were released.

[PowerPak]

Hi, I'm wondering if I can get some help?

 

Spoiler

I've beaten the level, all endings, everything is golden. Huge props to the wizard who made this.

 

However I really want to explore the concrete labyrinth that appears in the closet, the one that's not always there. Only I've no idea how to practically do so. Going into the closet surrounds me in darkness and it seems impossible to navigate as I can't even tell where walls are. It's all just black. I can sort of work out where walls are by fixing my view in place and judging by the weapon bob and wall humping, but it doesn't feel like I'm doing it right.

 

Others in this thread have talked about exploring it and finding things, and I'd like to do so too but... how? Surely I'm doing something wrong here. 

 

Level is absolutely fantastic. Made me go through a lot. 

[Scuba Steve]

You could check the display options for the hardware renderer in the settings menu. On my monitor, I was able to navigate through the dim light without much trouble, but I'm guessing everyone's monitor settings are different. You could try adjusting the brightness or gama settings and see what helps. It looks like the map is set to 'dark' for rendering style, so I'm not sure if zdoom let's you change that or not.

[PowerPak]

30 minutes ago, Scuba Steve said:

You could check the display options for the hardware renderer in the settings menu. On my monitor, I was able to navigate through the dim light without much trouble, but I'm guessing everyone's monitor settings are different. You could try adjusting the brightness or gama settings and see what helps. It looks like the map is set to 'dark' for rendering style, so I'm not sure if zdoom let's you change that or not.

Ah, dug around in the settings and found that I had Tonemap turned on in Postprocessing. I don't remember turning that on, but I likely did it a while ago and forgot. I do love crushed colours in my shooters. Thank you for the prompt. 

[Groplaw]

On 3/17/2023 at 1:41 PM, Eevee said:

 

to expand on this:

 

  Hide contents

i love how much this is a Doom thing, and only a Doom thing.  you could try to recreate it in some other engine, but a huge chunk of what it is would be lost.

 

i mean right from the beginning, "my house" is among the oldest genres we've got.  the earliest house wad i see on idgames is from june 1994 — four months before doom 2 was even released!  and even if you're not aware of it, i think anyone with any exposure to doom can intuit why it's an appealing thing to do: doom is a relatively accessible way to slap together a 3d space, and it (well, moreso doom 2) comes with textures and mechanisms that work well for building residential spaces.  the result will always be a slightly strange artifact that straddles both the familiar textures and chunkiness of doom, and the ironically unfamiliar echoes of someone else's personal space.  punctuated of course by doomguy's incredibly goofy size and physics.

 

i actually love that this changes the camera height (41 to 54 iirc?), something i once did less conservatively, because not only does it make the house feel more sensible, but it makes underhalls feel really weird.  on my first run through underhalls i actually thought it might be the beta version of the level from romero's dump, because everything about it felt off — but no, there is no MAP02 in the pk3 at all.  it's stock underhalls, rendered unsettling simply by making doomguy 20% taller.

 

and the way this uses underhalls without touching it is staggering.  i only played through underhalls because it felt off, which made me wonder if the level would do something strange later on — otherwise i don't know how i ever would've found out that it loops back to the house.  i didn't find the chainsaw in the garage, either, so carrying a full stack of shells back from underhalls helped a hell of a lot.

 

but i think the single most genius thing about that is hiding the super shotgun in stock underhalls.  not in the level at all, but in a different level, a stock level, and the most famous place to get the super shotgun in the whole game.  you already know it's there.  just go get it.

 

(and then mirror underhalls!  talk about dedication to the bit)

 

but you can only appreciate a riff on underhalls if you understand what underhalls means, if you know that a wad replaces individual maps rather than defining a new set of them, if you're used to treating the opening shot of underhalls as interchangeable with the cast roll.  much like you can only appreciate a riff on Running From Evil if you understand its role, if you're used to having it play in the background of a single level wad, especially from the same era that brought us a glut of house wads because there were fewer musicians and fewer tracks available and who even knows what a MUS is.

 

the trickiest part of the design is probably coaxing the player into not exiting immediately.  lotsa folks have commented on the soul sphere, but i actually didn't notice it the first time around — i kept looking simply because of the monster count, because i expect levels to be designed to be 100%able.  (ironically, i don't think this one is, not even close.)  that's not even an original doom feature, it's a feature fans came up with to make it easier to 100% levels, but it's one everyone seems to take for granted now.  and while i can't be sure how deliberate it was, i know that the designer could absolutely have obscured the true monster count if they'd wanted to — the majority of the monsters are already spawned by script.

 

(i have a soft spot in my heart for "the exit is always available" — i think it's a really interesting premise and invites some great questions about what the real goal of a game is, what the player must do vs what the player wants to do.  that especially comes up in doom, where uv-max is almost taken for granted as the normal way to play, where players get frustrated by secrets that are difficult to get saveless or monsters that are well out of the way, and so maps are generally designed around that expectation.  simply grabbing the blue keycard and exiting within two minutes is a perfectly valid way to complete this level, but it doesn't complete the experience, the same way exiting a normal level without uv-maxing doesn't complete that experience.  and the level is aware of this and even nods to it, since reaching the "real" ending means you can't actually exit at all.  which is itself a common trick to end a vanilla-compatible mapset without dumping you in the next vanilla level!)

 

even the reveals of the various houses make for a strange gradient across one's understanding of mapping

"ah, all this vanilla doomcute" → "oh the doors swing now, i guess that's why this is zdoom" → "wait is this room over room" → "how the fuck does this work"

"great use of stock textures" → "is this one edited?" → "oh we are just somewhere else now"

"ah, D_RUNNIN, my old friend" → "did it just skip a note?" → "what the fuck"

 

oh yeah, fun fact: aside from the house and both versions of underhalls, every level's music is changed to D_RUNNIN

 

but yeah.  what a fabulous tribute to doom culture.  the dev team thought of everything, as they say, right down to the cheat codes.

 

this is my favorite kind of gzdoom project, too.  i feel like a lot of gzdoom stuff either adds in so many features that the game starts to become something else, or explicitly seeks to create a different game entirely.  myhouse uses practically every feature gzdoom has, but with remarkable restraint (for what it is), and the end result still feels like doom.  i know it's not because i'm aware of doom's original limitations, but a non-euclidean locker room maze doesn't play all that differently from the e1m6 maze.  some of the monsters are new, but they're creepy in a familiar way.  the shadow vile reveal hearkens back to the original arch-vile reveal.  a door that appears from nowhere has the same vibe as a walkover line before i knew what a walkover line was.  it all feels like doom in the way doom originally felt like doom: mysterious, magical, and haunting.

 

i know this is pretty much all obvious to anyone who's enough of a doom nerd to be reading doomworld, but it's all struck me so hard that i just needed to write it down

 

 

This is so well put.  There was another aspect of it this post really made me think about, but maybe I'm just reading tea leaves.

 

Spoiler

When you fight Shrek, it works as a surreal thing, a creepy thing, a sort of unexpected and even a bit funny thing.  A childhood image of something happy coming to life and threatening you, etc.  

 

At the same time though, thinking about what you wrote, this also seems VERY steeped in being "Doom", as its almost an extension of and comment on the Doom trope of "oh ho ho, I added some crappy hand drawn sprites of simpsons characters!"  "of barney the dinosaur!"  "of elmo!" etc, that was so common in the 90's.

 

Maybe I'm overthinking it, but your post really made me see that part in a new light. 

Edited March 19, 2023 by Groplaw

[Walter confetti]

This is one of the best "my house" type of wad, i dare to say one of the best experience i had with Doom in general, a very unique way to put a unexpected turn on your typical adventure.

Spoiler

Stuck in the burned house segment and i didn't find a way to pass this part. Everything is impressive, from the just basic remake of his friend house, to the slightly changed area with swinging doors to the creepy backrooms\dark stairs section.

 

[Eevee]

15 hours ago, Groplaw said:

This is so well put.  There was another aspect of it this post really made me think about, but maybe I'm just reading tea leaves.

 

  Hide contents

When you fight Shrek, it works as a surreal thing, a creepy thing, a sort of unexpected and even a bit funny thing.  A childhood image of something happy coming to life and threatening you, etc.  

 

At the same time though, thinking about what you wrote, this also seems VERY steeped in being "Doom", as its almost an extension of and comment on the Doom trope of "oh ho ho, I added some crappy hand drawn sprites of simpsons characters!"  "of barney the dinosaur!"  "of elmo!" etc, that was so common in the 90's.

 

Maybe I'm overthinking it, but your post really made me see that part in a new light. 

 

no, i think you're right—

 

Spoiler

other places like the gas station are also a familiar relic of that time, basically a direct riff on Doom City

 

Edited March 20, 2023 by Eevee
too much whitespace

[Kyka]

Honestly, this level is like using a public phone box, and all I expected to find in said phone box is, well, a phone. And probably some graffiti. And then other people start telling you about how they used that phone box, and how they loved the spa, and the sauna, and the movie room, and the underground nightclub, and the wine tasting room, and how the medieval weapons collection is second to none, and don't forget to see the Holocaust memorial, which of course is on the third floor, just past the X-men training school, where you have a beautiful view of the active volcano, (though currently not active, thankfully,) and how you simply must check out the courtyard with the life-size replica sphinx with the fully restored face, but if you hit the turkish district you have gone too far and might miss it entirely, which would be a shame, especially as just nearby is the aerospace museum, and the caberet club, complete with showgirls, and the helicopter pad on the roof. Just as a quick aside, the child minding centre is near the private mall and the art gallery, for convenience...

 

Helluva phone box, that. 

 

From what people have said, I need to play this map again with the altered version of d_runnin. I'm all curious now, as I don't usually have music going when I am dooming.

 

This level was profound in a way that I don't know how to put into words. Extraordinary. @Eevee put it into words better than I could hope to in their post above. Well done.

 

Edited March 20, 2023 by Kyka

[Pechudin]

Thanks to whoever recommended the House of Leaves as a reading. The WAD has a bunch of familiar notes to the book, as does the accompanied material in the DropBox. Also, the book was released in 2000, and it really seems like the Backrooms genre got a lot of its inspiration from there.

[BouncyTEM]

This has been one of the most life-changing mods i've ever played. No joke.

 

Incredible experience.

[Not Jabba]

MyHouse has joined Ancient Aliens, Lullaby, Eviternity, and a handful of other Doom mods that have gotten a PCGamer article.

[Dominic Tarason]

43 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

MyHouse has joined Ancient Aliens, Lullaby, Eviternity, and a handful of other Doom mods that have gotten a PCGamer article.

 

Written by an incredibly cool and sexy individual, I'm sure.

[HorrorMovieRei]

I have nothing to add. Just wanna say I've been playing this nonstop since yesterday and I've become obsessed with this little project.

Spoiler

As far as I'm concerned this is the best execution of non euclidian architecture/house of leaves'esque enviroments in video game form that I've seen yet.

Very well done

Edited March 20, 2023 by HorrorMovieRei