i played it when it came out and followed the whole mini internet hype cycle for it (and later watched someone else stream a full playthrough) so i have a bit of MyHouse fatigue - which is why i didn’t post it here earlier. but it’s very cool to see people making something like this out of Doom.
also should this just officially become the Doom + Quake thread? since we have so much Quake discussion here already.
I checked here just last night after I did a short play through to see if anybody had posted about it but to no avail. Was funny trying to orient myself by thinking I’m either in the Playstation or Xbox dimension. Also to look up a highlight video playthrough of it afterwards that was barely halfway done when it got to the point where I got what I thought was the ending.
i had a student in my class ask me about this just now actually. guess i should give it a look.
EDIT: ah, youtube just handed me the 2M view vid calling it “doom’s most terrifying mod” so i guess i shouldn’t be surprised
EDIT EDIT: three different students! i guess yt is really pushing this one
I just played through myhouse.pk3 . It was cool. I eventually switched to the 2 hour video previously mentioned. It was neat! The ARG bits made me do the jerk off motion and the narration in the video is A Lot but it was neat and I recommend it. The pk3.
yeah the arg side of it is a lot more heavy-handed than it needs to be. kind of a shame because the actual content really speaks for itself and doesn’t really benefit from any of it, but I guess it’s food for the internet hype machine.
I’ve been playing a bunch of myhouse dot wad, it’s really clever and does some really neat things with surreal imagry and subverting expectations, except
Lots of frustrating gameplay, it is really easy to fall of the “main” path and miss a key “artifact” and then be blocked off from finding that artifact again. One artifact requires doing some FPS platforming. On my first playthrough I got stuck in the burning house and looping back through an infinite staircase, but this turns out to be a Doom doesn’t have an autosave feature, and unfortunately I keep forgetting to save which means redoing whole sections. This kind of ruins the whole surrealist mood it’s going for.
I recognize a lot of the locations from “backrooms” related videos and lore. Down to the knockoff shrek. It’s neat seeing this stuff get adapted to a doom map.
The underwater tunnel section sucks, if you don’t have full health you might not make it through. Thanks to slowdowns in taking corners and losing seconds to getting into the tunnel in the first place, it’s very easy to die there.
Boltgun is big, dumb and fun
Movement plays somewhere between Doom 2016 and Quake while the shooting gives the sense of physically shooting rocks, mid-sized boulders and actual boulders from the ridiculously punched-up weapons of the 40Kverse
Enemy variety actually exists (although Normal difficulty may be too lukewarm/forgiving) from fleshy mechanical soldiers, chaos space marines and gibbering horrors that multiply on death
Level design is spacious (to being with) with splashes of corridor BLAM BLAM RED MIST for flavor; and while not terribly explicit in terms of navigation (or feeling out the correct path) I never found myself wandering/backtracking for more than a couple of minutes here-and-there
Might just go back and crank the difficulty dial but I think there’s plenty here for TrueDoomMurderheads to get their rocks-off to
myhouse.wad was awesome. I played it last night and got the bad ending then just went through with a guide and there was like half of the wad I completely missed. Someone needs to get John Romero to play this on a stream.
I could’ve done without the zoomer memes but I liked myhouse.wad
Making big progress with my map, Nameless Revenge. But I am now looking at the last leg of loop structure that is the shape of the map, and I am go waaaah!!! so much work still to do. Though I’m just complaining because I’m having fun with the project again and liking how much work I’ve done on it.
Here’s an image of the map as it is, with a red line indicating the built and playable critical path, and a blue line indicating how much is left to finish. Kind of hard to read this, I’m sure, but maybe you can get what I mean with how close I am.
For the sake of keeping sane I’m bouncing between the blocking phase, the embellishing phase, and a scripting phase during the creation of this. There will be many edit passes at the end when everything is in place, where I will fix holes, apply textures with more intention, block off parts of the map that shouldn’t be seen and create vistas out of whatever else I can’t block off. Then of course I will do a lighting pass or an encounter design pass, not sure which first.
This map to me is less of a combat level and more of an adventure, so I don’t think I’ll sweat too much over the encounters. I still want to try and have fun encounters it’s just that… eh. Most Quake monsters just aren’t that fun to fight imo, and the ones that are fun leave me with a limited pallet to design with, so I am leaning towards fewer encounters to preserve a sense of variety and creativity.
Its all about juxtaposing different monsters together. A bunch of knights and a shambler plays different from ogres paired with fiends. Quake monsters should not be considered as individual units, they are all about how they function together (including of course providing the playerwith opportunities for infighting)
Yep, I just got to discover the fun combos.
level architecture plays a big part of this but it helps to think of how a given monster constrains movement and to pair monsters where the ideal movement constraints contradict each other. For example, shamblers kind of expect the player to either stay really close or to fight in an area with a lot of cover, while fiends practically demand range and wide open spaces, so shambler + fiends has always been a standby of good encounter design. Shambler + vore, on the other hand, doesn’t really work, as they both push the player towards staying behind cover.
Death knights are so overused in part because they work in most situations, they’re always available as an option to spice up a boring encounter.
I hear ya. And trust me, I’ve been playing a lot of Quake and studying level design from a number of different perspectives the past two years, so I know what you’re saying. I think I am just reacting to being confronted with the work ahead of me.
But also, I do think you need to think of the Quake monsters on an individual basis occasionally. And at least when I do, I start to see some strong distinguishing categories forming. There are monsters that absolutely define the encounter, like you’re saying with the Vore, Fiend, Shambler.
And then there is a large class of monsters that I think are more or less just padding for a fight, there to make the territory control puzzle harder to calculate. I’m talking like the knight, both types of the guys with guns, scrags, dogs. These monsters are the ones I am trying not to over use or have create a feeling of sameness. I think the size of this monster class is probably due to the multiple worlds thing in Quake, and it’s leading to an interesting challenge for me to puzzle out the nuances of each one of them to be able to design something smart.
A monster like an ogre and death knight, to my mind, feel like a third class because they just have slightly more versatility to them than these filler mobs. They are also not as forceful and won’t always define an encounter like a shambler, vore, or (given the geometry) a fiend will.
It isn’t useful to think one monster is going to do enough to create the complex friction of what we mean when we talk about a combat encounter, you’re right. A shambler may feel like it’s the main feature of one, but there are many things contributing to a good encounter. It’s just in my opnion the roster of monsters in Quake is a bit quirky. I’ve seen some say it’s uneven or that there are clearly best, and I understand these points but don’t agree with them wholly either. The subtle strengths and drawbacks and affordances of that filler class of mobs (which I admit to not fully understanding) maybe just kind of complicates a lot of the instinctual level design knowledge I’ve picked up on as a player, whose most formative FPS experiences were with the super readable and hierarchical monster roster of Halo.
Anyway, these are just my newb thoughts.
Didn’t mean to come across as didactic about this, so sorry about that. Just wanted to wax rhapsodic about the way I think of encounter design in Quake.
I think in one of the quake expansions they put like 2 shamblers in a room and I was like “this isn’t it”
No worries Tulpa! I trust you to be a friendly person at this point. And I totally agreed with you anyway, your post got me to figure out a way to articulate just a feeling I’ve been sitting on for a little. So I appreciate it 
!!!
Realizing what my map is probably most influenced by, both visually and spatially:
First off, ripping. And then, tearing.
