Rebecca Heineman 3DO Doom Interview

[jute]

Here is a great new interview with Rebecca Heineman in which she discusses the troubled development of 3DO Doom at length: http://www.nodontdie.com/rebecca-heineman/

[gemini09]

I hope this was the last interview I read that makes me read "[Laughs]".

[mouldy]

That was an interesting read, cheers. That 3do stuff is insane

[VGA]

That was interesting but very long.

About the 3DO port, I don't get how it would be a big deal to put new weapons in if someone provides you with the art. You tell him that you need 1 main frame, 2 for the firing and 2 for the reloading and you replace the plasma gun. Then recolor the plasma projectile and make it fire 5 in a spread, then reload. Use some stock sounds.

Wow you have a badass plasma shotgun instead of the piss-shooting default plasma gun!

If in tragic time pressure, just extract the few frames of a gun and tell the artist to make replacements to that, then you just use these instead of the originals. Not a single line of code needs to be changed. Nothing needs to be tested or rebalanced.

I mean isn't that what was basically going on with all the Wolf3d ports? Asset changes only sometimes.

[Koko Ricky]

The fact that these bozos thought basic image manipulation was the same as making a game is just astounding. Also, the 3D0 version's soundtrack, while incomplete, is fantastic, and to think that clueless Christian musicians put it together is just great.

VGA said:

That was interesting but very long.

About the 3DO port, I don't get how it would be a big deal to put new weapons in if someone provides you with the art. You tell him that you need 1 main frame, 2 for the firing and 2 for the reloading and you replace the plasma gun. Then recolor the plasma projectile and make it fire 5 in a spread, then reload. Use some stock sounds.

Wow you have a badass plasma shotgun instead of the piss-shooting default plasma gun!

If in tragic time pressure, just extract the few frames of a gun and tell the artist to make replacements to that, then you just use these instead of the originals. Not a single line of code needs to be changed. Nothing needs to be tested or rebalanced.

I mean isn't that what was basically going on with all the Wolf3d ports? Asset changes only sometimes.

It sounds to me, judging from the interview, that she would have had to lift art from manipulated screenshots, and it's likely there weren't any assets that were fully finished. This is not like today where someone gives you a sprite sheet and then you drop it in the game. I have a feeling this was a real hackjob that would have looked hideous if she had attempted to implement it.

[esselfortium]

GoatLord said:

It sounds to me, judging from the interview, that she would have had to lift art from manipulated screenshots, and it's likely there weren't any assets that were fully finished. This is not like today where someone gives you a sprite sheet and then you drop it in the game. I have a feeling this was a real hackjob that would have looked hideous if she had attempted to implement it.

Plus, with the extreme deadline-pushing just to get the game playable-but-hopelessly-unoptimized, digging into changing the weapons and making sure the changes all work as intended would have been a can of worms not worth opening.

[VGA]

Asset-swapping a gun doesn't really require testing.

Anyway, it was just a thought I had that if provided with the assets by an artist, 90% of the work is done. When talking about the Doom engine.

[Job]

esselfortium said:

Plus, with the extreme deadline-pushing just to get the game playable-but-hopelessly-unoptimized, digging into changing the weapons and making sure the changes all work as intended would have been a can of worms not worth opening.

That didn't really pan out well for them, did it? Not being sarcastic, but there was once a Doom goldrush where every platform wanted their port ready at the profit table, ASAP. A lot of stillborn versions of Doom came into being as a result, when there was plenty of opportunity to do more or better with their respective version.

[Koko Ricky]

VGA said:

Asset-swapping a gun doesn't really require testing.

Anyway, it was just a thought I had that if provided with the assets by an artist, 90% of the work is done. When talking about the Doom engine.

Yeah, but listen to the interview. Those goobers clearly just altered a few screenshots; there was no way there were complete, professional, palette-transparent assets ready to be switched out. The team didn't know what they were doing on any level.

[Deleted_Account]

I absolutely adore the Doom 3D0 soundtrack, especially this song.

[plums]

The 3DO soundtrack is the best thing to come out of any console release of Doom. The interpretations are all so good, I really wish there were more tracks in it.

Good interview, I think she's done others on 3DO Doom so I was expecting a repost but this one's brand new.

edit: Any info on who actually made the music? doomwiki says that "The decision to replace the MIDI-based PC soundtrack with live recorded music was made by Heineman on a whim due to lack of time to write a music driver for the 3DO. A band hired by ADI was used to do the recordings." with no info as to who it was.

[PsychoGoatee]

That soundtrack definitely rocks! Love that version of At Doom's Gate.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/3do/doom/credits

Not seeing anything in particular on there, maybe two people under Art Interactive credited for "audio tracks", though that could be SFX etc.

[VGA]

Found a mirror for a pk3 version of the 3DO OST apparently.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/3dfbm5n3k18s7t6/3DO.pk3

[Koko Ricky]

She tells you in the interview. Some of those clueless saps at the Christian software company played in a band and sent her recordings. The process was a bit lengthy, so only a handful of tracks were made.

[Chezza]

wow I had no idea about the 3DO Doom. I bet she regrets taking on the project or showing so much sympathy to her old work mates.

[gemini09]

VGA said:

Found a mirror for a pk3 version of the 3DO OST apparently.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/3dfbm5n3k18s7t6/3DO.pk3

Thanks! Looking forward to hear it and also owning it :)

[Quasar]

plums said:

edit: Any info on who actually made the music? doomwiki says that "The decision to replace the MIDI-based PC soundtrack with live recorded music was made by Heineman on a whim due to lack of time to write a music driver for the 3DO. A band hired by ADI was used to do the recordings." with no info as to who it was.

That it was a garage band acquaintance of the guy running the thing is the extent of our knowledge. I've never seen any actual names thrown around and apparently, whoever they were, they didn't go on to press any famous CDs you would've heard of or have any pages of digital download music waiting to be discovered.

[plums]

With the lack of info, that's what I figured. I certainly didn't expect a ton but it would have been nice to know something about them.

The mobygames page PsychoGoatee linked has two names under Audio, Bryan Celand and Randy Scott. Randy Scott is the guy who was behind Art Data Interactive, I think, and pretty much the only results for Bryan Celand that come up are about the 3DO soundtrack.

Interestingly though, searching Randy Scott comes up with this guy. His bio states that he moved to California (where ADI was located) and worked for a computer company. Might be the same person?

edit: I think it might be. Which suggests that Randy Scott might have played in that band, which would mean he was actually responsible for something good to have come out of that port.

[Xaser]

Heh, I'd known bits and pieces of the story but hadn't read the full thing until now. Weird and unfortunate but cool.

Perhaps the most interesting is how the one good thing about it (the music) was a random thing by a throwaway band to work around a time constraint. Stranger than fiction and whatnot.

I'm also going to be a jerk and complain about the format of the article. The typography is funky and it reads like it was a spoken interview that was later translated to text verbatim without any regard to flow. Now I'm idly wondering if the article itself was ironically rushed out the door. :P

[Laughs.]

[Varis Alpha]

not all of 3DO's soundtrack is really great, though. there's some tracks that are really great (At Doom's Gate, Suspense, Dark Halls) and some of it is just okay (Kitchen Ace, Hell Keep, Demons on the Prey.) but given the port we're talking about, i'm going to give the middling quality of the OST a pass because quite frankly, from what i can read in the interview, we're just lucky we got something actually decent for the music.

[durian]

Great interview - thanks for sharing.