Game Design

By J. Daniel Pacey

Doom

Doom was a groundbreaking game by ID, following on from the success of Castle Wolfenstein, one of the earliest first-person-shooters (FPS) available on PCs, a genre which is now thoroughly oversaturated. It provided an atmospheric and often frantic gaming experience with over the top weapons and excessive gore, but more interestingly laid the foundations for an active on-line development community to create their own levels and modifications to run with the game engine.

I tried my hand at designing some levels using a DOS based editor called DEU (version 5.1), the results of which are available to download here:

Instructions for running modified levels in Doom:

Extract the *.wad file and then run the game with the following command:
doom -file level
where level is the path to the *.wad file

JavaScript

I spent some time learning JavaScript in the Summer of 1998 in preparation for the return to my casual contract with the Learning Technologies Team at the University of Central Lancashire during which I worked on developing a virtual experiment using the scripting language. As a learning experiment I created the following maze game, the latter of which randomly generates mazes, although sometimes without a solution!

Email daniel(at)jdanielp(dot)co(dot)uk