To Guide or Not to Guide: Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus (1995, SAMS Publishing)

Note: All images in this article are sourced from my own scans unless otherwise indicated, and are (c) 1995, SAMS Publishing.

iD Software unleashed Hell in 1993, then brought Hell to Earth in 1994. Most players of the day were content to attack the game as it shipped, then slip online to deathmatch with their friends or co-operate through the campaign. After a while though, you knew all the secrets, your buddies knew how to find all the weapons, and familiarity began breeding contempt.

Fortunately iD had a solution to this: you could go online and download brand new levels, for absolutely no money at all! Fresh arenas to fulfill your deathmatch bloodlust, or solo experiences for times when you couldn't die up the phone line just to get your BFG fix -- both were just a few mouse clicks away. Sooner or later though, a thought went through every Doom player's mind: what if I could make my own Doom levels and use them to murder my buddies (in the virtual sense)?

Well, it turns out making levels for Doom is a completely different skill set than playing Doom levels, and the editors out there often threw you right into the deep end with little documentation. Sectors, textures, triggers, nodes, actors, flags, sprites, BSP trees, linedefs...the budding WAD author needed to understand all these and more, or else the result of his casual experimentation would be memory errors, graphical anomalies, and levels that weren't fun to play. Unless you were lucky enough to have a master WAD hacker at your beck and call to show you the ropes, chances are you got your Doom editor's education via the alt.games.doom newsgroup on Usenet. That was fine if you had specific questions about stuff, but what if you were a total newbie who couldn't even link four walls together?

SAMS Publishing to the rescue! They rounded up twenty battle-tested space marines (alright, 'level designers'), the cream of the crop of the Doom editing community, asked them to write about areas they specialized in, edited the manuscripts into a cohesive instruction set, cobbled together hundreds of megabytes of resources (including over 1,000 user-created levels) for a CD-ROM insert, and sent this beast to bookstore shelves everywhere. Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus was intended to be the last word in creating levels for Doom, Doom II, and Heretic. The result was an 932-page cellophane-wrapped monstrosity weighing nearly ten pounds with a cover price of $39.99 -- equal to the original cost of a registered version of Doom in 1993!

Assuming your back survived the trip getting it home from the store, you could tear open the shrinkwrap and begin your journey from apprentice WAD designer to Doom Guru. The only question is, was it worth the cost?

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To Guide or Not to Guide?

If for some reason you bought this book on the assumption it would help you be a better Doom player, then I hope the 'you' of 1995 kept the receipt, because while this is a strategy guide of sorts, it wasn't there to reveal hidden secrets and divulge cheat codes. This book had one purpose and one purpose only: to subject you to the harsh boot camp reality of what it meant to create your own levels, impress upon you the complexity you were about to undertake, then make you question your own sanity for wanting to do so.

Let's get one thing straight: if you were willing to put in the time, follow the examples, and participate in the exercises, Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus would make a WAD author out of you several times over. The writers were not fooling around: the table of contents alone is thirty-three pages long; the index in the back takes up another twenty-four; twenty pages are devoted to nothing but an Appendix of tables concerning all the information you could possibly need at your fingertips as a WAD writer; eight pages in the center comprise a full-color gallery of screenshots of cool things other people had done with the Doom engine, meant to whet your appetite and get you hungry to be just as awesome.

Between the covers, you'll find contributions by the likes of Matt Tagliaferri (creator of the popular DoomCAD level editor), Ben Morris (creator of the Doom Construction Kit), and Justin Fisher (author of the popular Aliens-TC total conversion, and one of the best-known WAD authors of the day). The CD has copies of every program discussed within the text. If worse came to worse, you could use the whole thing as a bludgeoning weapon to hold off a horde of zombies. Sounds perfect, right?

Well, all that perfection comes with a price (and not just the $40 price tag either). See, you've really got to want to make levels for Doom to get the full use out of the book. The back cover categorizes its user level as 'Casual to Expert', but it really tilts towards the upper part of that scale. If you can barely handle running Doom on your own, you've got no hope of actually putting this to use.

The good news is that, while there are better options for level design, thanks to new programs and source ports of the Doom games that will run on just about everything from Linux to cell phones and ATMs, the tips and suggestions in this book are still applicable. Building a Doom level is relatively easy to do, but building a good Doom level is another story entirely. What's more, the tricks and advanced bits of jiggery-pokery the authors manage to work out of the game's engine, as well as advice for what makes for good level design, are still useful today. The specifics of pulling them off won't directly translate to, say, UnrealEd or other modern FPS engines, but the ideas themselves are still appealing. Plus, unlike many games from twenty years ago, Doom has a community of players who enjoy downloading new maps and taking on new challenges even today. It may not be as large as it once was, but it is there, so the book still has practical applications.

That said, if there's one thing to make the would-be WAD author reconsider buying it, it's this sucker right here:

One year later in 1996, with the release of Hexen and the updating of a number of Doom editing tools, SAMS Publishing decided a second edition was in order. They trimmed some of the fat from the original work (the table of contents page is now only 25 pages, for instance, and the eight page color gallery got left on Phobos), stuffed the CD with newer versions of programs appearing on the original disc plus some fresh releases from other talented programmers, including a full-fledged art resource of over 350 sprites, and pushed an extra thousand or so user-created levels inside just for good measure. The end result is 3D Game Alchemy for Doom, Doom II, Heretic, and Hexen, and it's the last word on level design for all four of these games.

The only real downside to this edition over the first is the lack of Justin Fisher's Aliens-TC on the CD-ROM. SAMS apparently got into some hot water over the WAD's inclusion on the previous book's disc, and dropped it from inclusion for the second printing. Understandable, but unfortunate. Nevertheless, this is the twenty-first century -- if you can make Doom WADs, you're capable of utilizing a search engine to find the files for yourself.

If you're serious about bringing your 90's FPS level building game to the table, you owe it to yourself to have at least one of these books (spine creased, pages dog-eared, cover coffee-ringed) at your fingertips while you hack out another epic testament to iD Software's hellscape nightmare. The tools on the CD may have been obsoleted by better tech, but the information is unmatched by anything else on the printed market.

I, of course, never managed to cobble together jack crap using either one of these books, but it was a hell of a lot of fun seeing what went on 'under the hood', so to speak. Plus I was on dial-up, so downloading a thousand user-made levels would have taken me, like, all bloody year. That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.

Guide.