Poet's Level Design Tips (Poet's Classical Wolfenstein 3-D site)
Poet's Dead Guard Trick (Poet's Classical Wolfenstein 3-D site)
When I make levels I often start with sitting back and imagining scenes and situations. Then I translate these into maps. A major element in my level designs from the beginning was to give both the player and the enemies the possibility to move around a lot and getting to areas from different angles. This gives the player many options, many of the Wolf-Extra levels develops so differently, depending on what the player chooses to do, that you can play the same level half a dozen times and it will feel like a new level each time.
From the beginning I always found Wolf3D to be, not real, but surreal. For instance you had nicely decorated rooms with dinner tables, and then you found all the food on the floor, and not on the tables. I always wanted to emphasize the dreamlike, or say nightmarish if you so prefer, qualities of Wolf3D. Like making a nice and comfortable looking room with a door you would think leads to a similar room, but which instead leads directly to a mutant infested slimy cave. The kind of constantly changing of scenes that may occur in dreams.
In Wolf-Extra II: the Nightmare, which does not take place in a castle but in the protagonist’s subconscious mind at night, I wanted to further develop the surrealism of Wolf3D for instance by having nicely decorated dining rooms with vines hanging from the ceilings etc.
This lead to my idea of making levels that looked like ruins. I have always made levels starting the process with one big empty room, and then drawing the walls (instead of starting with all walls and drawing rooms). The fact that I am not really drawing rooms but walls, may sometimes make the rooms take on quite fantastic shapes. This is in accordance with the way I want the levels to develop but it also creates the visual impression I want to achieve. Wolf Hour has several levels that look like ruins. You may again enter a dining room with three nicely decorated walls, but when you turn around to where you expect to find the fourth wall all you see are some random wall blocks with caves or a big outdoor area beyond, as if it once was a wall there that has crumbled.
In my later games, like The Tower and Wolf-Extra III, I wanted to make levels, combined with new code features, where I could develop and investigate the many possibilities for making different and challenging puzzles in a Wolf game. Instead of making levels where the player has a lot of choices of moving I wanted to make levels where you really have to think to be able to get anywhere at all. For these games I made more compact levels of the same size and shape with elevator positions that correspond to the position of the entrance elevators on the next floor for added realism, but still maintaining the dreamlike qualities.
The actors in Wolf3D have never seemed really real to me. Not only the mutants but the others also seem like living deads who are forced to wander forever in the confined areas the levels make up. I like to make abandoned looking areas. In The Tower and Wolf-Extra III you find rooms with slime and moss covered walls with moss eaten pictures of Hitler, dining tables, floor lamps, vines and heaps of bones pell-mell.
For my latest effort, A Doll’s House, I started out with a completely new approach. It consists of non-linear floors with very realistic architecture to the degree that things like bathrooms and chimneys and fireplaces are in the same position relative to each other on all floors. With all new wall patterns the game takes place in a mansion or big house, and not a castle.
Paal Olstad p-olstad@online.no
