The length of these sequences was crucial. “You could really show off, like an enemy shattering in front of your camera, and to me that was the right direction to go in.” For Hara, these moments of synched melee would work the same way, and besides, the effect was just too good. If you decide to hit the button combination for a throw in a fighting game, you know you’re happy to commit yourself to watch a short animation of your character executing the action.
“But I wasn’t too concerned about that, because it’s kind of like the throw moves in fighting games, you know?” Hara says. “We do everything we can to not take player control away, throughout the game, whether for a cinematic or anything,” says Stratton. Taking control from the player was a controversial concept. They just didn’t have that impact.” And so they tried something else, bringing the action right up into the player’s face, driven through a set animation, and showed the concept off in the animatic, which featured what game director Marty Stratton calls “synced moments of melee between the player and the enemy”.
“The way you remember Doom, you remember the melting demon right in front of your face, but the enemies were still AI, small, and the level of detail was getting lost. “I just felt like the actual visual wasn’t there,” Hara says. Shoot an enemy in the shoulder and it would spin and fall and then try to stand up again, hit it harder in a leg and it might blow it clean off.īut it wasn’t working. So they built a prototype which was built on the elaborate hit detection features they’d made for Rage, which they’d recently launched, with the addition of a new gore system. The stuff, in fact, that Brutal Doom is all about. Shoot the enemy and he just melts,” he tells me. “To me, when I hear Doom, what comes to my mind is the melting demon stuff. The aim was to finally finish the game by bringing Doom back to its roots, and for animation director Shinichiro Hara, that was all about one thing. The origin of glory kills lies in an animatic, a visual prototype which was made by id’s animation team during the great overhaul of the Doom project some three years ago. It’s a feature, after all, that was intended to capture something special about the original Doom that had little to do with movement, but it turned out to trigger all kinds of secondary effects. You’re the Doom Marine: you move like the wind and your shots are unbroken by the need to reload.Īt the heart of how Doom creates this response in players is a single feature which, paradoxically, is all about pausing your interaction with the game, pressing you so close to the enemy that they often fill the screen. It’s a game of aggression and constant movement.
ĭoom, the new one, has one heck of a sense of forward momentum. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games.
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