Dos Game Club

Doom Map Pack

Developer Notes

E1M8 Ashes Over Babel | Watchful | 13 Apr 2025

My last attempt at Doom mapping was in 1995, when the tools were mostly still in DOS. The stress of feeling out of practice and unqualified was compounded by what appeared to be a deadline only three days away.

Some relief to the time pressure was recalling that most of Doom's maps appear completely and shamelessly unrelated to one another. Dropping continuity meant more freedom to work without having to frequently coordinate with the other mappers. The deadline turned out to be more aspirational, which also provided much needed time for tweaks and other experiments.

I'd like to explore more ideas like fixing the hall-of-mirror glitches, rendering the ash cloud above the tower, try cinderblock textures for the tower, forced pistol start, silently removing puffs at the cloud boundaries, lightning that hurts players, etc. But I have other commitments and even club activities which deserve more attention. And it's good enough now to express my primary ideas and hopefully provide some entertainment to others.

Design and Inspiration

My initial idea was to try to force players to kite monsters into barrels that can be exploded, and failing that into clusters of other groups that may infight. Doom also features a lot of religiously inspired imagery, so the Tower of Babel seemed like a fun setting.

Unfortunately I could find no way in vanilla Doom to gate progress to killing enemies, so no obvious way to force the player to engage with them all. Putting a lot of keyed doors or elevators on a supposedly ancient structure felt too artificial. Thankfully E1M8 can trigger an event on the death of all boss-level monsters, and Tijn was willing to swap map assignments so I could leverage that.

Putting the player just above a small horde of pinkies was also a callback to the game's cover art, since none of the original levels felt much like the Marine on an outdoor height facing an onslaught. It had always bothered me that game art in the 80s and 90s was so different than the in-game art. So it was fun to at least try to recreate some portion of that moment.

The surrounding ocean was an attempt to explain the lack of hell-sky as well as provide a more natural horizon with a plausible limit. After all, not even Doomguy would try to swim across an ocean. And only later did I realize we could replace the whole episode's sky texture in a map-pack WAD while retaining DOS compatibility. Still, Doom's technical limits meant either making the tower shorter--to avoid seeing the sky repeat at the screen corners--or setting the tower in a large basin. The basin idea also could be explained as water erosion and meant I could keep a taller tower for a longer journey up to the summit.

Finally, the ash cloud is supposed to explain why Doomguy's last confrontation occurs on a moving surface. Apparently there is a limit to how many lifts vanilla Doom can handle, or I would have tried to make it more dynamic and granular. Doomguy also cannot step higher than 24 units, so the lifts couldn't move too far apart or movement would be abruptly stopped. Larger gaps between lifts also made the already blocky 'cloud' surfaces feel even more artificial. Something like a factory or base within the bowels of the tower was another idea. But I thought my time was short, and making a crude approximation of a cloud seemed faster to create and more novel than yet another human construct.

Conclusion

Maps and packs without any new art, audio, or behaviors always bored me as a teen aspiring to be a game artist and designer in the 90s. It felt like the easiest yet mostly limiting part of working with the technology, especially once Duke3D came out. Yet working on a Doom map with the club has softened my view considerably, and helped a much older me appreciate how much folks can and have accomplished given the time constraints and some creativity.

I hope you can find at least something to enjoy about each map in the pack.