Doom
Release type: Incomplete
Release date: 1996
Levels: 2
Author: Alan Caudel
Website: DummyDuck.com
Related games: N/A
So around the time that Andy Stone stopped work on Game-Maker, along came a game called Doom. Doom was a success, because it was brilliant in every way. The downside is that people began to look askance at anything that wasn't Doom. If your game wasn't (faux) 3D, if it wasn't violent enough, if it didn't have all of the superficial elements that made Doom seem so impressive (regardless of the real genius of its pacing and level design, which is easier to overlook), it was out-of-date. Old-fashioned. Cheap. For kids.
This was a sea change for which RSD was particularly unprepared. Game-Maker was a pretty good toolbox for echoing the 2D action-adventure games that Apogee and Epic were churning out -- but a 3D engine was another thing entirely, and overnight it became the base expectation of every potential customer. There are other factors that led to Game-Maker landing on the back shelf, but that shift in expectation must be one of the biggest.
So, what of existing Game-Maker owners? The tools and engine are open-ended enough to trick them into almost anything, given enough patience and ingenuity. Would Doom work, somehow? Or, something similar enough? This is the question that Alan Caudel set out to answer.
As it turns out... no. Well, probably not. If there is an available simulacrum, he did not find it here. Instead what he assembled is a simple shooting gallery; you've got a scrolling gun at the bottom, you've got targets above, and you can shoot upward. This in itself is a reasonable starting place. There's no reason why Game-Maker can't be a good vehicle for a shooting gallery, if one puts in the effort to make it interesting, and to play smoothly.
Caudel didn't go that deeply here. He put together a few elements, saw that they clearly weren't going to work as well as he hoped, shrugged, and moved on. And that's fine. That doesn't mean someone else couldn't learn from this experience and do something really neat with the idea -- without the pretense at channeling Carmack and Romero. All it means is that there wasn't much motivation here to figure out the next step. Hell, there's always a better idea to chase.
The available version of this game is missing some component files.
Story[edit]
N/A
Instructions[edit]
- Arrow keys: Move those ways
- Spacebar: shoot
Credits[edit]
Designed by Alan Caudel.
Availability[edit]
This game is not known to have been distributed in any form, prior to its addition to the Archive.
Archive History[edit]
After an earlier wave of rediscoveries, on July 13 2011 Alan Caudel provided another archive of previously missing Game-Maker material, including the following:
Links[edit]
Downloads[edit]
- Doom (162 kB)
