My first experiences with Doom modding were a long time ago. I remember hacking levels together with DeePsea, back when my source port of choice was Legacy. Okay, that wasn’t a long time ago for Doom veterans, but it seems like a long time ago for me. Unfortunately, most if not all of the levels I made back then are probably lost. With that being said it’s no great loss- I don’t think any of them were ever very good. Eventually I think I got frustrated with the restrictions and stopped, or maybe I just got bored. I was like 12 or something.
I got back into Doom modding a few years ago when I discovered ZDoom and all of its advanced capabilities. The first thing I tried to create was Arctic Assault, an odd mishmash between Operation Arctic Wolf and Call of Duty that predictably got as far as the second level before the project died. It was also a collaboration with a friend, and he got about one level in too. The next project was Derpmod, which is exactly what it sounds like. I worked on it on and off for a few months, but Ascension ended up sucking up all my time and I never got back to Derpmod after that.
I started producing semi-finished stuff in 2013. I created Stoner Doom on a whim, then created Metro 2034 as a joke gift for a friend. Around this time I started to put together Ascension Revolution, which never really went anywhere. Cordis was a Valentine's Day themed mod which ended up rushed and turned out not so great. After that, I didn't have time to do any full mods, but I've put together a few levels. I managed to throw together a half-complete mod for Christmas 2015, as well.
I really like working with ZDoom. It’s a very accessible engine, and though it still has some baggage from the Doom days it’s pretty flexible. Doom Builder is simple to pick up and you can hack together a map fairly quickly. You could just throw everything into a folder and load that, but I prefer using SLADE to manage WAD files. Making something really good, though, takes effort and skill.
This website is designed to emulate a late 1990s website in form and function. The layout was inspired by Laz Rojas WolfenDOOM site, although it's not exactly the same. The general style is largely my own, inspired by a quick trawling of old-looking websites and my hazy memories of an earlier Internet. Even the way content is organized and presented is meant to seem archaic and evoke a site from the past. At the same time, however, I decided that the site had to be usable and not look completely horrible, and avoid the archaic techniques used to actually implement those old sites. It is as much an exercise in web design as it is a way of showing my WADs to the world.
I'd like to add proper mobile support (with responsive design) and get the hitcounter working some day. I'm also looking into using AJAX to fill the content instead of using iframes.
This site may look seriously old-school, but it's actually on the cutting edge to the point where it won't work properly in all browsers.
The site has been tested on the following browsers:
This site was developed in Netbeans IDE, using Git for source control and Firefox with Firebug for testing.