Development Log: The Sacrifice - Part I: Overview

Sacrifice is a nine-level DOOM mod with a story and level design that works from the broad-strokes overarch to the fine granularity of individual rooms within levels.

The main thrust of the level design is to take the linear level sequence of DOOM and turn it into a hub-and-spoke design.  So levels 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 will have the player retracing their steps through a central room to get to the next spoke, while levels 2, 4, 6, and 8 require the player to go deep into a level and wind up back at the beginning to exit.

Each level and room should tell its own tale with detailing and enemy placement, as though little vignettes are taking place that the player stumbles upon.  Rather than placing enemies for the sake of obstructing the player, each enemy should have a reason for being in the location that they are in.  This also requires rooms that can serve for three purposes, since different amounts of baddies happen with each difficulty level.

Using the basic theme of Hell inherent in the enemy design and textures of DOOM, Sacrifice takes you down to the depths of Hell and back.  In Sacrifice, you play an infiltrator, gathering intelligence on a cult of Devil-Worshippers by pretending to be one.  You are a low-ranking recruit in their circle, but you hoped to rise in the chain and gain greater access to their secret information.

Before you can, however, you are selected to take part in their sacrificial ritual -- and you are the sacrifice.  You are meant to go down into a pit (so as to be closer to Hell) and shoot yourself in the head, killing yourself, since to the cult, self-sacrifice of life is the ultimate sacrifice, and Satan is pleased by such sacrifices.

This back-story gives the player a reason to start with a gun, which is something I struggled with concocting for the scenario.  It's a little convoluted, I think, and I may change it later.  (After all, it's easy to change back-story when DOOM's back-story itself takes place in the manual.)

I may have the player be a Devil-Worshipper who simply doesn't want to end his life, or changes his mind on the whole thing, or wants to raise the Devil in a different way, or whathaveyou.  Whatever I end up with for player motivations, the scenario all starts off the same: you are in the pit, and you are supposed to shoot yourself, and you decide to climb out and sacrifice some other Devil-Worshippers instead.

So you begin in the sacrificial chamber, at the bottom of the pit (I think of something like that scene from Temple of Doom without the lava).  The sacrificial pit room is the central hub which the player will come back to again and again.

There are five doors leading out of the chamber, though only one opens.  The player will discover, as the game progresses, that red flames around the doors indicate that they cannot be opened yet, green indicate the player may enter, and blue indicate the door has been previously opened.  This shows the player what they have so far accomplished and how much they have left to go in a rough way.

The hub-and-spoke idea, given that DOOM is obviously linear, means that the levels have bits and pieces copy-pasted to provide continuity and appear as hub-and-spoke.

So the Player, at the beginning of level 3, will begin where they left off in level 1, after making a circuit through level 2.  My hope is that this makes the levels appear more seamless than the original DOOM, which, through its map screen between levels, showed individual buildings clearly marked, making the levels themselves as episodic as the game.