DCasali

I should clarify a little - I love many kinds of music and I truly appreciate and respect the effort and talent it takes to write music of any kind. During the Covid lockdowns I bought a keyboard and Ableton and gave it a shot myself. It's fun, but it's also not easy! Back in the 90s I enjoyed video game music, from Doom to Dune 2, and Simcity 2000. Even back then, I'd eventually disable the music because the repetition would get to me, and I'd start to listen to CDs (remember those) while I played. Fast forward to now, that distaste for repetition as well as not often being a fan of the music itself (maybe my music tastes have changed over time, or maybe I don't like that midi sound you get in Doom?), I prefer to just have the sound effects. And one silly reason - I often have Doom idle in the background, and even with the menu engaged and the game paused, you still hear the music playing, so I'd go in and mute the music even if I'd been playing with it before hand. Then I'd just forget to unmute it when I resumed playing. To your second question - Milo and I didn't have any experience writing music, instead we spent all our time building levels and making textures.

Hmm, I'm not sure you want to watch my map 07 playthrough :) I'm sad to hear that your fear of working under someone else's direction prevented you from pursuing games as a career. You clearly have the aptitude and passion for it. At Valve you never have to worry about that. The vision is shared, and everyone has ownership over it. It might sound weird and impossible but it works for us. In fact, we actively discourage individual ownership over large sections of our games because collaboration has always improved our products and creates a happier and more fulfilling work place.

Thanks for your words about Plutonia. Development of TNT was pretty fun for the most part. It was exciting to be part of a big collection of people contributing to a polished product. I learned a lot from the forums that Team TNT came out of, and there were some really talented and nice people on that team. We were all amateurs and pretty young at the time, so it's remarkable that we had the kind of co-operation we did! Even before the prospect of ID publishing the project came about, I was getting a little restless with things because I wanted to create more and more content. I would sit at work and think of ideas, make a sketch, then immediately when I got home I'd start building. People were starting to say how my brother and I were submitting too many maps, and they didn't want us monopolizing Evilution. That sentiment grew much stronger when ID came into the picture and added motivation for Milo and I to put our own thing together. We originally wanted to make 7 maps and release them as a mini map pack. When three of ours were excluded from Evilution, we added those and sent ten to ID.

I've definitely thought about it. A little busy at the moment, but it's always there at the back of my mind.

I'm certainly late to the game in talking about how great Valiant is, but I just played through it for the first time, and holy crap, what an achievement! I was so impressed with how consistent the quality is, and that it was all done by one guy - Paul DeBruyne. I hope he reads these forums because I want to say congratulations directly. The maps always have something new, something interesting to them, and the use of monsters, and placement of bonus items is masterful. The visuals are great and I even listened to some of the music because it was that good (I usually hate having the music on because I mostly don't like video game music). Map 31 was probably the most fun I've ever had playing Doom single player. I hope Paul went on to have a great career in games, he clearly has the talent and passion for it. I played through the entire thing blind on UV and had an absolute blast! Even when I sounded grumpy, it was either because I was suffering from Covid or it was because I just sound that way when I'm enjoying playing Doom :) Is Ancient Aliens as good as Valiant? Is anything else this good? I had way more fun playing this than I did Doom Eternal. This community has so much talent.

I agree with the OP. I think Quake's weapons sound good - nice and crisp and go well with the mechanics of the weapon, but the characters always sounded muddy to me. They're far less distinct than the Doom ones and have less character. They're like muffled grunts, and they all live within a similar spectrum, a criticism I'd level at their appearance and behavior too. On the flip side, I think Doom's monsters have sounds that are as varied as their appearance and behaviors. They have crisp, unique sounds that take advantage of different frequency ranges so they can exist together and not blend into one muddied soundscape. To me, Doom's character SFX are the result of thoughtful design, inspiration and professional soundscaping. Quake's feel very much more rushed and less inspired.

Plutonia does contain a few maps that were excluded from TNT. I don't remember exactly which ones, I went back through to try to jog my memory, but it didn't help much. I think map 09 Abattoir was one of them, and if I had to guess it'd be map 02 (Well of Souls) and perhaps map 08 (Realm). The maps were part of TNT until it was agreed to be sold to ID, then existing concerns about difficulty lead to their removal. Milo and I didn't want to reduce the difficulty because we were in a different mindset than most of the rest of the TNT team. We were more excited about providing a challenge and weren't worried about going against established conventions. We also weren't crazy about the range of quality of the maps in TNT. That, and because there had already been disagreements about TNT and what should be in it, Milo and I started building our own set of maps that delivered what we were more interested in playing ourselves.

I finished my playthrough and all maps are now uploaded! This was a fun way to get back into Doom. These maps had familiar elements to them, all being based of their Plutonia counterparts. There were a handful that were much bigger than they needed to be, and felt like they went on FOREVER. This never made the map more fun, just made for more map. Other maps had key/switch/doors that weren't obvious, so I got lost a LOT. The majority of the maps were great though, they were easy to navigate and had fun traps and fights that made you think. I've started a play through of the original Plutonia Experiment now, which has been a really fun trip so far. I'll start uploading those soon.

Nice job on those maps Thomas! The trap in Map 10 with the revenants that spawn behind you across the gap was great. It took me quite a few tries to get through that. I also liked map 30 a lot. I tried IDCLEV33 and it did nothing. Is there anything else I have to do to load that map? I just found it - adding "-warp 33" to the command line. Thanks, I'll go play this now

Thanks, I'm excited to be playing/talking Doom again. I'm going to do that next - play through Plutonia Exp. It's been a long long time so it'll be interesting that's for sure. Hopefully I can remember some cool stuff about how we made it.

It's been a long time, but I've been busy! Doom was easy to get back into, there's something about the raw simplicity of it. I haven't tried playing more modern Doom stuff yet but I've been (mostly) enjoying Plutonia2

Hi Joe! Your map was really great, thanks for building it! Those sniping revenants were tricky to deal with but used really well. The big outside battle was fun too. Adding the damaging floor was genius, it gave me a timer for dealing with everything.

Maps 09 through 15 are up. This is a great set of maps! Really cool that this came together from a diverse set of mappers in the community. It took me a little while to realize each map is directly inspired by the equivalent Plutonia Experiment map number. It's a great idea and executed really well. I'm getting lost a good deal in some of these, I wish the automap was more helpful - like coloring doors and keys for example.

Thanks, I appreciate the kind words. The HL projects were the result of a lot of passion, drive, competition and creativity, and some tough times for sure! During HL1 development, the team was incredibly focused. I remember coming home at 4am, sleeping till 10am, eating some cereal then returning to work, repeat. Did that seven days a week for about 18 months, it was brutal but so exciting. When I do my Plutonia play through I'll be sure to talk about the design and stuff as I go.