Back in the day when I first heard of doom, it was by finding a level editor on a shareware collection cd-rom. THEN I bought
doom, since it was a requirement to use said level editor. I was always a fan of wanting to do level design since drawing mario and sonic levels in grade school notebooks. My first venture into this included a nintendo game by the name of Dudes With Attitude
which allowed for custom levels you designed for the game's specific rules and engine.
Through trial and error, I finally got a level to work, and eventually copied it over 70 times to make 3 megawads. I
named them Chambers of Death. The reason for this is
at first I could only get one map working when you used premade shapes, it would automatically add a "sidedef" definition
to your "linedefs" or lines/walls. I used an old ms-dos primitive editor because, hey, it
was 1995.
Eventually, I got a second level to work, called Battlefields. It also became a megawad.
After that, I made several attempts, some working and some not, before finally realizing what a
sidedef actually was, and why some lines didn't have an option for wall textures and some did.
There was a lot to doom level design, and I never read a single manual.
After a trilogy of differing level tests called Doom Nightmares 1-3, I began work on my first
true megawad, Doom Chaos 3. Parts 1 and 2 were on graph
only and never were transitioned to doom. Back then I never downloaded levels, just perused
the old cd-rom collections such as D!Zone, so the quality compared to what I knew was pretty
'meh' as I had nothing newer to compare it to.
I hadn't known of doomworld or that all of my trash was up for review, especially the
next bigger effort known as Nightmares of Loki. I had just used various FTPS until finally discovering doomworld's existance and joined.
I was used to levels on D!Zone and garbage like that, with few gems but mostly garbage. So to that, mine seemed legit to me. Nightmares of
Loki was originally going to be called "Doom Legacy" until 1999 when I found out about
source ports, and discovered the name was taken. I uploaded this massive
heap of nonsense in 2003 promising a full redo. Unknown to myself at the time, it was up
for review, and the reviews were terrible! Upon using the ftp server as "previous
version" storage, I sent it in front of an entire community of judges, and they all said no.
From the sound of my dad screaming into the microphone, reversed and echoed to the massive boring levels
without details, the other mouth noises, the poorly colorized enemies and textures, to everything
else, this wad got the boot forever. Years later, you can watch an entire 4 hour and 20 minute
playthrough here by the Doom Wad World people, who also did others such as
Nightmares 2, Nightmares 3, and Chaos3. All of this was enough to quit for a very long time.
Fast-forward 20 years to 2019. I had created a few levels I didn't release and decided to join
a community project on "Oops! All Techbase." I contributed MAP14, called Inhumane Resources, with a lot
of detail work by a user named mistersector.
Over the course of these years I went to college and made a plethera of music. I wrote a plot for a
"someday" reboot for Nightmares of Loki." It would be a partial joke that I redid
it, but my goal was to make it good. I've made a soundtrack for it I wish to redo. To learn
a lot of scripting and new ideas, I've decided first to again resurrect my very first level
for a second trilogy. It will also have an original soundtrack, and a lot of new ideas with a lot of fun going into it.
It is mainly for practice and personal nostalgia. The new name is "Z Chambers."
I am hoping that in 2029 I will have the first installment of Nightmares of Loki, the reboot, ready
for the 30th anniversary of the original, but other than some soundtrack work, a rough draft of a plot,
and a few connections, I have no levels. I am planning the proposed 81 levels split into three games
to be made while I learn things making the new Z-Chambers levels simultaneously.
It is also recommended that you check out another work in progress, "Time Killers for Doom."
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